Let them disdain and fret till they are weary!  We in ourselves have that shall make us merry; Which he that wants and had the power to know it, Would give his life that he might die a poet.

It was no small thing to be suffering for Apollo’s sake in 1614.  Shakespeare might hear of it at Stratford, and talk of the prisoner as he strolled with some friend on the banks of Avon.  A greater than Shakespeare—­as most men thought in those days—­Ben Jonson himself, might talk the matter over “at those lyric feasts, Made at the Sun, The Dog, the triple Tun”; for had not he himself languished in a worse dungeon and under a heavier charge than Wither?  To be seven-and-twenty, to be in trouble with the Government about one’s verses, and to have other young poets, in a ferment of enthusiasm, clinging like swallows to the prison-bars—­how delicious a torment!  And to know that it will soon be over, and that the sweet, pure meadows lie just outside the reek of Southwark, that summer lingers still and that shepherds pipe and play, that Fame is sitting by her cheerful fountain with a garland for the weary head, and that lasses, “who more excell Than the sweet-voic’d Philomel,” are ready to cluster round the Interesting captive, and lead him away in daisy-chains—­what could be more consolatory!  And we close the little dainty volume, with its delicate perfume of friendship and poetry and hope.

DEATH’S DUEL

DEATH’S DVELL; or, A Consolation to the Soule, against the dying Life, and living Death of the Body.  Delivered in a Sermon at White Hall, before the King’s Maiesty, in the beginning of Lent, 1630. By that late learned and Reverend Divine, John Donne, Dr. in Divinity, & Deane of S. Pauls, London.  Being his last Sermon, and called by his Maiesties houshold The Doctor’s owne Funerall Sermon.  London, Printed by Thomas Harper, for Richard Redmer and Benjamin Fisher, and are to be sold at the signe of the Talbot in Alders-gate street.  MDCXXXII.

The value of this tiny quarto with the enormous title depends entirely, so far as the collector is concerned, on whether or no it possesses the frontispiece.  So many people, not having the fear of books before their eyes, have divorced the latter from the former, that a perfect copy of Death’s Duel is quite a capture over which the young bibliophile may venture to glory; but let him not fancy that he has a prize if his copy does not possess the portrait-plate.  One has but to glance for a moment at this frontispiece to see that there is here something very much out of the common.  It is engraved in the best seventeenth-century style, and represents, apparently, the head and bust of a dead man wrapped in a winding-sheet.  The eyes are shut, the mouth is drawn, and nothing was ever seen more ghastly.