sted at his funeral oration; and a collection of verses in his
praise was published in more than forty languages.

Salmasius was regarded as a prodigy of learning; and various princes
and powers entered into a competition who should be so fortunate as to
secure his residence in their states. Christina, queen of Sweden,
having obtained the preference, received him with singular reverence and
attention; and, Salmasius being taken ill at Stockholm, and confined to
his bed, the queen persisted with her own hand to prepare his caudles,
and mend his fire. Yet, but for the accident of his having had Milton
for his adversary, his name would now be as little remembered, even by
the generality of the learned, as that of Peiresk.

Du Bartas, in the reign of Henry the Fourth of France, was one of the
most successful poets that ever existed. His poem on the Creation of the
World went through upwards of thirty editions in the course of five
or six years, was translated into most European languages, and
its commentators promised to equal in copiousness and number the
commentators on Homer.

One of the most admired of our English poets about the close of the
sixteenth century, was Donne. Unlike many of those trivial writers of
verse who succeeded him after an interval of forty or fifty years, and
who won for themselves a brilliant reputation by the smoothness of their
numbers, the elegance of their conceptions, and the politeness of their
style, Donne was full of originality, energy and vigour. No man can
read him without feeling himself called upon for earnest exercise of
his thinking powers, and, even with the most fixed attention and
application, the student is often obliged to confess his inability
to take in the whole of the meaning with which the poet's mind was
perceptibly fraught. Every sentence that Donne writes, whether in verse
or prose, is exclusively his own. In addition to this, his thoughts are
often in the noblest sense of the word poetical; and passages may be
quoted from him that no English poet may attempt to rival, unless it be
Milton and Shakespear. Ben Jonson observed of him with great truth and a
prophetic spirit: "Donne for not being understood will perish." But this
is not all. If Waller and Suckling and Carew sacrificed every thing to
the Graces, Donne went into the other extreme. With a few splendid and
admirable exceptions, his phraseology and versification are crabbed and
repulsive. And, as poetry is read