must be made. The frank disregard of decency is but too intelligible. What is strange is Donne's insistence upon the ugly and repulsive collateral consequences. The lady's husband had to be injured, and the objections of her father and mother to the suspected intimacy were inevitable. Donne's passion might blind him to their wrongs; but to insist upon that aspect of the question triumphantly and emphasise disgusting details is, to speak mildly, not pretty. If the poems were to be taken in their 'first intention' as deliberate utterances of his sentiments, we should have to call him not simply immoral, but unequivocally brutal. To me it seems that we merely have an illustration of a morbid tendency, not peculiar to Donne. In one of the 'elegies' Donne gives a description of another woman, only exceeded in offensiveness by some of Swift's worst performances. Swift's friends tell us that he was personally cleanly, even to scrupulosity, and that he contemplated filthy images because they had a perverse fascination for him. He was a self-torturer by nature, and dwelt upon disgusting things precisely because they disgusted him. Donne, I fancy, had in this respect a real affinity to the later dean. Carried away by his passions, he does not blind himself to the
