Page:Studies of a Biographer 3.djvu/75

 he might still be free from deadly sin. Nothing, at any rate, can be more characteristic than his mode of solving the problem. It was the finest imaginable case of casuistry. He goes to the civil law and the canon law, and distinguishes between positive suicide when you seek death, and negative suicide when you let death seek you, and provides a whole armoury of subtle legal distinctions which it would be very difficult to call up at the moment of temptation. There was a strain of the Hamlet in Donne, and Hamlet would have been still more puzzled whether to be or not to be if he had been as well crammed as Donne with whole bodies of casuistical divinity.

This, I fancy, gives us a significant glimpse into this most complex and perplexing character. His early errors of morality suggest at once defiance and remorse. His romantic love suggests gratitude for the blessings and repentance for the blunder. His poetical impulses are confused and distorted by his philosophy. His intellect, amazingly nimble and discursive rather than powerful, stimulates a boundless curiosity which tends to overwhelm his reason under vast masses of learning. He reminds us of Bacon by his fertility of illustration, and oddly enough seems, as Mr.