Life Letters of John Donne Author:Edmund Gosse Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER I CHILDHOOD History presents us with no instance of a man of letters more obviously led up to by the experience and character of his ancestors... more » than was John Donne. As we have him revealed to us, he is what a genealogist might wish him to' be. Every salient feature in his mind and temperament is foreshadowed by the general trend of his family, or by the idiosyncrasy of some individual member of it. On both sides he was sprung from Catholics of the staunch old stock, animated by a settled horror of reform and by a determination to oppose it. For these views, held, apparently without exception, by all his maternal relations since the early days of Henry VIII., there were no sacrifices which were not to be made cheerfully, promptly. " No family," says Donne himself in 1610, "which is not of far larger extent and greater branches, hath endured and suffered more in their persons and fortunes for obeying the teachers of Roman doctrine." This habitual stress and tension had given to the members of this class—men and women of exceptional cultivation—an independence of opinion which bordered upon eccentricity, a contempt for English standards of religion and literature, a habitLpf linking Q the Conti- nent for intellectual stimulus, amanner of lifesuperficialtv silken to excess, but taritalismgty abrupt anoTmscrutable in its movements. We see these characteristics in the Rastells- and the Heywoods, but we find them superlatively in that illustrious descendant of theirs who is the subject of these pages. What has just been said of the heritage of Donne from his ancestors is mainly and obviously true of those on the maternal side. Nothing leads us to question that it was disturbed by anything on the paternal side; but here we are left to conjecture. Of the parentage o...« less