and determines all. Nor do
all these, youth out of infancy, or age out of youth, arise so as a
Phoenix out of the ashes of another Phoenix formerly dead, but as a
wasp or a serpent out of a carrion or as a snake out of dung." We
can comprehend how an audience composed of men and women whose
ne'er-do-weel relatives went to the theatre to be stirred by such
tragedies as those of Marston and Cyril Tourneur would themselves
snatch a sacred pleasure from awful language of this kind in the
pulpit. There is not much that we should call doctrine, no pensive
or consolatory teaching, no appeal to souls in the modern sense. The
effect aimed at is that of horror, of solemn preparation for the
advent of death, as by one who fears, in the flutter of mortality, to
lose some peculiarity of the skeleton, some jag of the vast crooked
scythe of the spectre. The most ingenious of poets, the most subtle of
divines, whose life had been spent in examining Man in the crucible of
his own alchemist fancy, seems anxious to preserve to the very last
his powers of unflinching spiritual observation. The Dean of St.
Paul's, whose reputation for learned sanctity had scarcely sufficed
to shelter him from scandal on the ground of his fantastic defence of
suicide, was familiar with the idea of Death, and greeted him as a
welcome old friend whose face he was glad to look on long and closely.

The leaves at the end of this little book are filled up with two
copies of funeral verses on Dean Donne. These are unsigned, but we
know from other sources to whom to attribute them. Each is by an
eminent man. The first was written by Dr. Henry King, then the royal
chaplain, and afterward Bishop of Chichester, to whom the Dean had
left, besides a model in gold of the Synod of Dort, that painting of
himself in the winding-sheet of which we have already spoken. This
portrait Dr. King put into the hands of Nicholas Stone, the sculptor,
who made a reproduction of it in white marble, with the little urn
concealing the feet. This was placed in St. Paul's Cathedral, of which
King was chief residentiary, and may still be seen in the present
Cathedral King's elegy is very prosy in starting, but improves as it
goes along, and is most ingenious throughout. These are the words in
which he refers to the appearance of the dying preacher in the pulpit:

_Thou (like the dying Swan) didst lately sing
Thy mournful dirge in audience of the King;
When pale looks, and weak accent