duties of his position. One little incident strikes one rather disagreeably. In 1623, Donne married his eldest daughter, then only twenty, to Edward Alleyn, the founder of Dulwich, who was fifty-eight, and had lost his first wife just six months before. The affair was transacted in a purely commercial spirit, and led to some quarrelling over money matters. One cannot avoid the reflection that Donne had passed a little too completely out of the state of mind in which he had committed his own 'remarkable error.' Men, however, married their daughters in those days as they let their farms, and it would be unfair to dwell upon such matters. Donne, it is enough to say, was not retiring to a hermitage, but becoming an eloquent divine on the road to a bishopric. But a real and serious change came over him by degrees. In 1617, the patient, suffering wife was taken from him; and Donne was a man to feel the whole force of the blow. Preferments and success and life itself, he knew too well, would be henceforth sad and colourless. A dangerous illness in 1623 brought him to the brink of the grave. Mr. Gosse has brought out the personal significance of the 'devotions' which he composed at the time. He describes with singular vividness the fears and
