The poems of John Donne

HANDBOL'ND
AT THE

UNINLRSITY OF
TORONTO PRESS

p

i

fHE POEMS

OF

OHN DONNE

EDITED FROM THE OLD EDITIONS

AND NUMEROUS MANUSCRIPTS

vV ITH INTRODUCTIONS & COMMENTARY

BY

HERBERT J. Q GRIERSON M.A.

Ci'ALMERS PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN

VOL. II
INTRODUCTION AND COMMENTARY

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD

1

- \

PR

Impression 0/1929
First Edition 19 12

T/iw impression has been produced photographically by the
MusTON Company, /now sheets of the First Edition

HI

CONTENTS

PAGE

INTRODUCTION v

I. The Poetry of Donne ...... v

II. The Text and Canon of Donne's Poems . . Ivi

COMMENTARY i

INDEX OF FIRST LINES 276

6 7

1 /

'J

/

1

The Poetry of Donne. vii

regard to his ' wit ', its range and character, erudition and
ingenuity, all generations of critics have been at one. It is
as to the relation of this ' wit ' to, and its effect on, his poetry
that they have been at variance. To his contemporaries the
' wit ' was identical with the poetry. Donne's ' wit ' gave him
the same supremacy among poets that learning and humour
and art gave to Jonson among dramatists. To certain of his
Dutch admirers the wit of The Flea seemed superhuman, and
the epitaph with which Carew closes his Elegy expresses the
almost universal English opinion of the seventeenth century :

Here lies a king that ruled as he thought fit
The universal monarchy of wit ;
Here lies two flamens, and both those the best,
Apollo's first, at last the true God's priest.

It may be doubted if Milton shared this opinion. He never
mentions Donne, but it was probably of him or his imitators he
was thinking when in his verses at Cambridge he spoke of

those new-fangled toys and trimmings slight
Which take our late fantastics with delight.

Certainly the growing taste for ' correctness ' led after the
Restoration to a discrimination between Donne's wit and his
poetry. ' The greatest wit,' Dryden calls him, ' though not
the greatest poet of our nation.' What he wanted as a poet
were just the two essentials of ' classical ' poetry — smoothness,
of verse and dignity of expression. This point of view isj
stated with clearness and piquancy in the sentences of out-\
rageous flattery which Dryden addressed to the Earl of Dorset '
in the opening paragraphs of his delightful Essay on Satire :

' There is more of salt in all your verses, than I have seen in
any of the moderns, or even of the ancients ; but you have
been sparing of the gall, by which means you have pleased all
readers, and offended none. Donne alone, of all our country-
men, had your talent ; but was not happy enough to arrive at
your versification ; and were he translated into numbers, and
English, he would yet be wanting in the dignity of expression.
That which is the prime virtue, and chief ornament, of Virgil,
which distinguishes him from the rest of writers, is so con-

I

viii hjtroduction.

spicuous in your verses, that it casts a shadow on all your
contemporaries; we cannot be seen, or but obscurely, while
you are present. You equal Donne in the variety, multiplicity,
and choice of thoughts ; you excel him in the manner and the
words. I read you both with the same admiration, but not '
with the same delight.

He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his i
amorous verses, where nature only should reign ; and perplexes
the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, i
when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with
the softnesses of love. In this (if I may be pardoned for so /
bold a truth) Mr. Cowley has copied him to a fault ; so great '.
a one, in my opinion, that it throws his Mistress infinitely \
below his Pindarics and his latter compositions, which are j
undoubtedly the best of his poems and the most correct.'

Dryden's estimate of Donne, as well as his application to his
poetry of the epithet ' metaphysical ', was transmitted through
the eighteenth century. Johnson's famous paragraphs in
the Life of Coivley do little more than echo and expand
Dryden's pronouncement, with a rather vaguer use of the word
' metaphysical '. In Dryden's application it means correctly
' philosophical ' ; in Johnson's, no more than ' learned '.
' The metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show
their learning was their whole endeavour ; but unluckily
resolving to show it in rhyme, instead of writing poetry, they
only wrote verses, and very often such verses as stood the trial
of the fingers better than of the ear,' They * drew their con-
ceits from recesses of learning not very much frequented by ?
common readers of poetry '. Waller is exempted from being \
a metaphysical poet because ' he seldom fetches an amorous ;
sentiment from the depths of science ; his thoughts are for t
the most part easily understood, and his images such as the
superficies of nature readily supplies '.

Even to those critics with whom began a revived apprecia- /
tion of Donne as a poet and preacher, his ' wit ' still bulks /
largely. It is impossible to escape from it. ' Wonder-ex- i
citing vigour,' writes Coleridge, ' intenseness and peculiarity, 1
using at will the almost boundless stores of a capacious
memory, and exercised on subjects where we have no right

II

The Poetfj of Do?ine, ix

to expect it- -this is the wit of Donne." And lastly Ue
Quincey, who alone of these critics recognizes the essential
quality which may, and in his best work does, make Donne's
wit the instrument of a mind which is not only subtle and
ingenious but profoundly poetical : ' Few writers have shown
a more extraordinary compass of powers than Donne ; for he
combined what no other man has ever done — the last sub-
limation of dialectical subtlety and address with the most
impassioned majesty. Massy diamonds compose the very
substance of his poem on the Metempsychosis, thoughts and
descriptions which have the fervent and gloomy sublimity of
Ezekiel or Aeschylus, whilst a diamond dust of rhetorical
brilliancies is strewed over the whole of his occasional verses
and his prose.'

What is to-day the value and interest of this wit which
has arrested the attention of so many generations ? How far
does it seem to us compatible with poetry in the full and gener-
ally accepted sense of the word, with poetry which quickens the
imagination and touches the heart, which satisfies and delights,
which is the verbal and rhythmical medium whereby a gifted
soul communicates to those who have ears to hear the content
of impassioned moments.'

Before coming to close quarters with this difficult and
debated question one may in the first place insist that there
is in Donne's verse a great deal which, whether it be poetry
in the full sense of the word or not, is arresting and of worth
lx>th historically and intrinsically. Whatever we may think
of Donne's poetr\', it is impossible not to recognize the
extraordinary interest of his mind and character. In an age
of great and fascinating men he is not the least so. The
immortal and transcendent genius of Shakespeare leaves
Donne, as every other contemporary, lost in the shadows and
cross-lights of ar> age that is no longer ours, but from which
Shakespeare emerges into the clear sunlight. Of Bacon's
mind, 'deep and slow, exhausting thought,' and divining as none
other the direction in which the road led through the debris of
outworn learning to a renovated science and a new philosophy,

X Introduction,

^^s

Donne could not boast. Alike in his poetry and in his
soberest prose, treatise or sermon, Donne's mind seems to
want the high seriousness which comes from a conviction that
truth is, and is to be found. A spirit of scepticism and
paradox plays through and disturbs almost everything he
wrote, except at moments when an intense mood of feeling,
whether love or devotion, begets faith, and silences the sceptical
and destructive wit by the power of vision rather than ot
intellectual conviction. Poles apart as the two poets seem at
a first glance to lie in feeling and in art, there is yet some-
thing of Tennyson in the conflict which wages perpetually in
Donne's poetry between feeling and intellect. \i

But short of the highest gifts of serene imagination or
serene wisdom Donne's mind has every power it well could,
wit, insight, imagination ; and these move in such a strange
medium of feeling and learning, mediaeval, renaissance and
modern, that every imprint becomes of interest. To do full
justice to that interest one's study of Donne must include his
prose as well as his verse, his paradoxical Pseudomartyr^
and equally paradoxical, more strangely mooded Biathanatos^
the intense and subtle eloquence of his sermons, the tormented
passion and wit of his devotions, and the gaiety and melan-
choly, wit and wisdom, of his letters. But most of these
qualities have left their mark on his poetry, and given it |l
interests over and above its worth simply as poetry. k

One quality of his verse, which has been somewhat over- (
looked by critics intent upon the definition and sources of meta-
physical wit, is wit in our sense of the word, wit like the wit
of Swift and Sheridan. The habit in which this wit masquer- '
ades is doubtless old-fashioned. It is not always the worse
for that, for the wit of the Elizabethans is delightfully blended
with fancy and feeling. There is a little of Jaques in all
of them. But if fanciful and at times even boyish, Donne's
wit is still amusing, the quickest and most fertile wit of the ;
century till we come to the author of Hudibras. k

It is not in the Satyr es that this wit is to us most obvious. ,
Nothing grows so soon out of date as contemporary satire.

The Poetry of Donne,

XI

Even the brilliance and polish of Pope's satire — and Pope's
art is nowhere more perfect than in The Dunciad and the
Imitations of Horace — cannot interest us in Lord Hervey,
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and the forgotten poets of
an unpoetic age. How then should we be interested in
Elizabeth's fantastic ' Presence ', the streets of sixteenth -century
London, and the knavery of pursuivants, presented with
a satiric art which is wonderfully vivid and caustic but still
tentative, — over-emphatic, rough in style and verse, though
with a roughness which is obviously a studied and in
a measure successful effect. The verses upon Cory at s
Crtidities are in their way a masterpiece of insult veiled as
compliment, but it is a rather boyish and barbarous way.

It is in the lighter of his love verses that Donne's laugh-
able wit is most obvious and most agile. Whatever one may
think of the choice of subject, and the flame of a young man's
lust that burns undisguised in some of the Elegies^ it is im-
possible to ignore the dazzling wit which neither flags nor
falters from the first line to the last. And in the more
graceful and fanciful, the less heated Songs and Sonets^
the same wat, gay and insolent, disports itself in a
philosophy of love which must not be taken altogether
seriously. Donne at least, as we shall see, outgrew it. His
attitude is very much that of Shakespeare in the early
comedies. But the Petrarchian love, which Shakespeare
treats with light and charming irony, the vows and tears of
Romeo and Proteus, Dnnne oppply <;rr>fife He is one of
Shakespeare's young men as these were in the flesh and the
Inns, of Court, and he tells us frankly what in their youthful
cynicism {which is often even more of a pose than their
idealism) they think of love, and constancy, and women.

Of all miracles, Donne cries, a constant woman is the
greatest, of all strange sights the strangest :

If thou flndst one, let mee know,
vSuch a Pilgrimage were sweet ;
Yet doe not, I would not goe,
V. Though at next doore wee might meet.

T

X i i Introduction .

Though shee were true, when you met her,
And last, till you write your letter,

Yet shee

Will bee
False, ere I come, to two, or three.

But is it true that we desire to find her ? Donne's answer is
lVo7uans Constancy : -^

Now thou hast lov'd me one whole day,
To-morrow when thou leav'st what wilt thou say ?

She will, like Proteus in the Tzuo Geiiilemen of Verona^ have j
no dearth of sophistries— but why elaborate them ? ^

Vain lunatique, against these scapes I could >

Dispute, and conquer, if I would, I

Which I abstaine to doe, .

For by to-morrow, I may think so too. I

Why ask for constancy when change is the life and law ot
love ?

I can love both fair and brown ;

Her whom abundance melts, and her whom want betrays ;

Her who loves loneness best, and her who masks and plays, i

• •••■•• /

I can love her and her, and you and you,
I can love any so she be not true.

It is not often that the reckless and wilful gaiety ot youth
masking as cynicism has been expressed with such ebullient
wit as in these and companion songs. And when he adopts
for a time the pose of the faithful lover bewailing the cruelty
of his mistress the sarcastic wit is no less fertile. It would be
difficult to find in the language a more sustained succession of \
witty surprises than The Will. Others were to catch these
notes from Donne, and Suckling later flutes them gaily in his
lighter fashion, never with the same fullness of wit and fancy, ^
never with the same ardour of passion divinable through the
audacious extravagances. (i

But to amuse was by no means the sole aim of Donne's ' wit ' ;
gay humour touched with fancy and feeling is not its only

The Poetry of Donne. xiii

quality. Donne's ' wit ' has many strands, his humour many
moods, and before considering- how these are woven together
into an effect that is entirely poetical, we may note one or
two of the soberer strands which run through his Letters^
Epicedes^ and similar poems — descriptive, reflective, and
complimentary.

Not much of Donne's poetry is given to description. Of
the feeling for nature of the Elizabethans, their pastoral and
ideal pictures of meadow and wood and stream, which de-
lighted the heart of Izaak Walton, there is nothing in Donne.
A^greater contrast than that between Marlowe's Come live
wiiJi flic and Donne's imitation The Baite it would be hard to
ggnceive. But in The Storme and The Calme Donne used his
wit to achieve an effect of realism which was something new in
English poetry, and" was not reproduced till Swift wrote
The City Shower. From the first lines, which describe how

The South and West winds join'd, and as they blew,
Waves like a rolling trench before them threw,

to the close of The Storme the noise of the contending
elements is deafening :

Thousands our noises were, yet we 'mongst all
Could none by his right name, but thunder call :
Lightning was all our light, and it rain'd more
Than if the Sunne had drunke the sea before.

• ••••■■••

Hearing hath deaf'd our sailors, and if they
Knew how to hear, there's none knowes what to say :
Compared to these stormes, death is but a qualme.
Hell somewhat lightsome, and the Bermuda calme.

The sense of tropical heat and calm in the companion poem
is hardly less oppressive, and, if the whole is not quite so happy
as the first, it contains two lines whose vivid and unexpected
felicity is as delightful to-day as when Ben Jonson recited
them to Drummond at Hawthornden :

No use of lanthorns ; and in one place lay
Feathers and dust, to-day and yesterday.

xiv Introduction.

Donne's letters generally fall into two groups. The first
comprises those addressed to his fellow-students at Cambridge
and the Inns of Court, the Woodwards, Brookes, and others,
or to his maturer and more fashionable companions in the quest
of favour and employment at Court, Wotton, and Goodyere^
and Lord Herbert of Cherbury. To the other belong the
complimentary and elegant epistles in which he delighted and
perhaps bewildered his noble lady friends and patronesses
with erudite and transcendental flattery.

In the first class, and the same is true of some of the Satyres^
notably the third, and of the satirical Progresse of the Soute,
especially at the beginning and the end, the reflective, moral-
izing strain predominates. Donne's ' wit ' becomes the instru-
ment of a criticism of life, grave or satiric, melancholy or
stoical. Despite Matthew Arnold's definition, verse of this'
kind seldom is poetry in the full sense of the word ; but, as
Stevenson says in speaking of his own Scotch verses, talk not
song. The first of English poets was a master of the art.
Neither Horace nor Martial, whom Stevenson cites, is a more
delightful talker in verse than Geofifrey Chaucer, and the
archaism of his style seems only to lend the additional charm
of a lisp to his babble. Since Donne's day English poetry has
been rich in such verse talkers — Butler and Dryden, Pope
and Swift, Cowper and Burns, Byron and Shelley, Browning
and Landor. It did not come easy to the Elizabethans, whose
natural accent was song. Donne's chief rivals were Daniel
and Jonson, and I venture to think that he excels them both
"f in the clear and pointed yet easy and conversational develop-
ment of his thought, in the play of wit and wisdom, and,
despite the pedantic cast of Elizabethan erudite moralizing, in
the power to leave on the reader the impression of a potent
and yet a winning personality. We seem to get nearer to the
man himself in Donne's letters to Goodyere and Wotton than
in Daniel's weighty, but also heavy, moralizing epistles to the
^ Countess of Cumberland or Sir Thomas Egerton ; and the
personality whose voice sounds so distinct and human in our
ear is a more attractive one than the harsh, censorious, burly

The Poetry of Donne. xv

but a little blustering- Jonson of the epistles on country life
and generous givers. Donne's style is less clumsy, his verse
less stiff. His wit brings to a clear point whatever he has to
say, while from his verse as from his prose letters there dis-
engages itself a very distinct sense of what it was in the man,
underlying his brilliant intellect, his almost superhuman clever-
ness, which won for him the devotion of friends like Wotton
and Goodyere and Walton and King, the admiration of a
stranger like Huyghens, who heard him talk as well as preach :
— a serious and melancholy, a generous and chivalrous spirit.

