... each of them learning was the necessary robe of genius. Jonson, it is true, was a pedant of the classics, Donne of the speculative sciences; but both of them alike ate to a surfeit of the fruit of ... instead of being, like the other, the comment of a clever brain. Praise is the vice of the commonplace reviewer, just as censoriousness is the vice of the more clever sort. Not that one wishes eitherpraise ... in the story of the Countess of Essex's sordid crime. Donne's temper at the time isstill clearly that of a man of the world. His jest at the expense of Sir Walter Raleigh, then in the...