'Death's Duel' or A Consolation to the Soul
Against
The Dying Life and Living Death of the Body
THE planet among preachers, Lancelot Andrewes, went out in 1626. In the subsequent five years he was succeeded and surpassed in public estimation by that angel preaching from a cloud-John Donne.
Chronologically, Andrewes and Donne were contemporaries. As preachers, the former was Elizabethan, the latter Jacobean. As men, it has been said that Andrewes was of the born spiritual, while Donne, even in death, had not done with earth. The contrast is reflected in the quality of their eloquence. The brilliant imperfection of Donne's is more interesting but less exemplary than Andrewes.
In the early days of Charles I, Donne's sermons provided the most brilliant public entertainment London had to offer. The last of them, ' Death's Duel,' was the prologue to the most spectacular death of the time. For Donne, like Webster, was ' much possessed with death.' The portrait reproduced above was one of the preparations he made for his final rendezvous with the skeleton and scythe; in T. S. Eliot 's words
' He knew the anguish of the marrow,
The Ague of the skeleton,
No contact possible to flesh, Allayed the fever of the bone.'