However, keepe the lively tast you hold

Of God, love him as now, but feare him more,

And in your afternoones thinke what you told
And promis'd him, at morning prayer before.

Let falshood like a discord anger you.

Else be not froward. But why doe I touch

Things, of which none is in your practise new,
And Tables, or fruit -trenchers teach as much ;

Rut thus I make you keepe your promise Sir,
Riding I had you, though you still staid there,

And in these thoughts, although you never stirre,
You came with mee to Micham, and are here.

So he writes to Goodyere, but the letter to Wotton going
Ambassador to Venice is Donne's masterpiece in this simpler
style, and it seems to me that neither Daniel nor Jonson nor
rC>rayton ever catches this note at once sensitive and courtly. To
fin d a like courtliness we must go to Wotton ; witness the reply
to Donne's earlier epistle which I have printed in the notes. But
ne^ither Wotton nor any other of the courtly poets in Hannah's
collection adds to this dignity so poignant a personal accent.

This personal interest is very marked in the two satires
which are connected by tone and temper with the letters, the
third of the early, classical Satyr es and the opening and closing
stanzas of the Pro^resse^ofJlie^qule. Each is a vivid picture of
the inner workings of Donne's soul at a critical period in his
life. The first was doubtless written at the moment that he
was passing from the Roman to the Anglican Church. It is one

xvi Introductmi,

of the earliest and most thoughtful appeals for toleration, for the
candid scrutiny of religious differences, which was written
perhaps in any country — one of the most striking symptoms
of the new eddies produced in the stream of religious
feeling by the meeting currents of the Reformation and the
Counter-Reformation. '

It was a difficult and dangerous process through which
Donne was passing, this conversion from the Church of his
fathers to conformity with the Church of England as by law
established. It would be as absurd, in the face of a poem like
this and of all that we know of Donne's subsequent life, to call
it a conversion in the full senseof the term, a changed conviction,
as to dub it an apostasy prompted by purely political con-
siderations. Yet doubtless the latter predominated. The
position of a Catholic in the reign of Elizabeth was that of
a man cut off rigorously from the main life of the nation,
with every avenue of honourable ambition closed to him. He
had to live the starved, suspected life of a recusant or to seek
service under a foreign power. Some of the most pathetic
documents in Strype's Annals of the Reformation are those
in which we hear the cry of young men of secure station and
means driven by conscientious conviction to abandon home
and country. It is possible that before 1592 Donne himself
had been sent abroad by relatives with a view to his entering
a seminary or the service of a foreign power. His mother
spent a great part of her life abroad, and his own relatives wena
among those who suffered most severely under Walsingharn's
persecution. 'I had', Donne says, 'my first breeding and
conversation with men of suppressed and afflicted Religion,
accustomed to the despite of death, and hungry of an imagined
Martyrdome.' To a young man of ambition, and as yet cer-
tainly with no bent to devotion or martyrdom, it was only
common sense to conform if he might.

From this dilemma Donne escaped, not by any opportune
change of conviction, or by any insincere profession, but by
the way of intellectual emancipation. He looks round in this
satire and sees that whichever be the true Church it is not by

The Poetry of Donne. xvii

my painful quest of truth, and through the attainment of con-
/iction, that most people have accepted the Church to which
;hey may belong. Circumstances and whim have had more
to do with their choice than reason and serious conviction.
Yet it is only by search that truth is to be found :

On a huge hill
Craggec' and steep, Truth stands, and hee that will
Reach her, about must, and about must goe ;
And what the hills suddenes resists win so.
Yet strive so, that before age, deaths twilight.
Thy Soule rest, for none can work in that night.

It was not often in the sixteenth or seventeenth century that
a completely emancipated and critical attitude on religious,
not philosophical, questions was expressed with such entire
frankness and seriousness. From this position, Walton would
have us believe, Donne advanced through the study of
Bellarmine and other controversialists to a convinced accep-
tance of Anglican doctrine. The evidence points to a rather
different conclusion on Donne's part. He came to think that
all the Churches were ' virtual beams of one sun ', ' connatural
pieces of one circle ', a position from which the next step was
to the conclusion that for an Englishman the Anglican Church
was the right choice (Cujus regio, ejus religio) ; but Donne
had not reached this conclusion when he wrote the Satyre^ and
doubtless did not till he had satisfied himself that the Church
of England offered a reasonable via media. But changes of
creed made on purely intellectual grounds, and prompted by
practical motives, are not unattended with danger to a man's
moral and spiritual hfe. Donne had doubdess outwardly con-
formed before he entered Egerton's service in 1598, but long
afterwards, when he is already in Orders, he utters a cry which
betrays how real the dilemma still was :

Show me, deare Christ, thy spouse, so bright and clear ;

and the first result of his 'conversion' was apparently to
deepen the sceptical vein in his mind.

Scepticism and melancholy, bitter and sardonic, are certainly

11 917.3 h

xviii Introduction,

the dominant notes in the sombre fragment of satire The Pro-
gresse of the Soule^ which he composed in 1601, when he
was Sir Thomas Eg-erton's secretary, four months before his
marriage and six months after the death of the Earl of Essex.
There can be Httle doubt, as I have ventured to suggest
elsewhere, that it was the latter event which provoked this
strange and sombre explosion of spleen, a satire of the same
order as the Tale of a Tub or the Vision of fudgineni. The
account of the poem which Jonson gave to Drummond does
not seem to be quite accurate, though it was probably derived
from Donne himself. It was, one suspects from several cir-
cumstances, a little Donne's way in later years to disguise the
footprints of his earlier indiscretions. According to this
tradition the final habitat of the soul which ' inanimated ' the
apple

Whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world and all our woe,

was to be John Calvin. The tradition is interesting as mark-
ing how far Donne was in 1601 from his later orthodox
Protestantism, for Calvin is never mentioned but with respect
in the Sermons. A few months later he wrote to Egerton
disclaiming warmly all ' love of a corrupt religion '. But,
though sceptical in tone, the poem is written from a Catholic
standpoint ; its theme is the progress of the soul of heresy.
And, as the seventh stanza clearly indicates, the great heretic
in whom the line closed was to be not Calvin but Queen
Elizabeth :

the great soule which here among us now
Doth dwell, and moves that hand, and tongue, and brow
Which, as the Moone the sea, moves us.

Donne can hardly have thought of publishing such a poem, or
circulating it in the Queen's lifetime. It was an expression
of the mood which begot the ' black and envious slanders
breath'd against Diana for her divine justice on Actaeon ' to
which Jonson refers in Cynthia's Revels \\\^ same year. That
some copies were circulated in manuscript later is probably
due to the reaction which brought into favour at James's

The Poetry of Do?me, xlx

Court the Earl of Southampton and the former adherents of
Essex generally.

The tone, moreover, of the stanza quoted above suggests that
it was no vulgar libel on Elizabeth which Donne contemplated.
Elizabeth, the cruel persecutor of his Catholic kinsfolk, now
stained with the blood of her favourite, appeared to him some-
what as she did to Pope Sixtus, a heretic but a great woman.
He felt to her as Burke did to the ' whole race of Guises,
Condes and Colignis ' — ' the hand that like a destroying angel
smote the country communicated to it the force and energy
under which it suffered,' In a mood of bitter admiration, ot
sceptical and sardonic wonder, he contemplates the great bad
souls who had troubled the world and served it too, for the
idea on which the poem was to rest is the disconcerting reflec-
tion that we owe many good things to heretics and bad
men :

Who ere thou beest that read'st this sullen Writ,

Which just so much courts thee, as thou dost it.

Let me arrest thy thoughts ; wonder with mee.

Why plowing, building, ruling and the rest,

Or most of those arts, whence our lives are blest,

By cursed Cains race invented be,

And blest Seih vext us with Astronomie.

Ther's nothing simply good, nor ill alone.

Of every quality comparison,

The onely measure is, and judge, opinion.

It would have been interesting to read Donne's history of the
great souls that troubled and yet quickened the world from
Cain to Arius and from Mahomet to Elizabeth, but unfortu-
nately Donne never got beyond the introduction, a couple of
cantos which describe the progress of the soul while it is still
passing through the vegetable and animal planes, the motive of
which, so far as it can be disentangled, is to describe the pre-
human education of a woman's soul :

keeping some quality
I Of every past shape, she knew treachery,

Rapine, deceit, and lust, and ills enow
To be a woman.

b 2

XX hitroducttoji.

The fragment has some of the sombre power which De
Quincey attributes to it, but on the whole one must confess it
is a failure. The ' wit ' of Donne did not apparently include
invention, for many of the episodes seem pointless as well as
disgusting, and indeed in no poem is the least attractive side of
Donne's mind so clearly revealed, that aspect of his wit which
to some readers is more repellent, more fatal to his claim to be
a poet, than too subtle ingenuity or misplaced erudition — the
vein of sheer ugliness which runs through his work, presenting
details that seem merely and wantonly repulsive. The same
vein is apparent in the work of Chapman, of Jonson, and even in
places of Spenser, and the imagery oi Hamlet -avlA the tragedies
owes some of its dramatic vividness and power to the same
quality. The ugly has its place in art, and it would not be
difficult to find it in every phase of Renaissance art, marked
like the beautiful in that art by the same evidence of power.
Decadence brought with it not ugliness but prettiness.
^The reflective, philosophic, somewhat melancholy strain of
the poems I have been touching on reappears in the letters
addressed to noble ladies. Here, however, it is softened, less
sardonic in tone, while it blends with or gives place to another
strain, that of absurd and extravagant but fanciful and subtle
compliment. Donne cannot write to a lady without his heart
and fancv taking wing in their own passionate and erudite
fashion. '^ Scholastic theology is made the instrument of courtly
compliment and pious flirtation. He blends in the same
disturbing fashion as in some of the songs and elegies that
depreciation of woman in generlal, which he owes less to
classical poetry than to his over- acquaintance with the Fathers,
with an adoration of her charms in the individual which passes
into the transcendental .V He tells the Countess of Huntingdon
that active goodness in a woman is a miracle ; but it is clear
that she and the Countess of Bedford and Mrs. Herbert and
Lady Carey and the Countess of Salisbury are all examples ot
such miracle — ladies whose beauty itself is virtue, while their
virtues are a mystery revealable only to the initiated.

The highest place is held by Lady Bedford and Mrs. Herbert.

The Poetry of Do7ine, xxi

Nothing could surpass the strain of intellectual and etherealized
compliment in which he addresses the Countess. If lines like
the following- are not pure poetry, they haunt some quaint
borderland of poetry to which the polished felicities of Pope s
compliments are a stranger. If not pure fancy, they are not
mere ingenuity, being too intellectual and argumentative for the
one, too winged and ardent for the other:

Should I say I liv'd darker then were true,

Your radiation can all clouds subdue ;

But one, 'tis best light to contemplate you.

You, for whose body God made better clay.
Or tooke vSoules stuffe such as shall late decay.
Or such as needs small change at the last day.

This, as an Amber drop enwraps a Bee,

Covering discovers your quicke Soule ; that we

May in your through-shine front your hearts thoughts see.

You teach (though wee learne not) a thing unknowne
To our late times, the use of specular stone.
Through which all things within without were shown.

Of such were Temples ; so and such you are ;

Beemg and seeming is your equall care,

And verities whole sumine is but know and dare.

The long poem dedicated to the same lady's beauty,

You have refm'd me

is in a like dazzling and subtle vein. Those addressed to Mrs.
Herbert, notably the letter

Mad paper stay,

and the beautiful Elegie

No Spring, nor Summer Beauty hath such grace
As I have seen in one Autumnall face,

are less transcendental in tone but bespeak an even warmer
admiration. Indeed it is clear to any careful reader that in the
poems addressed to both these ladies there is blended with the
respectful flattery of the dependant not a little of the tone of
warmer feeling permitted to the ' servant ' by Troubadour

xxii Introductio7i.

convention. And I suspect that some poems, the tone of
which is still more frankly and ardently lover-like, were
addressed to Lady Bedford and Mrs. Herbert, though they
have come to us without positive indication.

The title of the subtle, passionate; sonorous lyric Tzvicknam
Garden^

Blasted with sighs, and surrounded with teares,

points to the person addressed, for Twickenham Park was the
residence of Lady Bedford from 1607 to 16 18, and Donne's
intimacy with her seems to have begun in or about 1608.
There can, I think, be little doubt that it is to her, and neither
to his w^fe nor the mistresses of his earlier, wandering fancy,
that these lines, conventional in theme but given an amazing
timbre by the impulse of Donne's subtle and passionate mind,
were addressed. But if Twicknain Garden was written
to Lady Bedford, so also, one is tempted to think, must have
been A Nodurnall upon S. Lucies Day^ for Lucy was the
Countess's name, and the thought, feeling, and rhythm of the
two poems are strikingly similar.

But the N^octurjtall is a sincerer and profounder poem than
Twtck7iain Garden^ and it is more difficult to imagine it the
expression of a conventional sentiment. Mr. Gosse, and there
is no higher authority when it comes to the interpretation of
Donne's character and mind, rightly, I think, suggests that the
death of the lady addressed is assumed, not actual, but he
connects the poem with Donne's earlier and troubled loves.
' So also in a most curious ode, the Nocturnal . . ., amid fire-
works of conceit, he calls his mistress dead and protests that
his hatred has grown cold at last.' But I can find no note of
bitterness, active or spent, in the song. It might have been
written to Ann More. It is a highly metaphysical yet sombre
and sincere description of the emptiness of life without love.
The critics have, I think, failed somewhat to reckon with
this stratum in Donne's songs, of poems Petrarchian in
convention but with a Petrarchianism coloured by Donne's
realistic temper and impatient wdt. Any interpretation of so

The Poetry of Donne. xxlii

enigmatical a poem must be conjectural, but before one denied
too positively that its subject was Lady Bedford — perhaps her
illness in. 1612 — one would need to answer two questions, how
far could a conventional passion inspire a strain so sincere, and
what was Donne's feeling for Lady Bedford and hers for him ?
Poetry is the language of passion, but the passion which
moves the poet most constantly is the delight of making poetry,
and very little is sufficient to quicken the imagination to its
congenial task. Our soberer minds are apt to think that there
must be an actual, particular experience behind every sincere
poem. But history refutes the idea of such a simple relation
between experience and art. No poet will sing of love con-
vincingly who has never loved, but that experience will suffice
him for many and diverse webs of song and drama. Without
pursuing the theme, it is sufficient for the moment to recall
that in the fashion of the day Spenser's sonnets were addressed
to Lady Carey, not to his wife ; that it was to Idea or to Anne
Goodere that Drayton wrote so passionate a poem as

Since there 's no help, come let us kiss and part ;

and that we know very little of what really lies behind Shake-
speare's profound and plangent sonnets, weave what web of
fancy we will.

Of Lady Bedford's feeling for Donne we know only what
his letters reveal, and that is no more than that she was his warm
friend and generous patroness. It is clear, however, from
their enduring friendship and from the tone of that corre-
spondence that she found in him a friend of a rarer and
finer calibre than in the other poets whom she patronized in
turn, Daniel and Drayton and Jonson — some one whose sensi-
tive, complex, fascinating personality could hardly fail to touch
a woman's imagination and heart. Friendship between man
and woman is love in some degree. There is no need to
exaggerate the situation, or to reflect on either her loyalty or
his to other claims, to recognize that their mutual feeling was
of the kind for which the Petrarchian convention afforded
a ready and recognized vehicle of expression.

xxiv Introduction.

