Your memory? Doctor Hamilton the Long-Minded, the Long-Lived? Or are you in
spiritualistic contact with Doctor Donne? I sincerely hope you aren't his
reincarnation; it would would be singularly unfair on the good Dean to have
to take Loughborough in lieu of Paradise.
joanna
>
> I *think* the caption -- "John Donne in his shroud, painted a few weeks
> before his death" -- is slightly wrong. My memory is that Donne posed for
> a sculptor, who later carved his efiggy on his tomb (upright in a
> wall-niche, no doggy footstools, but). Donne then, still dressed in his
> shroud (but presumably wearing undergarments) trogged off to Paul's Cross
> or wherever, preached Death's Duel (called by the gawping onlookers,
> "Doctor Donne's death sermon), and returned home to die.
>
> It would have been a bit of an anticlimax if he hadn't. Died, that is.
> Pretty promptly.
>
> The illustration (again, I think) is an engraving of the effigy, used as
> the frontispiece of the Sermons, published by his son in about 1640.
> (Would that we all had children who exhibited such filial piety. Though
> to be frank, Donne's son seems to have been more interested in the money
> he could make from Dear Dead Dad's published sermons.)
>
> The above is top-of-my-head, but the details will be in the standard life
> of Donne by R.C.Bald. I'll check this if anyone desperately wants
> confirmation of what I've said above, from memory.
>
> Otherwise, lazy ex-scholar that I am, I won't bother.
>
> The Other R.
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