was 'idealist only.' I fully subscribe to Mr. Gosse's view that this implies misconception. Donne had excellent reasons for interest in the question. If 'suicide' means voluntary death, suicides include all the martyrs and heroes who deserve our heartiest admiration. How are we to draw the line between the man who prefers death by torture to telling a lie, and the gentleman who shot himself rather than give up buttered muffins? Both choose death, though one earns adoration and the other contempt, and yet one case shades into the other by imperceptible degrees. Now, Donne was discussing exactly this point in respect of the Jesuits. Did the sufferers in his own family, the men of whom they had been proudest, deserve the crown of martyrdom, or were they traitors who had got their deserts? He was arguing against all his early associations, and no wonder that his argument suggested a problem. It had clearly, too, a personal application. Donne, in his troubles, thought, he tells us himself, of seeking refuge in death. It pleased him, he says, to reflect that he had 'the keys of his prison in his own hand,' a reflection which anticipates some recent pessimists. He wished, as Mr. Gosse says, to hold that if ever he should yield to the impulse,