And so it was, one fancies, with Mrs. Herbert. She too
found in Donne a rare and comprehending spirit, and he in
her a gracious and delicate friend. His relation to her, indeed,
was probably simpler than to Lady Bedford, their friendship
more equal. The letter and the elegy referred to already are
instinct with affection and tender reverence. To her Donne
sent some of his earliest religious sonnets, with a sonnet on her
beautiful name. And to her also it would seem that at some
period in the history of their friendship, the beginning of
which is very difficult to date, he wrote songs in the tone oi
hopeless, impatient passion, of Petrarch writing to Laura, and
others which celebrate their mutual affection as a love that
rose superior to earthly and physical passion. The clue here
is the title prefixed to that strange poem The Primrose^
being at Montgomery Castle upon the hill on which it is
situate. It is true that the title is found for the first time in
the edition of 1635 and is in none of the manuscripts. But it
is easier to explain the occasional suppression of a revealing
title than to conceive a motive for inventing such a gloss.
The poem is doubtless, as Mr. Gosse says, ' a mystical cele-
bration of the beauty, dignity and intelligence of Magdalen
Herbert ' — a celebration, however, which takes the form (as it
might with Petrarch) of a reproach, a reproach which Donne's
passionate temper and caustic wit seem even to touch with
scorn. He appears to hint to Mrs. Herbert that to wish to be
more than a woman, to claim worship in place of love, is to be
a worse monster than a coquette :

Since there must reside
Falshood in woman, I could more abide
She were by Art, than Nature falsifi'd.

Woman needs no advantages to arbitrate the fate of man.

In exactly the same mood as The Primrose is The Blossome,
possibly written in the same place and on the same day, for
the poet is preparing to return to London. The Dampe is in
an even more scornful tone, and one hesitates to connect it with
Mrs. Herbert. But all these poems recur so repeatedly together
in the manuscripts as to suggest that they have a common origin.

The Poetry of Donne. xxv

And with them go the beautiful poems The Funeyall and The
Relique. In the former the cruelty of the lady has killed her
lover, but in the second the tone changes entirely, the relation
between Donne and Mrs. Herbert (note the lines

Thou shalt be a Mary Magdalen and I
A something else thereby)

has ceased to be Petrarchian and become Platonic, their love
a thing pure and of the spirit, but none the less passionate for
that:

First, we lov'd well and faithfully,

Yet knew not what wee lov'd, nor why,

Difference of sex no more wee knew,

Then our Guardian Angells doe ;
Comming and going, wee
Perchance might kisse, but not between those meales ;

Our hands ne'r toucht the scales.
Which nature, injur'd by late law, sets free :
These miracles wee did ; but now alas,
All measure, and all language, I should passe,
Should I tell what a miracle shee was.

Such were the notes that a poet in the seventeenth century
might still sing to a high-born lady his patroness and his friend.
No one who knows the fashion of the day will read into them
more than they were intended to convey. No one who knows
human nature will read them as merely frigid and conventional
compliments. Any uncertainty one may feel about the subject
arises not from their being love-poems, but from the diflficulty
which Donne has in adjusting himself to the Petrarchian
convention, the tendency of his passionate heart and satiric wit
to break through the prescribed tone of worship and com-
plaint.

Without some touch of passion, some vibration of the heart,
Donne is only too apt to accumulate ' monstrous and disgusting
hyperboles '. This is very obvious in the Epicedes — his
complimentary laments for the young Lord Harington, Miss
Boulstred, Lady Markham, Elizabeth Drury and the Marquis
of Hamilton, poems in which it is difficult to find a line that
moves. Indeed, seventeenth-century elegies are not as a rule

■J"

xxvi Introduction,

pathetic. A poem in the simple, piercing strain and the Words-
worthian plainness of style of the Dutch poet Vondel's lament
for his little daughter is hardly to be found in English. An
occasional epitaph like Browne's

May ! be thou never grac'd with birds that sing,

Nor Flora's pride !
In thee all flowers and roses spring,

Mine only died,

comes near it, but in general seventeenth-century elegy is apt
to spend itself on three not easily reconcilable themes —
extravagant eulogy of the dead, which is the characteristically
Renaissance strain, the Mediaeval meditation on death and its
horrors, the more simply Christian mood of hope rising at times
to the rapt vision of a higher life. In the pastoral elegy, such
as Lycidas^ the poet was able to escape from a too literal
treatment of the first into a sequence of charming conventions.
The second was alien to Milton's thought, and with his genius
for turning everything to beauty Milton extracts from the
reference to the circumstances of King's death the only touch
of pathos in the poem :*

Ay me ! whilst thee the shores and sounding Seas
Wash far away, where ere thy bones are hurld,

and some of his loveliest allusions :

Where the great vision of the guarded Mount
Looks towards Nantancos and Bayona's hold ;
Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth.
And, O ye Dolphins, waft the hapless youth.

In the metaphysical elegy as cultivated by Donne, Beaumont,
and others there was no escape from extravagant eulogy and
sorrow by way of pastoral convention and mythological
embroidery, and this class of poetry includes some of the worst
verses ever written. In Donne all three of the strains
referred to are present, but only in the third does he achieve
what can be truly called poetry. In the elegies on Lord
Harington and Miss Boulstred and Lady Markham it is difficult
to say which is more repellent —the images in which the poet

The Poetry of Donne, xxvii

sets forth the vanity of human life and the humiliations of death
or the frigid and blasphemous hyperboles in which the virtues
of the dead are eulogized.

Even the Second Anniversary^ the greatest of Donne's
epicedes, is marred throughout by these faults. There is no
stranger poem in the English language in its combination of
excellences and faults, splendid audacities and execrable
extravagances. 'Fervour of inspiration, depth and force and
glow of thought and emotion and expression ' — it has some-
thing of all these high qualities which Swinburne claimed ; but
the fer\'Our is in great part misdirected, the emotion only half
sincere, the thought more subtle than profound, the expression
heated indeed but with a heat which only in passages kindles
to the glow of poetry.

Such are the passages in which the poet contemplates the
joys of heaven. There is nothing more instinct with beautiful
feeling in Lycidas than some of the lines of Apocalyptic
imagery at the close :

There entertain him all the Saints above,
In solemn troops, and sweet Societies
That sing, and singing in their glory move,
And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes.

But in spiritual sense, in passionate awareness of the tran-
scendent, there are lines in Donne's poem that seem to me
superior to anything in Milton if not in purity of Christian
feeling, yet in the passionate, mystical sense of the infinite as
something other than the finite, something which no sugges-
tion of illimitable extent and superhuman power can ever in
any degree communicate.

Think then my soule that death is but a Groome,
Which brings a Taper to the outward roome,
Whence thou spiest first a little glimmering light,
And after brings it nearer to thy sight :
For such approaches does heaven make in death.

• •••■••

Up, up my drowsie wSoule, where thy new eare
Shall in the Angels songs no discord heere, &c.

In passages like these there is an earnest of the highest note of

XXVIU

hity^oduction.

spiritual eloquence that Donne was to attain to in his sermons
and last hymns.

Another aspect of Donne's poetry in the Anniversaries, of
his conteniplus 7mtJidi ^nd ecstatic vision, connects them more
closely with Tennyson's In Memoriani than Milton's Lycidas.
Like Tennyson, Donne is much concerned with the progress of
science, the revolution which was going on in men's knowledge
of the universe, and its disintegrating effect on accepted beliefs.
To him the new astronomy is as bewildering in its displacement
of the earth and disturbance of a concentric universe as the new
geology was to be to Tennyson with the vistas which it opened
into the infinities of time, the origin and the destiny of man :

The new philosophy calls all in doubt,

The Element of fire is quite put out ;

The Sun is lost, and th' earth, and no mans wit

Can well direct him where to look for it.

And freely men confesse that this world 's spent,

When in the Planets, and the Firmament

They seeke so many new ; they see that this

Is crumbled out againe to his Atomies.

On Tennyson the effect of a similar dislocation of thought, the
revelation of a Nature which seemed to bring to death and
bring to life through endless ages, careless alike of individual
and type, was religious doubt tending to despair :

O life as futile, then, as frail!

• • • • ■

What hope of answer, or redress ?
Behind the veil, behind the veil.

On Donne the effect was quite the opposite. It was not of
religion he doubted but of science, of human knowledge with
its uncertainties, its shifting theories, its concern about the
unimportant :

Poore soule, in this thy flesh what dost thou know ?
Thou know'st thy selfe so httle, as thou know'st not,
How thou didst die, nor how thou wast begot.

Have not all soules thought
For many ages, that our body is wr«ujht

The Poetry of Donne, xxix

Of Ayre, and Fire, and other Elements ?
And now they thinke of new ingredients ;
And one Soule thinkes one, and another way
Another thinkes, and 'tis an even lay.

Wee see in Authors, too stiffe to recant,

A hundred controversies of an Ant ;

And yet one w^atches, starves, freeses, and sweats.

To know but Catechismes and Alphabets

Of unconcerning- things, matters of fact;

How others on our stage their parts did Act ;

What Ccesar did, yea, and what Cicero said.

With this welter of shifting theories and worthless facts he

contrasts the vision of which religious faith is the earnest

here :

In this low forme, poore soule, what wilt thou doe ?

When wilt thou shake off this Pedantery,

Of being taught by sense, and Fantasie ?

Thou look'st through spectacles ; small things seeme great

Below ; But up unto the watch-towre get,

And see all things despoyl'd of fallacies :

Thou shalt not peepe through lattices of eyes.

Nor heare through Labyrinths of eares, nor learne

By circuit, or collections, to discerne.

In heaven thou straight know'st all concerning it.

And what concernes it not, shalt straight forget.

It will seem to some readers hardly fair to compare a poem
like /« Memoriani^vi\\\Qh^ if in places the staple of its feeling
and thought w^ears a little thin, is entirely serious throughout,
with poems which have so much the character of an in-
tellectual tour de force as Donne's A nnwersartes, hut it is
easy to be unjust to the sincerity of Donne in these poems.
Their extravagant eulogy did not argue any insincerity to
Sir Robert and Lady Drury. It was in the manner of the time,
and doubtless seemed to them as natural an expression of grief
as the elaborate marble and alabaster tomb which they erected
to the memory of their daughter. The Second Anniversarie
was written in France when Donne was resident there with
the Drurys. And it was on this occasion that Donne had the
vision of his absent wife which Walton has related so graphically.

XXX hitrodicction.

The spiritual sense in Donne was as real a thing as the restless
and unruly wit, or the sensual, passionate temperament. The
main thesis of the poem, the comparative worthlessness of this
life, the transcendence of the spiritual, was as sincere in Donne's
case as was in Tennyson the conviction of the futility of life if
death closes all. It was to be the theme of the finest passages
in his eloquent sermons, the burden of all that is most truly
religious in the verse and prose of a passionate, intellectual,
self-tormenting soul to whom the pure ecstasy of love of
a Vondel, the tender raptures of a Crashaw, the chastened
piety of a Herbert, the mystical perceptions of a Vaughan
could never be quite congenial.

I have dwelt at some length on those aspects of Donne's
' wit ' which are of interest and value even to a reader who
may feel doubtful as to the beauty and interest of his poetry
as such, because they too have been obscured by the criti-
cism which with Dr. Johnson and Mr. Courthope represents
his wit as a monster of misapplied ingenuity, his interest as
historical and historical only. Apart from poetry there is in
Donne's ' wit ' a great deal that is still fresh and vivid, wit as
we understand wit ; satire pungent and vivid ; reflection on
religion and on life, rugged at times in form but never really
unmusical as Jonson's verse is unmusical, and, despite frequent
carelessness, singularly lucid and felicitous in expression ;
elegant compliment, extravagant and grotesque at times but
often subtle and piquant ; and in the A nntversari'es^ amid
much that is both puerile and extravagant, a loftier strain of
impassioned reflection and vision. It is not of course that
these things are not, or may not be constituents of poetry,
made poetic by their handling. To me it seems that in
Donne they generally are. It is the poet in Donne which
flavours them all, touching his wit with fancy, his reflection
with imagination, his vision with passion. But if we wish to
estimate the poet simply in Donne, we must examine his
love-poetry and his religious poetry. It is here that every
one who cares for his unique and arresting genius will admit
that he must stand or fall as a great poet.

The Poetry of Donne, xxxi

For it is here that we find the full effect of what De
Quincey points to as Donne's peculiarity, the combination of
dialectical subtlety with weight and force of passion. Objec-
tions to admit the poetic worth and interest of Donne's love-
poetry come from two sides — from those who are indisposed
to admit that passion, and especially the passion of love, can
ever speak so ingeniously (this was the eighteenth-century
criticism) ; and from those, and these are his more modern critics,
who deny that Donne is a great poet because with rare
exceptions, exceptions rather of occasional lines and phrases
than of whole poems, his songs and elegies lack beauty. Can
poetry be at once passionate and ingenious, sincere in feel-
ing and witty, — packed with thought, and that subtle and
abstract thought, Scholastic dialectic ? Can love-poetry speak
a language which is impassioned and expressive but lacks
beauty, is quite different from the language of Dante and
Petrarch, the loveliest language that lovers ever spoke, or the
picturesque hyperboles of Romeo and Juliet ? Must not the
imagery and the cadences of love poetry reflect 'I'infinita,
ineffabile bellezza ' which is its inspiration ?

The first criticism is put very clearly by Steele, who goes
so far as to exemplify what the style of love-poetry should be ;
and certainly it is something entirely different from that of The
Extasie or the Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day. Nothing
could illustrate better the ' return to nature ' of our Augustan
literature than Steele's words :

' I will suppose an author to be really possessed with the
passion which he writes upon and then we shall see how he
would acquit himself. This I take to be the safest way to
form a judgement upon him : since if he be not truly moved,
he must at least work up his imagination as near as possible
to resemble reality. I choose to instance in love, which is
observed to have produced the most finished performances in
this kind. A lover will be full of sincerity, that he may be
believed by his mistress ; he will therefore think simply ; he will
express himself perspicuously, that he may not perplex her ; he
will therefore write unaffectedly. Deep reflections are made
by a head undisturbed ; and points of wit and fancy are the

xxxii Int7^oductio?i.

work of a heart at case; these two dangers then into which
poets are apt to run, are effectually removed out of the
lover's way. The selecting proper circumstances, and placing
them in agreeable lights, are the finest secrets of all poetry ;
but the recollection of little circumstances is the lover's sole
meditation, and relating them pleasantly, the business of his
life. Accordingly we find that the most celebrated authors of
this rank excel in love-verses. Out of ten thousand instances
I shall name one which I think the most delicate and tender
I ever saw.

To myself I sigh often, without knowing why ;
And when absent from Phyllis methinks I could die.

A man who hath ever been in love w^ill be touched by the
reading of these lines ; and everyone who now feels that
passion, actually feels that they are true.'

It is not possible to find so distinct a statement of the other
view to which I have referred, but I could imagine it coming
from Mr. Robert Bridges, or (since I have no authority to
quote Mr. Bridges in this connexion) from an admirer of
his beautiful poetry. Mr. Bridges' love-poetry is far indeed
from the vapid naturalness which Steele commended in The
Guardian. It is as instinct with thought, and subtle thought,
as Donne's own poetry; but the final effect of his poetry is
beauty, emotion recollected in tranquillity, and recollected
especially in order to nx its delicate beauty in appropriate
and musical words :

Awake, my heart, to be loved, awake, awake!
The darkness silvers away, the morn doth break,
It leaps in the sky : unrisen lustres slake .
The o'ertaken moon. Awake, O heart, awake !

She too that loveth awaketh and hopes for thee ;
Her eyes already have sped the shades that flee.
Already they watch the path thy feet shall take:
Awake, O heart, to be loved, awake, awake !

And if thou tarry from her, — if this could be, —
She Cometh herself, O heart, to be loved, to thee ;
For thee would unashamed herself forsake :
Awake to be loved, my heart, awake, awake !

The Poetry of Do7ine.

xxxin

Awake, the land is scattered with h'g-ht, and see,
Uncanopied sleep is flying from field and tree :
And blossoming boughs of April in laughter shake ;
Awake, O heart, to be loved, awake, awake!

Lo all things wake and tarry and look for thee:
She looketh and saith, 'O sun, now bring him to me.
Come more adored, O adored, for his coming's sake,
And awake my heart to be loved : awake, awake ! '

Donne has written nothing at once so subtle and so pure and
lovely as this, nothing the end and aim of which is so entirely
to leave an untroubled impression of beauty.

