he acted as a go-between in bribing the Lieutenant of the Tower to resign his post and make way for a more pliable successor on the eve of the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury.  This he did on behalf of Sir Thomas Monson, one of whose dependants, as Mr. Percival Vivian says, “actually carried the poisoned tarts and jellies.”  Campion afterwards wrote a masque in celebration of the nuptials of the murderers.  Both Monson and he, however, are universally believed to have been innocent agents in the crime.  Campion boldly dedicated his Third Book of Airs to Monson after the first shadow of suspicion had passed.

As a poet, though he was no Puritan, he gives the impression of having been a man of general virtue.  It is not only that he added piety to amorousness.  This might be regarded as flirting with religion.  Did not he himself write, in explaining why he mixed pious and light songs; “He that in publishing any work hath a desire to content all palates must cater for them accordingly”?  Even if the spiritual depth of his graver songs has been exaggerated, however, they are clearly the expression of a charming and tender spirit.

  Never weather-beaten sail more willing bent to shore,
  Never tired pilgrim’s limbs affected slumber more,
  Than my wearied sprite now longs to fly out of my troubled breast. 
  O come quickly, sweetest Lord, and take my soul to rest.

What has the “sweet master Campion” who wrote these lines to do with poisoned tarts and jellies?  They are not ecstatic enough to have been written by a murderer.

IV.—­JOHN DONNE

Izaak Walton in his short life of Donne has painted a figure of almost seraphic beauty.  When Donne was but a boy, he declares, it was said that the age had brought forth another Pico della Mirandola.  As a young man in his twenties, he was a prince among lovers, who by his secret marriage with his patron’s niece—­“for love,” says Walton, “is a flattering mischief”—­purchased at first only the ruin of his hopes and a term in prison.  Finally, we have the later Donne in the pulpit of St. Paul’s represented, in a beautiful adaptation of one of his own images, as “always preaching to himself, like an angel from a cloud, though in none; carrying some, as St. Paul was, to Heaven in holy raptures, and enticing others by a sacred art and courtship to amend their lives.”  The picture is all of noble charm.  Walton speaks in one place of “his winning behaviour—­which, when it would entice, had a strange kind of elegant irresistible art.”  There are no harsh phrases even in the references to those irregularities of Donne’s youth, by which he had wasted the fortune of L3,000—­equal, I believe, to more than L30,000 of our money—­bequeathed to him by his father, the ironmonger.  “Mr. Donne’s estate,” writes Walton gently, referring to his penury at the time of his marriage, “was the greatest part spent in many and chargeable travels,