Christian prince leading an army through the country against the Turk. may undoubtedly have good success against his forces, if he shall observe these conditions following :

First. If in conducting his army he shall avoid and decline the wide plains, and come not near unto the river Danubius; of the commodity whereof, the Turk by reason of his great courage, standeth always in need.

Secondly. If he shall not come nigh unto such places where the Turk may have convenient use of his horsemen and innumerable footmen; with the excessive multitudes of which, he will easily oppress and suppress a Christian army, if they should chance to encounter in those plains.

Thirdly. If the Christian prince shall arm this year, and proceeding slowly on his journey not meet with the Turk, but fortify and strengthen such places as he shall get and conquer; and the next year, when, as the Turk neither is wont, nor can arm with the like number and quantity, proceed manfully; for the Prince in thus doing, shall compel him to stand continually upon his guard, and always to entertain great and gross armies, which he should not be able to endure long; or else enforce him to use such forces as might be more easily conquered, and so consequently drive him to change the accustomed course and custom of his wars, which would be as much as half a victory gotten against him.

Fourthly. If the Christians shall endeavour to draw him into some strait, and there with some warlike stratagem enforce him to a battle, and with a troop of well-ordered footmen, encounter his Janizaries, which he usually reserveth for some extremity, and some unknown and unusual exploit, drive them to the worst, or put them out of their array and order; there is no doubt but with the strangeness thereof he might obtain a notable victory against him; whose horsemen are most easily overthrown, because they are for the most part unarmed.

Fifthly. If he shall mark and observe when there is a mutiny, sedition, or secret dissension, disturbance, or discontentment betwixt the Turk and his subjects, and by all cunning and policy entertain the same, maintain the procurers and heads thereof, and in the very heat of their tumult be ready to invade them. For indeed, the especial means to weaken the Turk, is to assault him when he is otherwise busied in wars with the Sophi, or with any other enemies, or when his successors are at contention for the crown, or his people divided amongst themselves, or he did

lately receive some notable overthrow; for he, tyrannising his subjects in such manner as he doth, the least overthrow that can be, must needs endanger his State greatly, because he feareth that his own people will be ready to give entertainment, aid, and succour unto any, by whom they may have certain hope to wind their necks out of the yoke of that intolerable servitude which they now suffer.

This is so true, that it is credibly affirmed by the best warriors of our age that if the Christians had proceeded with their invincible navy, when Don John de Austria gave the Turk the famous overthrow (for which all Christendom greatly rejoiced) they might haply have gotten Constantinople, and have recovered most part of the Turkish dominion.

(From The State of Christendom.)

TO SIR EDMUND BACON

O (MY most dear nephew, for so I still glory to call you, while Heaven possesseth her who bound us in that relation) how have I of late after many vexations of a fastidious infirmity, been at once rent in pieces by hearing that you were at London: what? said I, and must it be at a time when I cannot fly thither to have my wonted part of that conversation; wherein all that know him enjoy such infinite contentment? Thus much did suddenly break loose from the heart that doth truly honour you. And now (Sir) let me tell you both how it hath gone with me, and how I stand

at the present. There is a triple health. Health of body, of

mind, and of fortune; you shall have a short account of all three.

For the first it is now almost an whole cycle of the sun, since after certain fits of a quotidian fever, I was assailed by that splenetic passion, which a country good fellow that had been a piece of a grammarian meant, when he said he was sick of the flatus, and the other hard word, for hypocondriacus stuck in his teeth; it is the very Proteus of all maladies; shifting into sundry shapes, almost every night a new, and yet still the same; neither can I hope that it will end in a solar period; being such a saturnine humour; but though the core and root of it be remaining, yet the symptoms (I thank my God) are well allayed, and in general I have found it of more contumacy than malignity; only since the late cold weather, there is complicated with it a more

asthmatical straightness of respiration than heretofore; yet those about me say I bear it well, as perchance custom hath taught me, being now familiarised and domesticated evils, in the tragedian's expression: Jam mansueta mala. And thus much of the habit

of my body. On the other side: my mind is in a right philosophical state of health; that is, at an equal distance both from desire and hope; and ambitious of nothing, but of doing nothing and of being nothing; yet I have some employment of my thoughts to keep them from mouldering, as you shall know before I close this letter. But first, touching the third kind of health. My condition or fortune was never better, than in this good Lord Treasurer's time; the very reverse of his proud predecessor, that made a scorn of my poverty, and a sport of my modesty; leaving me in a bad case; and the world, so as though we now know by what arts he lived, yet are we ignorant to this hour by what religion he died, save only that it could not be good, which was not worthy the professing. This free passage let me commit to your noble breast, remembering that in confidence of the receiver, I have transgressed a late counsel of mine own which I gave to a young friend, who asking me casually of what he should make him a suit, as he was passing this way towards London; I told him that in my opinion, he could not buy a cheaper nor a more lasting stuff there than silence. For I loved him well, and was afraid of a little freedom that I spied in him. And now, Sir, I must needs conclude (or I shall burst) with letting you know, that I have divers things in wild sheets that think and struggle to get out of several kinds, some long promised, and some of a newer conception; but a poor exercise of my pen (wherewith I shall only honour myself by the dedication thereof unto your own person) is that which shall lead the way by mine and your good leave, intending (if God yield me his favour) to print it before it be long in Oxford, and to send you thence, or bring you a copy to our Redgrave. What the subject is you must not know beforehand, for I fear it will want all other grace, if it lose virginity. And so the Lord of all abundant joy keep you long, con quella buona Ciera, which this my servant did relate unto me,

JOHN DONNE

[John Donne was born in London in 1573, his father being a tradesman or merchant of means, his mother a daughter of Heywood the epigrammatist, and a relation of Sir Thomas More. He was brought up in a Roman Catholic circle, if not actually as a Roman Catholic; but was admitted at Hart Hall, Oxford. Perhaps (for Walton could hardly be wrong here, though later biographers doubt) he was also entered at Cambridge. He travelled, and became a member of Lincoln's Inn in 1592, now definitely casting in his lot with the English Church; but it was long before he took orders. He went the Cadiz voyage in 1596, and on his return became a member of the household of Lord Keeper Egerton. Here he fell in love with and clandestinely married Anne More or Moore, a connexion of the Lord Keeper's wife. Her father, Sir George, was very angry, and procured Donne's dismissal and imprisonment; but this difficulty blew over. Donne would apparently have chosen lay preferment, but, though he was a favourite with James the First, none came, and at length, in 1615, he took orders. The king made him his chaplain, and he received several livings and the readership of Lincoln's Inn. His wife, whom he idolised, died in 1617, and his heart seems to have been broken his appointment to the Deanery of St. Paul's in 1621 making no change in the ascetic and mystical tincture which his life and thought had taken. He held his post ten years, and died on the 31st March 1631. Of his various poems nothing need be said here, and, indeed, few of them were published during his life. His first published work was prose- -a treatise entitled Pseudo Martyr-written at the king's desire to reconcile Roman Catholics to the oath of allegiance (1610). He also wrote essays, "devotions," and miscellaneous tractates, of which the chief, not published till after his death, was a paradox on suicide, entitled Biathanatos. But his principal work in prose is composed of sermons which fall but little short of the second hundred in number. It is unlucky that the only full edition of his works, that of Alford in 1839, is not complete, and is very badly done.]

THE characteristics of Donne's voluminous and now little read prose are not on the whole very different from those of his strange and frequently exquisite but far less voluminous and better known The differences, indeed, are little more than might be expected to be caused by the variation of subject and the advance of years.

verse.

If he seldom, in prose, reaches the highest efforts of