But it is not true either that the thought and imagery of
love-poetr}' must be of the simple, obvious kind which Steele
supposes, that any display of dialectical subtlety, any scin-
tillation of wit, must be fatal to the impression of sincerity and
feeling, or on the other hand that love is always a beautiful
emotion naturally expressing itself in delicate and beautiful
language. To some natures love comes as above all things /
a force quickening the mind.intensifying its purely intellectual N
energy, opening new vistas of thought abstract and subtle,
making the soul ' intensely, wondrously alive '. Of such were
DojQne and Browning. A love-poem like ' Come into the
garden, Maud ' suspends thought and fills the mind with a
succession of picturesque and voluptuous images in harmony
with the dominant mood. A poem such as The Aiiniver-\
sane or The Extasie, The Last Ride Together or Too Late,
is a record of intense, rapid thinking, expressed in the simplest,
most appropriate language — and it is a no w^hit less natural
utterance of passion. Even the abstractness of the thought, on
which Mr. Courthope lays so much stress in speaking of Donne
and the ' metaphysicals ' generally, is no necessary- implication of
want of feeling. It has been said of St. Augustine ' that his
most profound thoughts regarding the first and last things
arose out of prayer . . . concentration of his whole being in
prayer led to the most abstract observation '. So it may be
with love-poetry — so it was with Dante in the Vita Njwva, and
1^ so, on a lower scale, and allowing for the time that the passion

II 917.3

xxxiv hitroductio?!.

^

is a more earthly and sensual one, the thought more capricious
and unruly, with Donne. The Nocturnall upon S. Liicies Day
is not less passionate because that passion finds expression in
abstract and subtle thought. Nor is it true that all love-poetry
is beautiful. Of none of the four poems I have mentioned in
the last paragraph is pure beauty, beauty such as is the note of
Mr. Bridges' song, the distinctive quality. It is rather vivid
realism :

And alive I shall keep and long, you will see!

I knew a man, was kicked like a dog
From gutter to cesspool ; what cared he

So long as he picked from the filth his prog?
He saw youth, beauty and genius die.

And jollily lived to his hundredth year.
But I will live otherwise : none of such life !

At once I begin as I mean to end.

But this sacrifice of beauty to dramatic vividness is a charac-
teristic of passionate poetry. Beauty is not precisely the
quality we should predicate ot the burning lines of Sappho
translated by Catullus :

lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus
flamma demanat, sonitu suopte
tintinant aures geminae, teguntur
lumina nocte.

Beauty is the quality of poetry which records an ideal passion
recollected in tranquillity, rather than of poetry either dramatic
or lyric which utters the very movement and moment of
passion itself.

Donne's love-poetry is a very complex phenomenon, but the
two dominant strains in it are just these : the strain of dialectic,
subtle play of argument and wit, erudite and fantastic ; and the
strain of vivid realism, the record of a passion which is not
ideal nor conventional, neither recollected in tranquillity nor a
pure product of literary fashion, but love as an actual, imme-
diate experience in all its moods, gay and angry, scornful and
rapturous with joy, touched with tenderness and darkened with
sorrow— though these last two moods, the commonest in love-

The Poetry of Domie.

XXXV 11

poetry, are with Donne the rarest. The first of these strain^'
comes to Donne from the Middle Ages, the dialectic of the
Schools, which passed into mediaeval love-poetry almost from
its inception ; the second is the expression of the new temper
of the Renaissance as Donne had assimilated it in Latin countries.
Donne uses the method, the dialectic of the mediaeval love-
poets, the poets of the dolce stil nuovo^Qi\x\vi\c^\^ Cavalcanti,
Dante, and their successors, the intellectual, argumentative
evolution of their canzoni^ but he uses it to express a temper
of mind and a conception of love which are at the opposite pole
from their lofty idealism. The result, however, is not so entirely
disintegrating as Mr. Courthope seems to think : ' This fine
Platonic edifice is ruthlessly demolished in the poetry of Donne.
To him love, in its infinite variety and inconsistency, represented
the principle of perpetual flux in nature.' ^ The truth is rather
that, owing to the fullness of Donne's experience as a lover, the
accident that made of the earlier libertine a devoted lover and
husband, and from the play of his restless and subtle mind on the
phenomenon of love conceived and realized in this less ideal
fashion, there emerged in his poetry the suggestion of a new
philosophy of love which, if less transcendental than that
of Dante, rests on a juster, because a less dualistic and ascetic,
conception of the nature of the love of man and woman.

The fundamental weakness of the mediaeval doctrine of love,
despite its refining influence and its exaltation of woman, was
that it proved unable to justify love ethically against the claims
of the counter-ideal of asceticism. Taking its rise in a relation-
ship which excluded the thought of marriage as the end and
justification of love, which presumed in theory that the relation
of the ' servant ' to his lady must always be one of reverent and
unrewarded service, this poetry found itself involved from the
beginning in a dualism from which there was no escape. On
the one hand the love of woman is the great ennobler of the

\

r--

'■ /

\

' History of English Poetry, iii. 154. Mr. Courthope qualifies this
statement somewhat on the next page: ' From this spirit of cynical law-
lessness he was perhaps reclaimed by genuine love,' (S:c. But he has,
I think, insufficiently analysed the diverse strains in Donne's love-poetry.

c 2

XXXIV

Int7^0(luction,

^

jc.unian heart, the influence which elicits its latent virtue as the
sun converts clay to gold and precious stones. On the other
hand, love is a passion which in the end is to be repented of in
sackcloth and ashes. Lancelot is the knight whom love has
made perfect in all the virtues of manhood and chivalry ; but
the vision of the Holy Grail is not for him, but for the virgin and
stainless Sir Galahad.

In the high philosophy of the Tuscan poets of the ' sweet
new style ' that dualism was apparently transcended, but it was
by making love identical with religion, by emptying it of
earthly passion, making woman an Angel, a pure Intelligence,
love of whom is the first awakening of the love of God.
' For Dante and the poets of the learned school love and virtue
were one and the same thing; love zvas religion, the- lady
beloved the way to heaven, symbol of philosophy and finally
of theology.' ^ The culminating moment in Dante's love for
Beatrice arrives when he has overcome even the desire that she
should return his salutation and he finds his full beatitude in
' those words that do praise my lady '. The love that begins in
the Vita Ntwva is completed in the Paradiso.

The dualism thus in appearance transcended by Dante
reappears sharply and distinctly in Petrarch, ' Petrarch ', says
Gaspary, ' adores not the idea but the person of his lady ; he
feels that in his affections there is an earthly element, he cannot
separate it from the desire of the senses ; this is the earthly
tegument which draws us down. If not as, according to the
ascetic doctrine, sin, if he could not be ashamed of his passion,
yet he could repent of it as a vain and frivolous thing, regret
his wasted hopes and griefs. '^ Laura is for Petrarch the flower
of all perfection herself and the source of every virtue in her
lover. Yet his love for Laura is a long and weary aberration
of the soul from her true goal, which is the love of God. This
is the contradiction from which flow some of the most lyrical

* Gaspary: History of Italian Literature (Oelsner's translation), 1904.
Consult also Karl Vossler : Die philosophischen Crundlagen des * siissen
neuen Sti/s', Heidelberg, 1904, and La Poesia giovanile Ssr=c. di Guide
Cavalcanti : Studi di Giulio Salvadori, Roma, 1895.

* Gaspary : Op. Cit.

The Poetry of Donne, xxxvii

strains in Petrarch's poetry, as the fine canzone ' V vo pensando ',
where he cries :

E sento ad ora ad or venirmi in core
Un leggiadro disdegno, aspro e severo,
Ch'ogni occuho pensero
Tira in mezzo la fronte, ov' altri '1 vede ;
Che mortal cosa amar con tanta fede,
Quanta a Dio sol per debito convensi,
Pill si disdice a chi piu pregio brama,

Elizabethan love-poetry is descended from Petrarch by way
of Cardinal Bembo and the French poets of the Pleiade^ notably
Ronsard and Desportes. Of all the Elizabethan sonneteers
the most finely Petrarchian are Sidney and Spenser, especially
the former. P^or Sidney, Stella is the school of virtue and
nobility. He too writes at thnes in the impatient strain of
Petrarch :

Hut ah ! Desire still cries, give me some food. ^ \

And in the end both Sidney and Spenser turn fromeartnly X.o //
heavenly love :

Leave me, O love, which reachest but to dust,
And thou, my mind, aspire to higher things :
Grow rich in that which never taketh rust,
Whate\'er fades but fading pleasure brings.

And so Spenser :

Many lewd lays (Ah ! woe is me the more)
In praise of that mad fit, which fools call love,
I have in the heat of youth made heretofore ;
That in light wits affection loose did move,
But all these follies now I do reprove.

But two things had come over this idealist and courtly
love-poetry by the end of the sixteenth century-. It had become
a literary artifice, a refining upon outworn and extravagant
conceits, losing itself at times in the fantastic and absurd.
A more important fact was that this poetry had begun to
absorb a new warmth and spirit, not from Petrarch and medi-
aeval chivalry, but from classical love-ppetry with its simpler,
less metaphysical strain, its equally intense but more realistic

XXX VI n

l7itroductio7i.

/^'■'

^>

1

I

description of passion, its radically different conception of the
relation between the lovers and of the influence of love in
a man's life. The courtly, idealistic strain was crossed by an
Epicurean and sensuous one that tends to treat with scorn the
worship of woman, and echoes again and again the Pagan cry,
never heard in Dante or Petrarch, of the fleetingness of beauty
I and love :

Mvamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus !
Soles occidere et redire possunt :
Nobis quum semel occidit brevis lux
Nox est perpetua una dormienda.

Vivez si men croyez, n'attendez a demain ;
Cueillez des aujourd'hui les roses de la vie.

vSince brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea.
But sad mortality o'er-sways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea
,./ Whose action is no stronger than a flower 1

Now if we turn from Elizabethan love-poetry to the Sojigs

1 and Sonets and the Elegies of Donne, we find at once two

distinguishing features. In the first place his poetry is in one

respect less classical than theirs. There is far less in it of the

superficial evidence of classical learning with which the poetry

. of the ' University Wits ' abounds, pastoral and mythological

•' imagery. The texture of his poetry is more mediaeval than

theirs in as far as it is more dialectical, though a dialectical

evolution is not infrequent in the Elizabethan sonnet, and the

\ imagery is less picturesque, more scientific, philosophic,

realistic, and homely. The place of the

goodly exiled train
Of gods and goddesses

is taken by images drawn from all the sciences of the day, from
the definitions and distinctions of the Schoolmen, from the
travels and speculations of the new age, and (as in vShake-
speare's tragedies or Browning's poems) from the experiences
of everyday life. Maps and sea discoveries, latitude and
longitude, the phoenix and the mandrake's root, the Scholastic
theories of Angelic bodies and Angelic knowledge. Alchemy

The Poetry of Do7i?ie, xxxix

and Astrology, legal contracts and non obstantes, ' late
schoolboys and sour prentices,' ' the king's real and his
stamped face ' — these are the kind of images, erudite, fanciful,
and homely, which give to Donne's poems a texture so different
at a first glance from the florid and diffuse Elizabethan poetry,
whether romantic epic, mythological idyll, sonnet, or song;
while by their presence and their abundance they distinguish
it equally (as Mr. Gosse has justly insisted) from the studiously
moderate and plain style of' well-languaged Daniel '.

But if the imagery of Donne's poetry be less classical than
that of Marlowe or the younger Shakespeare there is no poet
the spirit of whose love -poetry is so classical, so penetrated
with the sensual, realistic, scornful tone of the Latin lyric
and elegiac poets. If one reads rapidly through the three
books of Ovid's Ainoycs^ and then in the same continuous
rapid fashion the Soii^s and the Elegies of Donne, one will
note striking differences of style and treatment. Ovid develops
his theme simply and concretely, Donne dialectically and
abstractly. There is little of the ease and grace of Ovid's
verses in the rough and vehement lines of Donne's Elegies,
Compare the song,

Husie old foole, unruly Sunne,

with the famous thirteenth Elegy of the first book,

lam super oceanum venit a seniore marito,
Flava pruinoso quae vehit axe diem.

Ovid passes from one natural and simple thought to another,
from one aspect of dawn to another equally objective. Donne
just touches one or two of the same features, borrowing them
doubtless from Ovid, but the greater part of the song is devoted
to the subtle and extravagant, if you like, but not the less
passionate development of the thought that for him the woman
he loves is the whole world.

But if the difference between Donne's metaphysical conceits
and Ovid's naturalness and simplicity is palpable it is not less
clear that the emotions which they express, with some important

xl hitroductio?i.

exceptions to which I shall recur, are identical. The love
which is the main burden of their song is something very
different from the ideal passion of Dante or of Petrarch, of
Sidney or Spenser. It is a more sensual passion. The same
tone of witty depravity runs through the work of the two poets.
There is in Donne a purer strain which, we shall see directly,
is of the greatest importance, but such a rapid reader as I am
contemplating might be forgiven if for the moment he over-
looked it, and declared that the modern poet was as sensual
and depraved as the ancient, that there was little to choose
between the social morality reflected in the Elizabethan and in
the Augustan poet.

And yet even in these more cynical and sensual poems
a careful reader will soon detect a difference between Donne
and Ovid. He will begin to suspect that the English poet is
imitating the Roman, and that the depravity is in part a reflected
depravity. In revolt from one convention the young poet is
cultivating another, a cynicism and sensuality which is just as
little to be taken an pied de la lettre as the idealizing worship,
the anguish and adoration of the sonneteers. There is, as has
been said already, a gaiety in the poems elaborating the thesis
that love is a perpetual flux, fickleness the law of its being,
which warns us against taking them too seriously ; and even
those Elegies which seem to our taste most reprehensible are
aerated by a wit which makes us almost forget their indecency.
In the last resort there is all the difference in the world between
the untroubled, heartless sensuality of the Roman poet and the
gay wit, the paradoxical and passionate audacities and sensual-
ities of the young Elizabethan law-student impatient of an
unreal convention, and eager to startle and delight his fellow
students by the fertility and audacity of his wit.

It is not of course my intention to represent Donne's love-
poetry as purely an ' evaporation ' of wit, to suggest that there
is in it no reflection either of his own life as a young man or
the moral atmosphere of Elizabethan London. It would be
a much less interesting poetry if this were so. Donne has
pleaded guilty to a careless and passionate youth :

The Poetry of Do7t7ie, xli

In mine Idolatry what showres of raine
Mine eyes did waste ? what griefs my heart did rent ?
That sufferance was my sinne ; now I repent ;
Cause I did suffer I must suffer pain.

From what we know of the lives of Essex, Raleigh,
Southampton, Pembroke, and others it is probable that Donne's
Elegies come quite as close to the truth of life as Sidney's
Petrarchianism or Spenser's Platonism, The later cantos
of The Faerie Qneene reflect vividly the unchaste loves and \/
troubled friendships of Elizabeth's Court, Whether we can
accept in its entirety the history of Donne's early amours
which Mr. Gosse has gathered from the poems or not, there »|! ^
can be no doubt that actual experiences do He behind these /
poems as behind Shakespeare's sonnets. In the one case as in '=
the other, to recognize a literary model is not to exclude the |

probability of a source in actual experience. i

But however we may explain or palliate the tone of these i

poems it is impossible to deny their power, the vivid and !

packed force with which they portray a variously mooded
passion v^orking through a swift and subtle brain. If there is
little of the elegant and accomplished art which Milton admired
in the Latin Elegiasts while he ' deplored ' their immorality, i

there is more strength and sincerity both of thought and j

imagination. The brutal cynicism of !

