Page:The Poems of John Donne - 1896 - Volume 1.djvu/26

xxii of Pope, and which, through his recension, became known to a much larger number of persons than the work of any other Elizabethan Satirist, have the least share of Donne’s poetical interest. But they display to the full his manly strength and shrewd sense, and they are especially noticeable in one point. They exhibit much less of that extravagant exaggeration of contemporary vice and folly which makes one of their chief contemporaries, Marston’s Scourge of Villainy, almost an absurd thing, while it is by no means absent from Hall’s Virgidemiarum. We cannot indeed suppose that Donne’s satire was wholly and entirely sincere, but a good deal in it clearly was. Thus his handling of the perennial subjects of satire is far more fresh, serious, and direct than is usual with Satirists, and it was no doubt this judicious and direct quality which commended it to Pope. Moreover, these poems abound in fine touches. The Captain in the first Satire—

the ingenious evildoers in the second—

the charming touch at once so literary and so natural in the fifth—