raordinary man, with all its cold
and hot fits, its rage of lyrical amativeness, its Roman passion, and
the high and clouded austerity of its final Anglicanism. Donne is one
of the most fascinating, in some ways one of the most inscrutable,
figures in our literature, and we may contemplate him with instruction
from his first wild escapade into the Azores down to his voluntary
penitence in the pulpit and the winding-sheet.

GERARD'S HERBAL

THE HERBALL _or General Historie of Plantes. Gathered by John Gerarde,
of London, Master in Chirurgerie. Very much enlarged and amended by
Thomas Johnson, citizen and apothecarye of London. London, Printed by
Adam Islip, Joice Norton, and Richard Whitakers. Anno_ 1633.

The proverb says that a door must be either open or shut. The
bibliophile is apt to think that a book should be either little or
big. For my own part, I become more and more attached to "dumpy
twelves"; but that does not preclude a certain discreet fondness
for folios. If a man collects books, his library ought to contain a
Herbal; and if he has but room for one, that should be the best.
The luxurious and sufficient thing, I think, is to possess what
booksellers call "the right edition of Gerard"; that is to say, the
volume described at the head of this paper. There is no handsomer book
to be found, none more stately or imposing, than this magnificent
folio of sixteen hundred pages, with its close, elaborate letterpress,
its innumerable plates, and John Payne's fine frontispiece in
compartments, with Theophrastus and Dioscorides facing one another,
and the author below them, holding in his right hand the new-found
treasure of the potato plant.

This edition of 1633 is the final development of what had been a slow
growth. The sixteenth century witnessed a great revival, almost a
creation of the science of botany. People began to translate the great
_Materia Medica_ of the Greek physician, Dioscorides of Anazarba, and
to comment upon it. The Germans were the first to append woodcuts to
their botanical descriptions, and it is Otto Brunfelsius, in 1530, who
has the credit of being the originator of such figures. In 1554 there
was published the first great Herbal, that of Rembertus Dodonaeus,
body-physician to the Emperor Maximilian II., who wrote in Dutch. An
English translation of this, brought out in 1578, by Henry Lyte, was
the earliest important Herbal in our language. Five years later, in
1583, a certain