Fond woman which would have thy husband die, |

the witty anger of The Apparition, the mordant and I
paradoxical wit of The Perfume and The Bracelet, the

passionate dignity and strength of His Picture, \

My body a sack of bones broken within, j

And powders blew stains scatter'd on my skin,

the passion that rises superior to sensuality and wit, and takes
wing into a more spiritual and ideal atmosphere, oi His parting
from her,

I will not look upon the quick'ning Sun,
But straight her beauty to my sense shall run ;
The ayre shall note her soft, the fire most pure ;
Water suggest her clear, and the earth sure —

*i^T'

xlii hitrodtcction.

compare these with Ovid and the difference is apparent
between an artistic, witty voluptuary and a poet whose
— passionate force redeems many errors of taste and art. Com-
pare them with the sonnets and mythological idylls and
Heroicall Epistles oi\S\^ Elizabethans and it is they, not Donne,
who are revealed as witty and ' fantastic ' poets content to
adorn a conventional sentiment with mythological fancies and
verbal conceits. Donne's interest is his theme, love and woman,
and he uses words not for their own sake but to communicate
his consciousness of these surprising phenomena in all their
. varying and conflicting aspects. The only contemporary
poems that have the same dramatic quality are Shakespeare's
sonnets and some of Drayton's later sonnets. In Shakespeare
this dramatic intensity and variety is of course united with
a rarer poetic charm. Charm is a quality which Donne's
poetry possesses in a few single lines. But to the passion
which animates these sensual, witty, troubled poems the closest
parallel is to be sought in Shakespeare's sonnets to a dark
lady and in some of the verses written by Catullus to or of
Lesbia :

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame.

■ — But neither sensual passion, nor gay and cynical wit, nor
scorn and anger, is the dominant note in Donne's love-poetry."
Of the last quality there is, despite the sardonic emphasis of
some of the poems, less than in either Shakespeare or Catullus.
There is nothing in his poetry which speaks so poignantly of
an outraged heart, a love lavished upon one who was worth-
less, as some of Shakespeare's sonnets and of Catullus 's poems.
The finest note in Donne's love-poetry is the note of joy,
the joy of mutual and contented passion. His heart rnigKtlbe
subtle to plague itself; its capacity for joy is even more
obvious. Other poets have done many things which Donne
could not do. They have invested their feelings with a garb
of richer and sweeter poetry. They have felt more deeply
and finely the reverence which is in the heart of love. But it
is only in the fragments of Sappho, the lyrics of Catullus, and

The Poetry of Do?ine. xliii

the songs of Burns that one will find the sheeriJQy of loving
and^ being loved expressed in the same direct and simple
language as in some of Donne's songs, only in Browning that
one will find the same simplicity of feeling combined with
a like swift and subtle dialectic.

I wonder by my troth what thou and I
Did till we loved.

For God's sake hold your tongue and let me love.

If yet I have not all thy love,
Deare, I shall never have it all.

Lines like these have the same direct, passionate quality as

(paivirai fxoi Kfji/09 icro? Oioiaii/

or

O my love 's like a red, red rose
That 's newly sprung in June.

The joy is as intense though it is of a more spiritual and
intellectual quality. And in the other notes of this simple
passionate love-poetry, sorrow which is the shadow of joy, and
tenderness, Donne does not fall far short of Burns in intensity
of feeling and directness of expression. These notes are not
so often heard in Donne, but

So, so break ofif this last lamenting kiss

is of the same quality as

Had we never lov'd sae kindly
or

Take, O take those lips away.

And strangest of all perhaps is the tenderness which came-
into Donne's poetry when a sincere passion quickened in his
heart, for tenderness, the note of

O wert thou in the cauld blast,

is the last quality one would look for in the poetry of a nature
at once so intellectual and with such a capacity for caustic
satire. But the beautiful if not flawless Elegy XVI,

By our first strange and fatal interview,

xliv Introduction,

and the Valedictions which he wrote on different occa-
sions of parting from his wife, combine with the pecuhar
elan of all Donne's passionate poetry and its intellectual content
a tenderness as perfect as anything in Burns or in Browning:

O more than Moone,
Draw not up seas to drowne me in thy spheare,
Weepe me not dead in thine armes, but forbeare
To teach the sea, what it may doe too soone.

Let not thy divining heart

Forethink me any ill.
Destiny may take thy part
And may thy feares fulfill ;
But thinke that we
Are but turn'd aside to sleep ;
They who one another keepe
Alive, ne'er parted be.

Such wilt thou be to mee, who must
Like th' other foot, obliquely runne ;

Thy firmnes makes my circle just.

And makes me end, where I begunne.

The poet who wrote such verses as these did not believe any
longer that ' love . . , represents the principle of perpetual flux
in nature '.

But Donne's poetry is not so simple a thing of the heart and
of the senses as that of Burns and Catullus. Even his purer
poetry has more complex moods — consider The Prohibition —
and it is metaphysical, not only in the sense of being erudite and
witty, but in the proper sense of being reflective and philoso-
phical. Donne is always conscious of the import of his moods ;
and so it is that there emerges from his poems a philosophy or
a suggested philosophy of love to take the place of the idealism
which he rejects. Set a song of the joy of love by Burns or by
Catullus such as I have cited beside Donne's Anniversaries

All Kings, and all their favorites,
All glory of honors, beauties, wits.

The Sun itselfe, which makes times, as they passe,
Is elder by a year, now, than it was

When thou and I first one another saw,

The Poetry of L)o7me, xlv

and the difference is at once apparent. Burns gets no further
than the experience, Catullus than the obvious and hedonistic
reflection that time is flying, the moment of pleasure short. In
Donne's poem one feels the quickening of the brain, the vision
extending its range, the passion gathering sweep with the
expanding rhythms, and from the mind thus heated and
inspired emerges, not a cry that time might stay its course,

Lente, lente curnte noctis equi,

but a clearer consciousness of the eternal significance of love,
not the love that aspires after the unattainable, but the love
that unites contented hearts. The method of the poet is,
I suppose, too dialectical to be popular, for the poem is in %yff
Anthologies. It may be that the Pagan and Christian strains
which the poet unites are not perfectly blended — if it is possible
to do so — but to me it seems that the joy of love has never
been expressed at once with such intensity and such eleyation.
And it is with sorrow as with joy. There is the same
difference of manner in the expression between Donne and
these poets, and the deepest thought is the same. The A^oc-
iurnall on S. Lticies Day is at the opposite pole of Donne's
thought from the Anniversaries and compared with

Had we never loved sae kindly
or

Take, O take those lips away,

both the feeling and its expression are metaphysical. But the
passion is felt through the subtle and fantastic web of dialectic;
and the thought from which the whole springs is the emptiness
pf life without love.

What, then, is the philosophy which disengages itself from
Donne's love-poetry studied in its whole compass ? It seems
to me that it is more than a purely negative one, that
consciously or unconsciously he sets over against the abstract
idealism, the sharp dualism of the Middle Ages, a justifi-
cation of love as a natural passion in the human heart the
meaning and end of which is marriage. The sensuality and
exaggerated cynicism of so much of the poetry of the

xlvi hitrodtiction.

\ —

u

{

Renaissance was a reaction from courtly idealism and
mediaeval asceticism. Hut a mere reaction could lead no-
whither. There are no steps which lead only backward in
the history of human thought and feeling. Poems like
Donne's Elegies ^\\\it. Shakespeare's Vemts and A do7n's, like
Marlowe's Hero a7id Leaiider could only end in penitent out-
cries like those of Sidney and Spenser and of Donne himself.
The true escape from courtly or ascetic idealism was a poetry
which should do justice to love as a passion in which body and
soul alike have their part, and of which there is no reason to
repent.

And this with all its imperfections Donne's love-poetry is.
It was not for nothing that Sir Thomas Egerton's secretary
made a runaway match for love. For Dante the poet, his wife
did not exist. In love of his wife Donne found the meaning
and the infinite value of love. In later days he might bewail
his ' idolatry of profane mistresses ' ; he never repented ot
having loved. Between his most sensual and his most
spiritual love-songs there is no cleavage such as separates
natural love from Dante's love of Beatrice, who is in the end
Theology. The passion that burns in Donne's most out-
spoken elegies, and wantons in the Epithalainia^ is not cast
out in The Anniversarie or The Canonization^ but absorbed.
It is purified and enriched by being brought into harmony
with his whole nature, spiritual as well as physical. It has
lost the exclusive consciousness of itself which is lust, and
become merged in an entire affection, as a turbid and dis-
coloured stream is lost in the sea.

This justification of natural love as fullness of joy and life is
the deepest thought in Donne's love-poems, far deeper and
sincerer than the Platonic conceptions of the affinity and
identity of souls with which he plays in some of the verses
addressed to Mrs. Herbert. The nearest approach that he
makes to anything like a reasoned statement of the thought
latent rather than expressed in The A^tniversarie is in The
Extasie^ a poem which, like the Nocturnall, only Donne could
have written. Here with the same intensity of feeling, and in

The Poci.^

^ry of Do?tne.

xlvii

rv

t/^

strain he emphasizes the

the same abstract, dialectical, erudiiv. i.,
interdependence of soul and body :

'IS h

As /our blood labours to beget •nent-

jpirits, as like soules as it can, 'btlfc^

Because such fingers need to knit ,^ ^^

That subtile knot, which makes us man :
>o must pure lovers soules descend ^

T'affections, and to faculties,
^Which sense may reach and apprehend,
E/se a great Prince in prisoji lies.

It may be that Donne has not entirely succeeded in what he
here attempts. There hangs about the poem just a suspicion
of the conventional and unreal Platonism of the seventeenth
century. In attempting to state and vindicate the relation ot
soul and body he falls perhaps inevitably into the appearance,
at any rate, of the dualism which he is trying to transcend.
He places them over against each other as separate entities
and the lower bulks unduly. In love, says Pascal, the body
disappears from sight in the intellectual and spiritual passion
which it has kindled. That is what happens in The
An7iiversarie^ not altogether in The Extasie. Yet no poem
makes one realize more fully what Jonson meant by calling
Donne ' the first poet in the world for some things '. ' I should
never find any fault with metaphysical poems,' is Cole-
ridge's judgement, ' if they were all like this or but half as
excellent.'

It was only the force of Donne's personality that could
achieve even an approximate harmony of elements so diver-
gent as are united in his love-verses, that could master the
lower- natured steed that drew the chariot of his troubled and
passionate soul and make it subservient to his yoke-fellow of
purer strain who is a lover of honour, and modesty, and
temperance, and the follower of true glory. In the work of
his followers, who were many, though they owed allegiance to
Jonson also, the lower elements predominated. The strain of
metaphysical love-poetry in the seventeenth century' with its
splendid elan and sonorous cadence is in general Epicurean

X

xlviii Introduc/.

ion.

and witty. It is only nov;^^^ ^^^^ _j„ Marvell, perhaps in
Herrick's

a^me to live, and I will live,
^,»- Thy Protestant to be,

certainynj^ Rochester's songs, in

c

An age in her embraces past
'^^ Would seem a winter's day,

or the unequalled :

When wearied with a world of woe

To thy safe bosom I retire,
Where love, and peace, and truth does flow,

May I contented there expire,

that the accents of the hear/ are clearly audible, that passion
prevails over Epicurean fancy or cynical wit. On the other
hand, the idealism of seventeenth-century poetry and romances,
the Platonism of the Hotel de Rambouillet that one finds in
Habington's Castara, in Kenelm Digby's Private Memoirs,
in the French romances of chivalry and their imitations in
English is the silliest, because the emptiest, that ever masquer-
aded as such in any literature, at any period. A sensual and
cynical flippancy on the one hand, a passionless, mannered
idealism on the other, led directly to that thinly veiled
contempt of women which is so obvious in the satirical essays
of Addison and Pope's Rape of the Lock.

But there was one poet who meditated on the same problem
as Donne, who felt like him the power and greatness of love,
and like him could not accept a doctrine of love which seemed
to exclude or depreciate marriage. In 1640, just before his
marriage, as rash in its way as Donne's but less happy in
the issue, Milton, defending his character against accusations
of immorality, traced the development of his thought about love.
The passage, in An Apology against a Pamphlet called
'A Modest CoJifutation\ &c., has been taken as having a
reference to the Paradise Lost. But Milton rather seems at
the time to have been meditating a work like the Vita Ntiova
or a romance like that of Tasso in which love was to be

\

I The Poetry of Do?i?te. xlix

a motive as well as religion, for the whole theme of his
thought is love, true love and its mysterious link with chastity,
of which, however, ' marriage is no defilement '. In the
arrogance of his youthful purity Milton would doubtless have
looked with scorn or loathing on the Elegies and the more care-
less of Donne's songs. But perhaps pride is a greater enemy
of love than such faults of sense as Donne in his passionate
youth was guilty of, and from which Dante by his own
evidence was not exempt. W'hatever be the cause — pride,
and the disappointment of his marriage, and political polemic
— Milton never wrote any English love- poetry, except it be
the one sonnet on the death of the wife who might have opened
the sealed wells of his heart ; and some want of the experience
which love brought to Dante has dimmed the splendour of the
great poem in which he undertook to justify the ways of God
to men. Donne is not a Milton, but he sounded some notes
which touch the soul and quicken the intellect in a way that
Milton's magnificent and intense but somewhat hard and
I objective art fails to achieve.

That the simpler and purer, the more ideal and tender of

Donne's love-poems were the expression of his love for Ann

More cannot of course be proved in the case of each individual

jpoem, for all Donne's verses have come to us (with a few

/unimportant exceptions) undated and unarranged. But the

I general thesis, that it was a great experience which purified and

) elevated Donne's poetry, receives a striking confirmation from

the better-known history of his devotional poetry. Here too

I wit, often tortured wit, fancy, and the heat which Donne's wit

was always able to generate, would have been all his verse had

to show but for the great sorrow which struck him down

in 1617 and gave to his subsequent sonnets and hymns a

sincerer and profounder note, his imagery a more magnificent

quality, his rhythms a more sonorous music.

Donne was not by nature a devotional poet in the same way
and to the same degree as Giles Fletcher or Herbert or
Crashaw. It was a sound enough instinct which, despite his
religious upbringing and his wide and serious interest in

11 917-3 d

r

1 Introdiictio7t, [

theological questions, made him hesitate to cross the threshold I
of the ministry and induced him to seek rather for some such \
public service as fell to the lot of his friend Wotton. It was ^
not, I think, the transition from the Roman to the Anglican
Church which was the obstacle. I have tried to describe what
seems to me to have been the path of enlightenment which
opened the way for him to a change which on every ground oi
prudence and ambition was desirable and natural. But to
conform, and even to take a part as a free-lance in theological
controversy was one thing, to enter the ministry another.
When this was pressed upon him by Morton or by the King
it brought him into conflict with something deeper and more
fundamental than theological doctrines, namely, a tempera-
ment which was rather that of the Renaissance than that
either of Puritan England or of the Counter- Reformation
whether in Catholic countries or in the Anglican Church —
the temperament of Raleigh and Bacon rather than of Milton
or Herbert or Crashaw.

The simple way of describing Donne's difficulty is W'alton's,
according to whom Donne shrank from entering the ministry
for fear the notorious irregularities of his early years should
bring discredit on the sacred calling. But there was more in
Donne's life than a youth of pleasure, an old age of prayers.
It is not the case that all which was best and most serious in
Donne's nature led him towards Holy Orders. In his earliest
satires and even in his ' love-song weeds ' there is evidence
enough of an earnest, candid soul underneath the extravagances
of wit and youthful sensuality. Donne's mind was naturally
serious and religious ; it was not naturally devout or ascetic,
but worldly and ambitious. But to enter the ministry was, for
Donne and for all the serious minds of his age, to enter a
profession for which the essential qualifications were a devo
tional and an ascetic life. The country clergy of the Anglicai^
Church were often careless and scandalous livers before Lau»i
took in hand the discipline of the Church ; but her bishops anc!
most eminent divines, though they might be courtly and
sycophantic, were with few exceptions men of devout and

4

The Poet?y of Donne. li

ascetic life. When Donne finally crossed the Rubicon, con-
vinced that from the King no promotion was to be hciped for
in any other line of life, it was rather with the deliberate
resolution that he would make his life a model of devotion and
ascetic self-denial than as one drawn by an irresistible attraction ■
or impelled by a controlling sense of duty to such a life. Donne/
was no St. Augustine whose transition from libertinism to
saintliness came entirely from within. The noblest feature of
r^onne s earher clerical life was the steadfast spirit in which he
set himself to realize the highest ideals of the calling he had
chosen, and the candour with which he accepted the contrast
between his present position and his earlier life, leaving to
whosoever wished to judge while he followed the path of duty
and penitence.

