ABSTRACT
A biographer of Izaak Wal ton observes: ‘Perhaps the satires and the sermons of Donne might have kept his name alive amongst a small company of literary men; but Walton has made Donne familiar to the majority of English churchmen.’ Donne’s literary immortality is no matter of mere conjecture; but it is true that he has been in general better known as the exemplar of sanctity depicted by Walton than either as preacher or poet. He must have seemed to most a seventeenthcentury John Sterling, mainly owing his vitality to his biographer. Students of his period must nevertheless have been aware that he was neither a saint nor a nonentity.
