BOOKS.
THE POETRY OF JOHN DONNE.*
THE history of the poetical reputation of John Donne is one of the most curious in literature. During his lifetime, his poems; With very few exceptions, were unpublished ; but they were widely circulated in manuscript, and became the object of a universal and unbounded admiration. Certainly in the eyes of the great majority of his contemporaries Donne was by far the most eminent writer of his age—which was the age of Bacon and Shakespeare. The first edition of his poems appeared in 1633, two years after his death, and was followed by half-a-dozen more in the course of the next thirty years. During that period his fame was at its height. Carey, in the well-known lines of his Elegy, expressed the opinion of the day :—
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