But such a spirit will not easily produce great devotional
poetry. There are qualities in the religious poetry' of simpler
and purer souls to which Donne seldom or never attains. The
natural love of God w^hich overflows the pages of the great
mystics, which dilates the heart and the verses of a poet like
the Dutchman Vondel, the ardour and tenderness of Crashaw^
the chaste, pure piety and penitence of Herbert, the love from
which devotion and ascetic self-denial come unbidden — to these
Donne never attained. The high and passionate joy of T/ie
Anniversary is not heard in his sonnets or hymns, liffort
is the note which predominates — the effort to realize the
majesty of God, the heinousness of sin, the terrors of Hell, the
mercy of Christ. Some of the very worst traits in Donne's
mind are brought out in his religious writing. The Essays on
Divinity are an extraordinary revelation of his accumulations
of useless Scholastic erudition, and his capacity to perform feats
of ingenious deduction from traditional and accepted premises.
To compare these freakish deductions from the theory of
verbal inspiration with the luminous sense of the Tractatus
Thcologico- Politicns is to realize how much rationalism was
doing in the course of the century for the emancipation and
healing of the hum.an intellect. Some of the poems, and those
the earliest written, before Donne had actually taken Orders,

d 2

J

Hi I?itroduction.

are not much more than exercises in these theological subtleties,
poems such as that On the Annunciation and Passion falling
in the safne year (1608), The Litany (1610), Good-Friday
(1613), and T/ie Cross {c. 1615) are characteristic examples
of Donne's intense and imaginative wit employed on traditional
topics of Catholic devotion to which no change of Church ever
made him indifferent. Donne never ignored in his sermons
the gulf that separated the Anglican from the Roman Church,
or the link that bound her to the Protestant Churches of the
Continent. ' Our great protestant divines ' are one of his
courts of appeal, and included Luther and Calvin of whom he
never speaks but with the deepest respect. But he was un-
willing to sacrifice to a fanatical puritanism any element of
Catholic dev^otion which was capable of an innocent inter-
pretation. His language is guarded and perhaps not always
consistent, but it would not be difficult to show from his
sermons and prose-writings that many of the most distinctively
Catholic tenets were treated by him with the utmost tenderness.
But, as Mr. Gosse has pointed out, the sincerest and pro-
foundest of Donne's devotional poetry dates from the death of
his wife. The loss of her who had purified and sweetened his
earliest love songs lent a new and deeper timbre to the sonnets
and lyrics in which he contemplates the great topics of personal
religion, — sin, death, the Judgement, and throws himself on the
mercy of God as revealed in Christ. The seven sonnets en-
titled La Corona have been generally attributed to this period,
but it is probable that they were composed earlier, and their
treatment of the subject of Christ's life and death is more in-
tellectual and theological than spiritual and poetical. It is when
the tone becomes personal, as in the Holy Sonnets^ when he is
alone with his own soul in the prospect of death and the Judge-
ment, that Donne's religious poetry acquires something of the
same unique character as his love songs and elegies by a similar
combination of qualities, intensity of feeling, subtle turns oi
thought, and occasional Miltonic splendour of phrase. Here
again we meet the magnificent openings of the Songs and
Sojiets : —

The Poetry of Don?2e, liii

This is my playes last scene ; here heavens appoint
My pilgrimages last mile ; and my race
Idly yet quickly run hath this last space,
My spans last inch, my minutes latest point ;

or,

At the round earths imagin'd quarters blow
Your trumpets. Angels, and arise, arise
From death you numberlesse infinities
Of soules, and to your scatter 'd bodies go :

and again —

What if this present were the worlds last night !

Marke in my heart, O Soule, where thou dost dwell,

The picture of Christ crucified, and tell

Whether that countenance can thee affright,

Teares in his eyes quench the amazing light.

Blood fills his frownes, which from his pierc'd head fell.

This passionate penitence, this beating as it were against
the bars of self in the desire to break through to a fuller
apprehension of the mercy and love of God, is the intensely
human note of these latest poems. Nothing came easily to his
soul that knew so well how to be subtle to plague itself. The
vision of divine wrath he can conjure up more easily than the
beatific vision of the love that ' moves the sun in heaven and all
the stars '. Nevertheless it was that vision which Donne sought.
He could never have been content with Milton's heaven of
majesty and awe divorced from the quickening spirit of love.
And there are moments when he comes as close to that
beatific vision as perhaps a self tormenting mind involved in
the web of seventeenth-century theology ever could, — at
moments love and ecstasy gain the upper hand of fear and
penitence. But it is in the sermons that he reaches these
highest levels. There is nothing in the florid eloquence of
Jeremy Taylor that can equal the splendour of occasional
passages in Donne's sermons, when the lava-like flow of his
heated reasoning seems suddenly to burst and flower in such
a splendid incandescence of mystical rapture as this : —

' Death and hfe are in the power of the tongue, says Solomon,

liv l7itroditctio7r.

in another sense : and in this sense too, If my tonoue, suggested
l^y my heart, and by my heart rooted in faith, can say, uoii
vioriar. jioii inoriar-. If I can say (and my conscience do not
tell me that I belie mine own state) if I can say, That the blood
of the Saviour runs in my veins. That the breath of his spirit
quickens all my purposes, that all my deaths have their
Resurrection, all my sins their remorses, all my rebellions their
reconciliations, I will hearken no more after this question as it
is intended de morie 7iaturaH^ of a natural death ; I know I
must die that death ; what care I ? nor de morfe spi7''itnali\
the death of sin, I know I doe, and shall die so ; why despair
I ? but I will find out another death, '}no7'-tein rap/its, a death
of rapture and of extasy, that death which St. Paul died more
than once, the death which St. Gregory speaks of, divma
coiiteniplatio q7wddain sep7ilchrti77i a7ii77tae^ the contempla-
tion of God and heaven is a kind of burial and sepulchre and
rest of the soul ; and in this death of rapture and extasy, in
this death of the Contemplation of my interest in my Saviour,
I shall find myself and all my sins enterred, and entombed in
his wounds, and like a Lily in Paradise, out of red earth, I
shall see my soul rise out of his blade, in a candor, and in an
innocence, contracted there, acceptable in the sight of his
Father.'

This is the highest level that Donne ever reached in eloquence
inspired by the vision of the joy and not the terror of the
Christian faith, higher than anything in the Seco7id A 7i7iive7'-
sa7y, but in his last hymns hope and confidence find a simpler
and a tenderer note. The noble hymn, ' In what torn ship so
ever I embark,' is in somewhat the same anguished tone as the
Ho/y So7i7iets ; but the highly characteristic

Since I am coming to that Holy roome,
Where with thy Quire of Saints for evermore,
I shall be made thy Musique ;

and the Hy77i7i to God the Father^ speak of final faith and hope
in tones which recall — recall also by their sea-coloured imager)^
and by their rhythm — the lines in which another sensitive and
tormented poet-soul contemplated the last voyage :

I have a sinne of feare, that when I have spunne
My last thred, I shall perish on the shore ;

The Poetry of Do7j7je.

Swear by thy self that at my death thy sunnc
Shall shine as he shines now and heretofore :

And having done that, Thou hast done,
I feare no more.

Beside the passion of these lines even Tennyson's grow a little
pale :

Twilight and evening bell

And after that the dark ;
And may there be no sadness of farewell

When I embark :
For though from out our bourne of Time and Place

The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face

When I have crost the bar.

It has not been the aim of the present editor to attempt
to pronounce a final judgement upon Donne. It seems to
him idle to compare Donne's poetry with that of other poets
or to endeavour to fix its relative worth. Its faults are great
and manifest ; its beauties S7ct generis^ incommunicable and
incomparable. My endeavour here has been by an analysis
of some of the different elements in this composite work —
poems composed at different ♦ime<? and in different moods ;
flung together at the end so carelessly that youthful ex-
travagances of witty sensuality and pious aspirations jostle
each other cheek by jowl ; and presenting a texture so
diverse from that of poetry as we usually think of it — to
show how many are the strands which run through it, and
that one of these is a poetry, not perfect in form, rugged
of line and careless in rhyme, a poetry in which intellect
and feeling are seldom or never perfectly fused in a work
that is of imagination all compact, yet a poetry of an ex-
traordinarily arresting and haunting quality, passionate,
thoughtful, and with a deep melody of its own.

II

THE TEXT AND CANON OF
DONNE'S POEMS

TEXT

Both the text and the canon of Donne's poems present
problems which have never been frankly faced by any of his
editors — problems which, considering the greatness of hie
reputation in the seventeenth century, and the very con-
siderable revival of his reputation which began with Coleridge
and De Quincey and has advanced uninterruptedly since, are
of a rather surprising character. An attempt to define and,
as far as may be, to solve these problems will begin most
simply with a brief account of the form in which Donne's
poems have come down to us.

Three of Donne's poems were printed in his lifetime — the
Anniversaries (i.e. The An atomy of the World ^'xlh. A Fiinerall
Elegie and The Progresse ofiJie Soule) in i6i i and 1612, with
later editions in 1621 and 1625 ; the Elegie upon the untimely
deatk^/ths incomparable Prince Henry ,\nSy\\est&r''sLachry-
mae Lachrymarnm^ 1613 ; and the lines prefixed to Coryats
Crudities in 161 1. We know nothing of any other poem by
Donne being printed prior to 1633. It is noteworthy, as
Mr. Gosse has pointed out, that none: oi i\\Q Miscellanies 'wh.ich.
appeared towards the end of the sixteenth century, as Englands
Parnassus^ (1600), or at the beginning of the seventeenth
century, as Davison's Poetical Rhapsody^ contained poems

' Englands Parnassus J or The Choysest Flcnvers of our Moderne Poets:
with their Poetical Comparisons. Descriptions of Be^vties, Personages,
Castles, Pallaces, Mountaines, Groves, Seas, Springs, Rivers etc. Wliere-
U7ito are annexed Other Various Discourses both Pleasaunt and Profitable.
Imprinted at London, For N. L. C. B. And T. H. 1600.

^ A Poetical Rhapsody Containing, Diuerse Somiets, Odes, Elegies,

Madrigalls, a?id other Poesies, both in Rime and Measured Verse. Never

yet published. &c. 1602. The work was republished in 1608, 161 1, and

1621. It was reprinted by Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges in 1814, by

Sir Harris Nicolas in 1826, and by A. H. Bullen in 1890.

Englands Helicon, printed in 1600, is a collection of songs almost without

Text of Do7ines Poems, Ivii

by Donne. The first of these is a collection of witty and
elegant passages from different authors on various general
themes (Dissimulation, Faith, Learning, &c.) and is just the
kind of book for which Donne's poems would have been
made abundant use of at a somewhat later period. There are
in our libraries manuscript collections of ' Donne's choicest
conceits ', and extracts long or short from his poems, dating
from the second quarter of the seventeenth century.' The
editor of the second of the anthologies mentioned, Francis
Davison, became later much interested in Donne's poems.
In notes which he made at some date after 1608, we find
him inquiring for ' Satyres, Elegies, Epigrams etc., by John
Don ', and querying whether they might be obtained ' from
Eleaz. Hodgson and Ben Johnson '. Among the books
again which he has lent to his brother at a later date are
'John Duns Satyres '. This interest on the part of Davison in
Donne's poems makes it seem to me very unlikely that if he
had known them earlier he would not have included some of
them in his Rhapsody, or that if he had done so he would not
have told us. It has been the custom of late to assign to
Donne the authorship of one charming lyric in the Rhapsody^
' Absence hear thou my protestation.' I hope to show else-
where that this is the work, not of Donne, but of another
young wit of the day, John Hoskins, whose few extant poems
are a not uninteresting link between the manner of Sidney
and the Elizabethans and of Donne and the ' Metaphysicals '.

The first collected edition of Donne's poems was issued in
1633, two years after his death. This is a small quarto, the
title-page of which is here reproduced.

exception in pastoral guise. The Eclogue introducing the Somerset
Epithalamion is Donne's only experiment in this favourite convention.
Donne's friend Christopher Brooke contributed an Epithalamion to this
collection, but not until 161 4. It is remarkable that Donne's poem The
Baite did not find its way into Englands Helicon which contains Marlowe's
song and two variants on the theme. In 1600 Eleazar Edgar obtained a
licence to publish Afnottrs by J. D. with Certen Oyr. (i.e. other) sonnetes
by W. S. Were Donne and Shakespeare to have appeared together ?
The volume does not seem to have been issued.

' e. g. Among Drummond of Hawthornden's miscellaneous papers; in
Harleian MS. 3991 ; in a manuscript in Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

1 vi i i I?}t7^odtlCti07l .

POEMS,

By J. D.
WITH

ELEGIES

ON THE AUTHORS

DEATH.

LONDON.

Printed by M. F. for I o h n M a r r i o t,

and are to be fold at his (hop in S' "Dunflam

Church-yard in Fleetfireet. 1633.

T^cxt of Donne s Poems. Hx

The first eight pa^-es (vSheet A) are numbered, and contain
(i) The Printey to the Unders/aiidcrs} (2) the Hexasfichon
Bibliopolae^ (3) the dedication of, and introductory epistle to,
The Progresse of the Soitle, with which poem the volume
opens. The poems themselves, with some prose letters and
the Elegies npoii the Author^ fill pages 1-406. The
numbers on some of the pages are misprinted. The order of
the poems is generally chaotic, but in batches the poems
follow the order preserved in the later editions. Of the signi-
ficance of this, and of the source and character of this edition,
I shall speak later. As regards text and canon it is the most
trustworthy of all the old editions. The publisher, John
Marriot, was a well-known bookseller at the sign of the Flower
de Luce, and issued the poems of Breton, Drayton, Massinger,
Quarles, and Wither. The printer was probably Miles Fletcher,
or Flesher, a printer of considerable importance in Little Britain
from i6n to 1664. It would almost seem, from the heading
of the introductory letter, that the printer was more responsible
for the issue than the bookseller Marriot, and it is perhaps
noteworthy that when in 1650 the younger Donne succeeded
in getting the publication of the poems into his own hand,
John Marriot 's name remained on the title-page (1650) as
publisher, but the printer's initials disappeared, and his
prefatory letter made way for a dedication by the younger
Donne. (See page 4.) It should be added that copies of the
1633 edition dififer considerably from one another. In some
a portrait has been inserted. Occasionally The Printer to the
Understanders is omitted, the Iiifinitati Sacrum &c. follow-
ing immediately on the title-page. In some poems, notably
The Progresse of the So7i/e, and certain of the Letters to
noble ladies, the text underwent considerable alteration as
the volume passed through the press. Some copies are more
correct than others. A few of the errors of the 1635 edition

* So on the first page, and the opening sentences of the letter defend
the use of the word ' Understanders'. Nevertheless the second and third
pages have the heading, running across from one to the other, ' The Printer
to the Reader.'

Ix Introduction,

are traceable to the use by the printer of a comparatively
imperfect copy of the 1633 edition.

The Poems by J. D. with Elegies on the AMihors Death
were reprinted by M. F. for John Marriot in 1635 (the
title-page is here reproduced), but with very considerable

POEMS,

By J. D.
WITH

ELEGIES

ON

THE AUTHORS

DEATH.

L 0 ND ON

Printed by £M. F. for John Marriot,

and are to be fold at his Shop in S* Dunfiani
Church-yard in Fleet-jireet.

I 6 i s.

