In Defence of John Donne

Mrs. E. M. Simpson has recently published a study of Donne’s prose works. The author of such a study could not avoid giving some account of those ideas which writers on Donne usually label his ‘Medievalism.’ For no one can read either Donne’s poetry or his prose intelligently unless he is fairly well acquainted with what Donne himself calls the philosophy of the ‘Schoole.’ Seemingly conversant with the whole range of scholastic writers, he had studied St. Thomas Aquinas with particular diligence, and he admired his genius profoundly : indeed he puts him on a level with St. Augustine, and in one place, addressing God, he speaks of St. Thomas as ‘that other instrument and engine of thine, whom Thou had st so enabled that nothing was too minerall and centrick forA Study of the Prose Works of John Donne,by Evelyn M. Simpson, D.Phil., Oxford. (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press; 1924.) It may not be altogether useless to say here that Donne was born in 1573, and died in 1631. He belonged to a family of which he himself said that no family ‘which is not of farre larger extent and greater branches hath endured and suffered more in their persons and fortunes, for obeying the teachers of Romane Doctrine.’ His mother, who was connected with the family of Blessed Thomas More, was ever a zealous Catholic, serving the Church to the best of her power. His younger brother, Henry, was thrown into prison in 1593 for harbouring a Jesuit named Harrington, and died there of a fever a few weeks later