fancies which distract him as he lies unable to sleep, listening to the clock or trying to divine the opinion of his physicians. They are unable to give morphia, but 'apply pigeons to draw the vapours from his head.' If, however, the treatment was antiquated, the emotions of the patient were modern, and, indeed, also ancient enough. Singular conceits still occur to him: they were strange enough and would mix well with delirious dreams; but no one could lay bare more effectively the emotions which must rise in all ages to an exquisitely sensitive nature lying in an antechamber of death. We see already the Donne who a few years later was to rise from his deathbed, and, standing in his shroud, to be drawn for the ghastly portrait, which stood by his bed during his last hours. The same figure is represented by the statue in St. Paul's. A few weeks had then passed since Donne, as Walton puts it, had preached his own funeral sermon. His friends, as they saw him in the pulpit, thought that he could only 'preach mortality by a decayed body and a dying face.' He was, however, able to speak, though in a 'faint and hollow voice and with many tears'; and so ended his strange career most characteristically. If, as Mr. Gosse observes,
