be sold at the signe of the Talbot in Alders-gate street. MDCXXXII_.


The value of this tiny quarto with the enormous title depends
entirely, so far as the collector is concerned, on whether or no it
possesses the frontispiece. So many people, not having the fear of
books before their eyes, have divorced the latter from the former,
that a perfect copy of _Death's Duel_ is quite a capture over which
the young bibliophile may venture to glory; but let him not fancy that
he has a prize if his copy does not possess the portrait-plate. One
has but to glance for a moment at this frontispiece to see that there
is here something very much out of the common. It is engraved in the
best seventeenth-century style, and represents, apparently, the head
and bust of a dead man wrapped in a winding-sheet. The eyes are shut,
the mouth is drawn, and nothing was ever seen more ghastly.

Yet it is not really the picture of a dead man: it represents the
result of one of the grimmest freaks that ever entered into a pious
mind. In the early part of March 1630 (1631), the great Dr. Donne,
Dean of St. Paul's, being desperately ill, and not likely to recover,
called a wood-carver in to the Deanery, and ordered a small urn, just
large enough to hold his feet, and a board as long as his body, to be
produced. When these articles were ready, they were brought into his
study, which was first warmed, and then the old man stripped off his
clothes, wrapped himself in a winding-sheet which was open only so far
as to reveal the face and beard, and then stood upright in the little
wooden urn, supported by leaning against the board. His limbs were
arranged like those of dead persons, and when his eyes had been
closed, a painter was introduced into the room and desired to make a
full-length and full-size picture of this terrific object, this solemn