theatrical presentment of life in death. The frontispiece of _Death's
Duel_ gives a reproduction of the upper part of this picture. It
was said to be a remarkably truthful portrait of the great poet and
divine, and it certainly agrees in all its proportions with the
accredited portrait of Donne as a young man.

It appears (for Walton's account is not precise) that it was after
standing for this grim picture, but before its being finished, that
the Dean preached his last sermon, that which is here printed. He had
come up from Essex in great physical weakness in order not to miss his
appointment to preach in his cathedral before the King on the first
Friday in Lent. He entered the pulpit with so emaciated a frame and a
face so pale and haggard, and spoke with a voice so faint and hollow,
that at the end the King himself turned to one of his suite, and
whispered, "The Dean has preached his own funeral sermon!" So, indeed,
it proved to be; for he presently withdrew to his bed, and summoned
his friends around to take a solemn farewell. He died very gradually
after about a fortnight, his last words being, not in distress or
anguish, but as it would seem in visionary rapture: "I were miserable
if I might not die." All this fortnight and to the moment of
his death, the terrible life-sized portrait of himself in his
winding-sheet stood near his bedside, where it could be the "hourly
object" of his attention. So one of the greatest Churchmen of the
seventeenth century, and one of the greatest, if the most eccentric,
of its lyrical poets passed away in the very pomp of death, on the
31st of March, 1631.

There was something eminently calculated to arrest and move the
imagination in such an end as this, and people were eager to read the
discourse which the "sacred authority" of his Majesty himself had