extricating himself from his difficulties by the methods familiar to the courtiers of the time. The most singular case was that of Sir Robert Drury. Drury, a man of great wealth, lost an only daughter in her fifteenth year. Donne had never seen the girl, but hearing of the father's grief composed a 'funeral elegy,' declaring, among other things, that death could—
'Find nothing after her so great to kill,
Except the world itself so great as she.'
The gratified father at once gave Donne a room in his great house in Drury Lane, and afterwards took him for a companion on a foreign tour. Donne carried on his hyperboles in two successive poems, commemorating anniversaries of the child's death, and rashly promised an annual celebration. His friends were scandalised by his outrageous compliments, and Ben Jonson told him that the poems might have been appropriate if addressed to the Virgin Mary. Donne argued that he was at liberty to treat Miss Drury as the ideal woman without reference to fact. The poems may be a warning that we must not infer genuine autobiography from his utterances, for, if the truth had been unknown, injudicious critics might have constituted a romance out of lines intended simply