Text of Donne s Poems, Ixi

alterations. The introductory material remained unchanged
except that to the Hexastichon Bibltopolae was added
a Hexastichon ad Bibliopolafn. Incerii. (See p. 3.) To
the title-page was prefixed a portrait in an oval frame. Outside
the frame is engraved, to the left top, ANNO DNI. 1591. ^TATIS
SViE. 18.; to the right top, on a band ending in a coat of
arms, ANTES MVRRTO que mvuado. Underneath the engraved
portrait and background is the following poem :

This was for youth, Strength^ Mirth, and wit that Time
Most count their golden Age ; but t'was not thine.
Thine was thy later yeares, so much rejind
From youths Drosse, Mirth, & wit; as thy pure mind
Thought (like the Angels) nothing but the Praise
Of thy Creator y in those last, best Dayes.

Witnes this Booke, (thy Embleme) which begins
With Love ; but endes, with Sighes, & Tear es for sins.

IZ: WA:
fVill: Marshall sculpsity

The Printer to the Understanders is still followed
immediately by the dedication, Infiniiati Sacrum., of The
Progresse of the vSc?//^, although the poem itself is removed to
another part of the volume. The printer noticed this mistake,
and at the end of the Elegies upon the Author adds this note :

Errata?-

Cvrtcous Reader, know, that that Epistle intituled, In-
fitiitati Sacru7n, 16, of August, 1601. which is printed in

* ' Will : Marshall sculpsit ' implies that Marshall executed the plate
from which the whole frontispiece is taken, including portrait and poem,
not that he is responsible for the portrait itself. To judge from its shape
the latter would seem to have been made originally from a medallion.
Marshall, the Dictionary of National Biography says, 'floruit c. 1630,'
so could have hardly executed a portrait of Donne in 1591. Mr. Laurence
Binyon, of the Print Department of the British Museum, thinks that the
original may have been by Nicholas Hilyard (see II. p. 134) whom Donne
commends in The Storme. The Spanish motto suggests that Donne had
already travelled.

The portrait does not form part of the preliminary matter, which con-
sists of twelve pages exclusive of the portrait. It was an insertion and is
not found in all the extant copies. The paper on which it is printed is
a trifle smaller than the rest of the book.

* One or two copies seem to have got into circulation without the

Ixii hitro(luctio7i.

the begi}ini)i(!;ofthe Booke, is misplaced; it should have beene
priiifed before the Progresse of the Soule, ifi Page 301.
before which it was ivritten by the A nthor ; if any other in
the Impression doe fall out, zvhich I know not of hold me
excused for I have endeavoured thy satisfaction.

Thine, I. M.

The closinir lines of Walton's poem show that it must have
been written for this edition, as they refer to what is the chief
feature in the new issue of the poems (pp. 1-388, including
some prose letters in Latin and English, pp. 275-300, but not
including the Elegies upon the Author which in this edition
and those of 1639, 1649, 1650, and 1654 are added in un-
numbered pages). This new feature is their arrangement in
a series of groups : ^ —

Errata. One such, identical in other respects with the ordinary issue,
is preserved in the library of Mr. Beverley Chew, New York. I am
indebted for this information to Mr. Crcoftrey Keynes, of St. Bartholomew's
Hospital, who is preparing a detailed bibliography of Donne's works.

^ Some such arrangement may have been intended by Donne himself
when he contemplated issuing his poems in 1614, for he speaks, in a letter
to Sir Henry Goodyere (see II. pp. 144-5), of including a letter inverse to
the Countess of Bedford ' amongst the rest to persons of that rank'. The
manuscripts, especially the later and more ambitious, e.g. Stephens and
C Flaherty, show similar groupings ; and in /(5?j, though there is no con-
sistent sequence, the poems fall into irregularly recurring groups. The
order of the poems within each of these groups in 1633 is generally retained
in 1633. In the 1635 arrangement there were occasional errors in the
placing of individual poems, especially Elegies, owing to the use of that
name both for love poems and for funeral elegies or epicedes. These
were sometimes corrected in later editions.

Modern editors have dealt rather arbitrarily and variously with the old
classification. Grosart shifted the poems about according to his own whims
in a quite inexplicable fashion. The Grolier Club edition preserves the
groups and their original order (except that the Epigrams and Progresse
of the Soule follow the Satyres), but corrects some of the errors in placing,
and assigns to their relevant groups the poems added in 16,50. Chambers
makes similar corrections and replacings, but he further rearranges the
groups. In his first volume he brings together— possibly because of their
special interest — the Sotit^s and Sonets, Epithalamions, Elegies, and
DiTifte Poems, keeping for his second volume the Letters to Severall
Personages, Funerall Elegies, Progresse of the Soul, Satyres, and Epigrams.
There is this to be said for the old arrangement, that it does, as Walton
indicated, correspond generally to the order in which the poems were
written, to the succession of mood and experience in Donne's life. In the
present edition this original order has been preserved with these modi-
fications : (I) In the Songs and Sonets, The F'lea has been restored to the
place which it occupied in 1633 ; (2) the rearrangement of the misplaced
Elegies by modern editors has been accepted; (3) their distribution of the

Text of Donates Poems. Ixiii

Songs and Sonets.

Epigrams.

Elegies.

Epithalamions, or^ Marriage vSongs.

Satyres.

Letters to Severall Personages.

Funerall Elegies, (including Ati Anatontie of the
World with A Fimerall Elegie, Of the Progresse oj
the Soiile^ and Epicedes and Obsequies vpon the
deaths of sundry Personages)
(Letters in Prose).'
The Progresse of the Soule.
Divine Poems.
While the poems were thus rearranged, the canon also
underwent some alteration. One poem, viz. Basse's Epitaph
on Shakespeare (' Renowned Chaucer lie a thought more nigh
To rare Beaumont '), which had found its way into i6}^^ was
dropped ; but quite a number were added, twenty-eight, or
twenty-nine if the epitaph Oti Hvnselfe be reckoned (as it
appears) twice. Professor Norton, in the bibliographical note
in the Grolier Club edition (which I occasionally call Grolier
for convenience), has inadvertently given the Elegie on the
L. C. as one of the poems first printed in i6)^. This is an
error. The poem was included in i6}} as the sixth in

few poems added in 1650 (in two sheets bound up with the body of the
work) has also been accepted, but I have placed the poem On Mr. Thomas
Coryats Criidiiies after the Satyres ; (4) two new groups have been in-
serted, Heroical Epistles and Epitaphs. It was absurd to class Sappho
to Philaenis with the Letters to Severall Personages. At the same time
it is not exactly an Elegy. There is a slight difference again between the
Funerall Elegy and the Epitaph^ though the latter term is sometimes
loosely used. Ben Jonson speaks of Donne's Epitaph on Prince Henry.
(5) The Letter, to E. of D. ivith six holy Sonnets has been placed before
the Divine Poems. (6) The Hymne to the Saints, and to Marquesse
Haniylton has been transferred to the Epicedes. (7) Some poems have
been assigned to an Appendix as doubtful.

' The edition of 1633 contained one Latin, and seven English, letters
to Sir Henry Goodyere, with one letter to the Countess of Bedford,
a copy of which had been sent to Goodyere. To these were added in /djj
a letter in Latin verse, De libra cum mutuarctur (see p. 397), and four
prose letters in English, one To the La. G. written from Amyens in February,
1611-2, and three To my honour" d friend G. G. Esquier, the first dated
April 14, 1612, the two last November 2, 1630, and January 7, 1630.

Ixiv Introduction.

a group of Elegies^ the rest of which are love poems. The
editor of i6}^ merely transferred it to its proper place among
the Funer all Elegies, yx's.x. as modern editors have transferred
the Elegie on his Mistris (' By our first strange and fatall
interview ') from the funeral to the love Elegies.

The authenticity of the poems added in i6)^ will be fully
discussed later. The conclusion of the present editor is that
of the English poems fifteen are certainly Donne's ; three or
four are probably or possibly his ; the remaining eleven arc
pretty certainly not by Donne. There is no reason to think that
i6}^ is in any way a more authoritative edition than i6)).
It has fewer signs of competent editing of the text, and it
begins the process of sweeping in poems from every quarter,
which was continued by Waldron, Simeon, and Grosart.

The third edition of Donne's poems appeared in 1639.
This is identical in form, contents, and paging with that of 1635.
The dedication and introduction to The Progresse of the
Soule are removed to their right place and the Errata
dropped, and there are a considerable number of minor altera-
tions of the text.

In the issuing of all these editions of Donne's poems, the
3'^ounger Donne, who seems to have claimed the right to benefit
by his father's literary remains, had apparently no part.^ What

* In the copy of the 1633 edition belonging to the Library of Christ
Church, Oxford, which has been used for the present edition, and bears
the name 'Garrard att his quarters in .^ermyte' {perhaps Donne's friend
George Garrard or Gerrard : see Gosse : Life and Letters Qr'c. i. 285), are
some lines, signed J. V., which seem to imply that the writer had some
hand in the publication of the poems ; but the reference may be simply
to his gift :

An early oflfer of him to yo"" sight

Was the best way to doe the Author Hght

My thoughts could fall on ; •w'^^ his soule w'''* knew

The weight of a iust Prayse will think't a true.

Our commendation is suspected, when

Wee Elegyes compose on sleeping men,

The Manners of the Age prevayling so

That not our conscience wee, but witts doe shyw.

And 'tis an often gladnes, that men dye

Of unmatch'd names to write more easyly.

Such my religion is of him ; I hold

It iniury to have his merrit tould;

Text of D 071726 s Poe77ts. Ixv

POEMS,

Sj J. D.
WITH

ELEGIES

ON

THE AUTHORS

DEATH.

1^ -^l^

LO ND 0 iV,
Printed by A/. F. for John Marriot,

and arc to be fold at his Shop in S' Duvjtans
Church-yard in Fleet-jireet.

I <5 3 9.

II 917 3

Ixvi hitj'odicctioii.

assistance, if any, the printer and publisher had from others of
Donne's friends and executors it is impossible now to say,
though one can hardly imagine that without some assistance
they could have got access to so many poems or been allowed
to publish the elegies on his death, some of which refer to the
publication of the poems' Walton, as we have seen, wrote
verses to be prefixed to the second edition. At any rate in
1637 the younger John Donne made an efifort to arrest
the unauthorized issue of his father's works. Dr. Grosart first
printed in his edition of the poems {Fuller Worthies' Library^
1873, ii, p. Hi) the following petition and response preserved
in the Record Office :

To y* most Reverende Father in God

\\'illiam Lorde Arch-Bisshop of

Canterburie Primate, and

jMetropolitan of all Eng-

lande his Grace.

The humble petition of John Donne, Clercke.

Doth show unto your Grace that since y® death of his Father

(latly Deane of Pauls) there hath bene manie scandalous

Pamflets printed, and published, under his name, which were

Who (like the Sunn) is righted best when wee

Doe not dispute but shew his quality.

Since all the speech of light is less than it.

An eye to that is still the best of witt.

And nothing can express, for truth or haste

So happily, a sweetnes as our taste.

■\\ch thought at once instructed me in this

Safe way to prayse him, and yo' hands to kisse.

Affectionately y"
J.V.

tu longe sequere et vestigia
semper adora

Vaughani

The name at the foot of the Latin line, scribbled at the bottom of the
page, seems to identify J. V. with a Vaughan, probably John Vaughan
(1603-74) who was a Christ Church man. In 1630 {D.N.B.) he was
a barrister at the Inner Temple, and a friend of Selden. He took an
active part in politics later, and in 1668 was created Sir John Vaughan
and appointed Chief Justice of the Common Pleas.

' I am inclined to believe that Henry King, the poet, and later Bishop
of Chichester, assisted the printer. The 1633 edition bears more evidence
of competent editing by one who knew and understood Donne's poems
than any later edition. See p. 255.

Text of Donne s Poems, Ixvii

none of his, by severall Boocksellers, vvithoute anie leave or
Autoritie ; in particuler one entitoled Juvenilia, printed for
Henry Scale ; another by John Marriott and William Sheares,
entitoled Ignatius his Conclave, as allsoe certaine Poems by
y* sayde John Marriote, of which abuses thay have bene often
warned by your Pe*'' and tolde that if thay desisted not,
thay should be proceeded against beefore your Grace, which
thay seeme soe much to slight, that thay profess soddainly to
publish new impressions, verie much to the greife of your
Pe*"" and the discredite of y® memorie of his Father.

Wherefore your Pe*"^ doth beeseece your Grace that you
would bee pleased by your Commaunde, to stopp their farther
proceedinge herein, and to cale the forenamed boocksellers
beefore you, to giue an account, for what thay haue allreadie
done ; and your Pe"" shall pray, &c.

I require y® Partyes whom this Pe* concernes, not to
meddle any farther w**^ y^ Printing or Selling of any y®
pretended workes of y^ late Deane of St. Paules, saue onely
such as shall be licensed by publicke authority, and approued
by the Peticon^', as they will answere y® contrary at theyr
perill. And of this I desire Mr. Deane of y® Arches to take
care.

Dec: 1 6, 1637. W. Cant.

Despite this injunction the edition of 1639 was issued, as the
previous ones had been, by Marriot and M. F. It was not till
ten years later that the younger Donne succeeded in establish-
ing his claim. In 1649 Marriot prepared a new edition,
printed as before by M. F. The introductory matter remained
unchanged except that the printing being more condensed it
occupies three pages instead of five ; the use of Roman and
Italic type is exactly reversed ; and there are some slight
changes of spelling. The printing of the poems is also more
condensed, so that they occupy pp. 1-368 instead of 1-388 in
i6)j-}g. The text underwent some generally unimportant
alteration or corruption, and two poems were added, the lines
Upojt Mr. Thomas Coryats Crudities (p. 172. It had been
printed with Coryats Crudities in 161 1) and the short poem
called So7inet. The Token (p. 'j2).

Only a very few copies of this edition were issued. W. C.
Hazlitt describes one in his Bibliographical Collections, &~c.^

e 2

Ixviii I?itroductio?2.

Second Series (1882), p. 181. The only copy of whose
existence I am aware is in the Library of Harvard College.
It was used by Professor Norton in preparing the Grolier
Club edition, and I owe my knowledge of it to this and to a
careful description made for me by Miss Mary H. Buckingham.
The title-page is here reproduced.

POEMS

'By J. D.
WITH

ELEGIES

O N

THE AUTHORS

DEATH.

LONDON
Printed by iV/. F. for John Marriot,

and are to be fold at his tliop in St Dunfians

Church-yard in Fleet-Jireel.

1 <S 4 5).

Text of Do7jnes Poems, Ixix

What happened seems to have been this. The younger
Donne intervened before the edition was issued, and either by-
authority or agreement took it ov^er. Marriot remained the
publisher. The title-page which in 164^ was identical with
that of i6)y-}g^ except for the change of date and the ' W '
in ' WITH ', now appeared as follows :

POEMS'

By J. D.

WITH

ELEGIES

ON THE

AUTHORS DEATH.

TO WHICH

Is added dfpers Copies under his o'Von hand

ne'^er before in print.

LONDON,
Printed for John Marriot^ and are

to be fold by Richard Marriot at his (liop

by doancery lane end over againft the Inner

Temple gate, i 5 5 o.

Ixx Inti^oduction,

The initials of the printer, M. F., disappear, and the name of
John Marriot's son, partner, and successor, Richard, appears
along with his own. There is no great distance between
St. Dunstan's Churchyard and the end of Chancery Lane.
With M, F. went the introductory Printer to the Uitder-
standers^ its place being taken by a dedicatory letter in young
Donne's most courtly style to William, Lord Craven, Baron of
Hamsted-Marsham.

In the body of the volume as prepared in 1649 no alteration
was made. The ' divers Copies . . . never before in print ', of
which the new editor boasts, were inserted in a couple of
sheets (or a sheet and a half, aa, bb incomplete) at the end.
These are variously bound up in different copies, being some-
times before, sometimes at the end of the Elegies upon the
Author^ sometimes before and among them. They contain
a quite miscellaneous assortment of writings, verse and prose,
Latin and English, by, or presumably by, Donne, with a few com-
plimentary verses on Donne taken from Jonson's Epigrams.

