ABSTRACT
Elizabethan time pronounced to be ‘examples,’ and did his best to rival; they were worth digging into as mines, but their art was detestable. A very different opinion was formed by the great critics at the beginning of this century: but, unhappily for Donne’s general reputation, for one person that reads De Quincey’s essay on Rhetoric or Coleridge’s priceless fragments of criticism, twenty read Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. M.Taine, in his rapid survey of English literature, has unhesitatingly adopted Johnson’s condemnation, and developed it into an historical theory. The poetry of Donne and his imitators M.Taine marks as a sign of the decadence of the grand inspiration that produced the literature of the Elizabethan period. The flood of great thoughts and great passions had spent itself; the mighty men of genius, through whom the heroic spirit had spoken, were succeeded by a feebler race, who, instead of giving free vent to fire that was burning in their hearts, strained and tortured their intellects in the devising of pretty compliments, and sought to outdo the natural language of overpowering passion by cold and artificial hyperbole. M.Taine admits that there is something of the energy and thrill of the original inspiration in Donne, but he does not admit that there is enough to exempt him from the sweeping censure passed by Johnson upon the school which he founded.
