Page:The Poems of John Donne - 1896 - Volume 1.djvu/19

Rh cording to Walton, received in the middle of his troubles the offer of a considerable preferment from Dean, afterwards Bishop, Morton, did not take orders earlier. But he told Morton that the irregularities of his early life prevented him, and the tenor both of his sacred and profane works makes it probable that this was a vera causa. Still there are other facts which show that he had not abandoned the hope of secular office, legal or other, until he reached middle life. At any rate it was not till 1615 that the express desire of the king (coupled with his sacred Majesty’s equally express refusal, even at Somerset’s desire, to make him anything else) induced him to take orders. James at once made him his chaplain, but for a time did not confer any benefice on him; and the heaviest calamity of his life, the death of his wife, to whom he was passionately attached, fell on him in 1617. But Lincoln’s Inn made him its preacher (Cambridge had conferred the degree of D.D. on him two years earlier), and he again went on a diplomatic expedition, this time with Lord Hay to Germany. At last, in Nov. 1621, he was made Dean of St. Paul’s, and other preferments falling in, he became a comparatively rich man. But he held these offices not quite ten years, and died, after a long illness (in the course of which he had the strange but characteristic