Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/234

214 by ambitious motives, but was not effected without a thorough study of the points at issue. He assisted Morton in his controversies with Rome, and his first published work was a learned and acute defence of the royal supremacy, the Pseudo-Martyr (1609), a closely reasoned treatise, unadorned with anything of his later eloquence. Accordingly, his method as a preacher does not differ essentially from that of Andrewes. He divides and subdivides his text, and where the question is a refined one of doctrine or conduct, he follows the orthodox scent through a not always lucid labyrinth of fathers and doctors. But his eloquence has a broader sweep than Andrewes. It is less colloquial, less dependent on the unction of scriptural and pious phrases. When he disentangles himself from definitions and controversy to bring home to his hearers a doctrine or an admonition, his style becomes irradiated with the glow of a bizarre and powerful imagination. He has dramatic touches that remind one of Webster, and passages of glowing, sonorous, periodic eloquence not surpassed by Burke. But such passages of pure eloquence are perhaps rare. The scholastic subtlety and learning with which the most impressive passages are generally interwoven, effective in their own day, militate against any wide enjoyment of Donne's intense and imaginative eloquence to-day.

Donne died in 1632, before he had received the bishopric to which he was designated by Laud and Charles. In 1633, the attention of the former, ever on the outlook for talent when conjoined with a