That the command to keep the Sabbath day holy, which we, especially
Roman Catholics and Anglicans of the Catholic school, interpret as
to the Christian Church a command to feast, to keep holiday, she
interpreted as a command to fast and pray. Probably both Lady Markham
and Lady Bedford belonged to the more Calvinist wing of the Church.
There is a distinctly Calvinist flavour about Lady Bedford's own
_Elegy_, which reads also as though it were to some extent a rebuke to
Donne for the note, either too pagan or too Catholic for her taste, of
his poems on Death. See p. 422, and especially:
Goe then to people curst before they were,
Their spoyles in triumph of thy conquest weare.
l. 58. _will be a Lemnia._ All the MSS. read 'Lemnia' without the
article, probably rightly, 'Lemnia' being used shortly for 'terra
Lemnia', or 'Lemnian earth'--a red clay found in Lemnos and reputed
an antidote to poison (Pliny, _N. H._ xxv. 13). It was one of
the constituents of the theriaca. It may be here thought of as an
antiseptic preserving from putrefaction. But Norton points out that by
some of the alchemists the name was given to the essential component
of the Philosopher's stone, and that what Donne was thinking of was
transmuting power, changing crystal into diamond. The alchemists,
however, dealt more in metals than in stones. The thought in Donne's
mind is perhaps rather that which he expresses at p. 280, l. 21. As
in some earths clay is turned to porcelain, so in this Lemnian earth
crystal will turn to diamond.
The words 'Tombe' and 'diamond' afford so bad a rhyme that G. L. Craik
conjectured, not very happily,'a wooden round'. Craik's criticism of
Donne, written in 1847, _Sketches of the History of Literature and
Learning in England_, is wonderfully just and appreciative.