under Elizabeth; his mother, who survived him, was a strong Catholic to the last; her two brothers were both Jesuits, and in Donne's childhood one of them was in an English gaol and unexpectedly fortunate in just avoiding the gallows to which his fellow-prisoners were sent. Donne, a singularly precocious child, might have been expected to catch the contagion of religious zeal. No one, we should say, had a mind or imagination more accessible to the manifold fascinations of the Catholic system. It would have been in the natural course of things had he been sent to Douay, become a seminary priest, and either attained eminence as a casuist or died as a martyr at Tyburn. He had, however, been entered at Oxford at the early age of eleven. He could thus avoid the oath of allegiance, imposed only at the age of sixteen, and his mother apparently assumed that supplies of knowledge could be inserted at any age. Donne, therefore, was brought up to be a rigid Catholic, and yet encouraged to mix with a Protestant world and attempt a secular career. His father had left him sufficient means, and at nineteen he was reading law at Lincoln's Inn. Before long his Catholicism was certainly fading; but how and why is not to be easily decided. How did
