Mr. Lynd very rightly insists that John Donne is "the supreme example of a Platonic lover among the English poets." But he implies that the impassioned logic of The Ecstasy is not quite consistent with Platonism. What is Platonism? It is customary to develop a system of philosophy of love from a few famous pages of the Symposium, ignoring the rest, and this more or less hypothetical or mythical Platonism has caused many people to forget Plato's real teaching. A careful study of the Symposium will, I think, show Donne to be much more truly in the genuine Platonic tradition than were some of the poetical Platonists who preceded him. Mr. Lynd is quite right on this point, and I think he might have put it even more strongly.—Yours, etc.,
Ben Crocker Clough.
Oxford, February 13th.
DOGS
(To the Editor of The London Mercury)
Sir,—Your reviewer in his notice of that interesting book Seventeenth Century Life in the Country Parish, referring to the "dog-whipper," says, "But why did the dogs of those days show such a church-going disposition?" I would remind him that the dog-whipper's office was not created in the seventeenth century, but in those remoter times when no gentleman appeared anywhere in public without his hawk on his wrist and his hound at his heel. In Barclay's Shippe of Fools (1509) he writes:
One time the hawkes bells jangleth hye
*****
And now the houndes barking strikes the skye