The text of Donne's own writings is carelessly printed. In
short, Donne's son did nothing to fix either the text or the
canon of his father's poems. The former, as it stands in the
body of the volume in the editions of 1650-54, he took over
from Marriot and M. F. As regards the latter, he speaks of
the ' kindnesse of the Printer, . . . adding something too much,
lest any spark of this sacred fire might perish undiscerned ' ;
but he does not condescend to tell us, if he knew, what these
unauthentic poems are. He withdrew nothing.

In 1654 the poems were published once more, but printed
from the same types as in 1650. The text of the poems
(pp. 1-368) is identical in /^^p, /<5fo, i6j4 ; of the additional
matter (pp. 369-392) in i6yo^ ^^54- The only change made
in the last is on the title-page, where a new publisher's name
appears,^ as in the following facsimile :

' Professor Norton (Grolier Club edition, i, p. xxxviii) states that the
Epistle Dedicatory and the Epigram by Jonson are omitted in this edition.
This is an error, perhaps due to the two pages having been torn out of or
omitted in the copy he consulted. They are in the Christ Church, Oxford,
copy which I have used.

Text of Donne s Poems, Ixxi

POEMS'

•B, J. D.

WITH

ELEGIES

ONTHE

AUTHORS DEATH.

TOWHICH

Is added dhers Copies under his o'Von hand
nelper before in 'Print.

LONDON,

Printed by J. Flejher^ and are to be fold

by John Svpeetiugy at the Angel in

Popeshead- Alley. \ 6 ^ \.

James Flesher was the son of Miles Flesher, or Fletcher, who
is probably the M. F. of the earlier editions. John Sweeting
was an active bookseller and publisher, first at the Crown in
Cornhill, and subsequently at the Angel as above (1639 - 1661).
He was the publisher of many plays and poems, and in 1657
the publication of Donne's Letters to Severall Persons of
Honour was transferred to him from Richard Mar riot, who
issued them in 1651.

Ixxii hitj'oductioii.

POEMS, &c

BY

T O H N DONNE,

late Dean of St. Pauls.
WITH

ELEGIES

ON THE

AUTHORS DEATH.

To which is added

[Divers Copies under his o'^n hand^

iI5e\)ert)cfoK0?itxteti.

In the SA VO T,

Printed 1)V T. N. for Henry Herrhigman , at the ligll of

the Anchor^ in the Jower-walk of the

NcTp-Exchiinge. l66^.

Text of Do?ines Poems. Ixxiii

The last edition of Donne's poems which bears evidence of
recourse to manuscript sources, and which enlarged the canon
of the poems, was that of 1669. The younger Donne died in
1662, and this edition was purely a printer's venture. Its
title-page runs as opposite.

This edition added two elegies which a sense of proprietv had
hitherto excluded from Donne's printed works, though they
are in almost all the manuscript collections, and a satire which
most of the manuscripts assign not to Donne but to Sir John
Roe. The introductory material remains as in i6jo-j^ and
unpaged ; but the Elegies to the Author are now paged, and
the poems with the prose letters inserted in 16)} and added to
in 16}^ (see above, p. Ixiii, note), the Elegies to the A Jithor, and
the additional sheets inserted in i6jO, occupy pp. 1-414. The
love Elegies were numbered as in earlier editions, but the
titles which some had borne were all dropped. Elegie XII II
(XII in this edition) was enlarged. Two new Elegies were
added, one {Loves Progress) as Elegie X VIII, the second
[Going to Bed) unnumbered and simply headed To his
Mistress going to bed. The text of the poems underwent
considerable alteration, some of the changes showing a
reversion to the text of 16^), others a reference to manuscript
sources, many editorial conjecture.

The edition of 1669 is the last edition of Donne's poems
which can be regarded as in any degree an authority for the
text of the poems, because it is the last which affords evidence
of access to independent manuscript sources. All subsequent
editions, till we come to those of Grosart and Chambers, were
based on these. If the editor preferred one reading to another
it was on purely internal evidence, a result of his own decision
as to which was the more correct or the preferable reading.
In 1 7 1 9, for example, a new edition was brought out by the well-
known publisher Jacob Tonson. The title-page runs as over.

Ixxiv Introduction.

POEMS

ON SEVERAL

OCCASIONS.

Written by the Reverend

JOHN DONNE, D.D.

Late Dean of St. Paul's.

WITH

Elegies on the Author's Death.

To this Edition is added,

Some Account of the Life
of the Author.

LONDON:

Printed for J. Ton son, and Sold by

W. Taylor at the Ship in

Pater -noJler'-Rovj, 1 7 1 9.

This edition opens with the Epistle Dedicatory as in iSfo-Sg,
which is followed by an abridgement of Walton's Ltyie of Donne.
An examination of the text of the poems shows clearly that
this edition was printed from that of 1669, but is by no means
a slavish reproduction. The editor has consulted earlier

Text of Donne s Poems. Ixxv

editions and corrected mistakes, but I have found no evidence
either that he knew the editions of 1633 and 1635, or had access
to manuscript collections. He very wisely dropped the Satire
' Sleep next Society ', inserted for the first time by the editor
of 7669, and certainly not by Donne. It was reinserted by
Chalmers in 1810.^

These, then, are the early editions of Donne's poems. But
the printed editions are not the only form in which the poems,
or the great majority of the poems, have come down to us.
None of these editions, we have seen, was issued before the
poet's death. None, so far as we can discover (I shall
discuss this point more fully later), was printed from sources
carefully prepared for the press by the author, as were for
example the LXXX Sermons issued in 1640. But Donne's
poems were well known to many readers before 1633. One
of the earliest published references to them occurs in 1614, in

• In 1779 Donne's poems were included in Bell's Poets of Great Britain.
The poems were grouped in an eccentric fashion and the text is a reprint
of 1719. In 1793 Donne's poems were reissued in a Complete Edition of
the Poets of Great Britain^ published by Arthur Arch, London, and Bell
and Bradfute, Edinburgh, under the editorship of Robert Anderson. The
text and arrangement of the poems show that this is a reprint of Bell's
edition. The same is true of the text, so far as I have checked it, in
Chalmers's English Poets, vol. v, 1810. But in the arrangement of the
poems the editor has recurred to the edition of 1669, and has reprinted
some poems from that source. Southey printed selections from Donne's
poems in his Select Works of the British Poets from Chaucer to Jonson
(1831). The text is that oi i66<). In 1839 Dean Alford included some of
Donne's poems in his very incomplete edition of the Works of Donne.
He printed these from a copy of the 1633 edition.

There were two American editions of the poems before the Grolier Club
edition. Donne's poems were included in The Works of the British Poets
-with Lives of their Authors, by Ezekiel Sanford, Philadelphia, 18 19. The
text is based on the edition of 1719. A complete and separate edition
was published at Boston in 1850. This has an eclectic text, but the editor
has relied principally on the editions after 1633. Variants are sparingly
and somewhat inaccurately recorded.

In 1802 F. G. Waldron printed in his Shakespeare Miscellany 'Two
Elegies of Dr. Donne not in any edition of his Works '. Of these, one,
* Loves War,' is by Donne. The other, ' Is Death so great a gamster,' is by
Lord Herbert of Cherbury. In 1856-7 Sir John Simeon printed in the
Miscellanies of the Philobiblon Society several * Unpublished Poems of
Donne '. Very few of them are at all probably poems of Donne.

Of Grosart's edition (1873), ^^ Grolier Club edition (1895), and
Chambers's edition (1896), a full account will be given later.

Ixxvi hitrodiictio7t,

a collection of Epigrams by Thomas Freeman, called Rtmne \
A nd a great Cast \ The Second Book.

Epigram 8^.

To lohn Dunne.

The Siornie describ'd hath set thy name afloate,
Thy Calme a gale of famous winde hath got :
Thy Satyres short, too soone we them o'relooke,
I prethee Persius write a bigger booke.

In 1616 Ben Jonson's ^^?^rtww^>y were published in the
first (folio) edition of his works, and they contain the Epigram,
printed in this edition, To Lucy., Cou7itesse of Bedford.,
zuith Mr. Donnes Satyres. In these and similar cases the
' bookes ' referred to are not printed but manuscript works.
Mr. Chambers has pointed out [Poems of f 0/172 Dowie., i, pp.
xxxviii-ix) an interesting reference in Drayton's Epistle to
Reynolds to poems circulating thus ' by transcription ' ; and
Anthony Wood speaks of Hoskins having left a 'book of poems
neatly written '. In Donne's own letters we find references to
his poems, his paradoxes and problems, and even a long treatise
like the BIAGANATO^, being sent to his friends with
injunctions of secrecy, and in the case of the last v/ith an
express statement that it had not been, and was not to be,
printed. Sometimes the manuscript collection seems to have
been made by Donne himself, or on his instruction, for
a special friend and patron like Lord Ancrum ; but after he
had become a distinguished Churchman who, as Jonson told
Drummond, ' repenteth highlie and seeketh to destroy all his
poems,' it was his friends and admirers who collected and
copied them. An instructive reference to the interest
awakened in Donne's early poems by his fame as a preacher
comes to us from Holland. Constantine Huyghens, the Dutch
poet, and father of the more famous scientist, Christian, was
a member of the Dutch embassy in 161 8, 1621-23, and again in
1624. He moved in the best circles, and made the acquaintance
of Donne (' great preacher and great conversationalist ', he calls

Text of Donne s Poems. Ixxvil

him) at the house probably of Sir Robert Killigrew. Writing
to his friend and fellow-poet Hooft, in 1630, he says : '

' I think I have often entertained you with reminiscences ot
Dr. Donne, now Dean of St. Pauls in London, and on account
of this remunerative post (such is the custom of the English)
held in high esteem, in still higher for the wealth of his
unequalled wit, and yet more incomparable eloquence in the
pulpit. Educated early at Court in the service of the great ;
experienced in the ways of the world ; sharpened by study ;
in poetry, he is more famous than anyone. Many rich fruits

* Huyghens sent some translations with the letter. He translated into
Dutch (retaining the original metres, except that Alexandrines are
substituted for decasyllabics) nineteen pieces in all. An examination of
these shows that the text he used was a manuscript one, the readings he
translates being in more than one instance those of the manuscript, as
opposed to the printed, tradition. In a note which he prefixed to the
translations when he published them many years later in his Korenbloevien
(1672) he states that Charles I, having heard of his intention to translate
Dr. Donne, ' declared he did not believe that anyone could acquit himself
of that task with credit ' — an interesting testimony to the admiration which
Charles felt for the poetry of Donne. A copy of the 1633 edition now in
the British Museum is said to have belonged to the King, and to bear the
marks of his interest in particular passages. Huyghens's comment on
Charles's criticism shows what it was in the English language which most
struck a foreigner speaking a tongue of a purer Germanic strain : ' I feel
sure that he would not have passed so absolute a sentence had he known
the richness of our language, a moderate command of which is sufficient
to enable one to render the thoughts of peoples of all countries with ease
and delight. From these I must, however, except the English ; for their
language is all languages ; and as it pleases them, Greek and Latin become
plain English. But since we do not thus admit foreign words it is easy to
understand in what difficulty we find ourselves when we have to express in
a pure German speech, Ecstasis, Aioi/n, Itifiuentiae, Legatum, Alloy,
and the like. Set these aside and the rest costs us no great effort.'

At the end of his life Huyghens wrote a poem of reminiscences,
Sermoties de Vita Propria^ in which he recalls the impression that Donne
had left upon his mind :

Voortreffelyk Donn, o deugdzaam leeraer, duld
Dat ik u bovenal, daar'k u bij voorkeur noeme,
Als godlijk Dichter en welsprekend Reednaer roeme,
Uit uwen gulden mond, 'tzij ge in een vriendenzaal
Of van den kansel spraakt, klonk louter godentaal,
Wier nektar ik zoo vaak met harte wellust proefde.

' Suffer me, all-surpassing Donne, virtuous teacher, to name you first
and above all ; and sing your fame as god-like poet and eloquent preacher.
From your golden mouth, whether in the chamber of a friend, or in the
pulpit, fell the speech of Gods, whose nectar I drank again and again with
heartfelt joy.'

Vondel did not share the enthusiasm of Huyghens and Hooft.

Ixxviii Introduction,

from the green branches of his wit^ have lain mellowing-
among the lovers of art, which now, when nearly rotten with
age^ they are distributing. Into my hands have fallen, by
the help of my special friends among the gentlemen of that
nation, some five and twenty of the best sort of medlars.
Among our people, I cannot select anyone to whom they
ought to be communicated sooner than to you,^ as this poets
manner of conceit and expression are exactly yours. Sir.'

This is a very interesting piece of evidence as to the manner
in which Donne's poems had been preserved by his friends, and
the form in which they were being distributed. There is no
reference to publication. It is doubtless due to this activity in
collecting and transcribing the poems of the now famous
preacher that we owe the number of manuscript collections
dating from the years before and immediately after 1630.

Had Donne undertaken the publication of his own poems,
such of these manuscript collections as have been preserved —
none of which are autograph, and few or none of which have
a now traceable history — would have little importance for
a modern editor. The most that they could do would be to
show us occasionally what changes a poem had undergone
between its earliest and its latest appearance. But Donne's
poems were not published in this way, and the manuscripts
cannot be ignored. They must have for his editor at least the
same interest and importance as the Quartos have for the
editor of Shakespeare. Whatever opinion he may hold, on
a priori or a posteriori grounds, regarding the superior

^ That is, many poems of his early years.

* Tot verschiedene reizen meen ik U. E. onderhouden te hebben met
de gedachtenisse van Doctor Donne, tegenwoordigh Deken van St Pauls
tot Londen, ende, door dit rijckelick beroep, volgens 't Engelsch gebruyck,
in hooghen ansien, in veel hooger door den rijckdom van sijn gadeloos
vernuft ende noch onvergelijckerer welsprekentheit op stoel. Eertijts ten
dienst van de grooten ten hove gevoedt, in de werelt gewortelt, in de
studien geslepen, in de dictkonst vermaerdt, meer als yemand. Van die
groene tacken hebben veel weelderige vruchten onder de liefhebbers leggen
meucken, diese nu bynaer verrot van ouderdom uytdeylen, my synde voor
den besten slag van mispelen ter hand geraeckt by halve vijf en twintig,
door toedoen van eenighe mijne besondere Heerenende vrienden van die
natie. Onder de onze hebb ick geene konnen uytkiesen, diese voor U. E.
behoorden medegedeelt te werden, slaende deze dichter ganschelijck op
U. E. manieren van invall ende uitspraeck.

Text of Donne s Poems, Ixxix

authority of the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays, no editor,
not ' thirled to ' a theory, will deny that a right reading has
been preserved for us often by the Quartos and the Quartos
only. No wise man will neglect the assistance even of the
more imperfect of them. Before therefore discussing the
relative value of the different editions, and the use that may
be made of the manuscripts, it will be well to give a short
description of the manuscripts which the present editor has
consulted and used, of their relation to one another, their
comparative value, and the relation of some of them to the
editions. It is, of course, possible that there are manuscripts
of Donne's poems which have not yet come to light ; and
among them may be some more correctly transcribed than
any which has come into the present editor's hands. He has,
however, examined between twenty and thirty, and with the
feeling recently of moving in a circle — that new manuscripts
were in part or whole duplicates of those which had been
already examined, and confirmed readings already noted but
did not suggest anything fresh.

I will divide the manuscripts into four classes, of which the
first two, it will be seen at a glance, are likely to be the most
important for the textual critic.

( 1 ) Manuscript collections of portions of Donne's poems, e. g.
the Saiyres. The ' booke ' to which Freeman refers in the
epigram quoted above was probably a small collection of this
kind, and we have seen that Jonson sent the Satyres to Lady
Bedford, and Francis Davison lent them to his brother. Of
such collections I have examined the following :

Q. This is a small quarto manuscript, bound up with a num-
ber of other manuscripts, in a volume (MS. 216) in the library
of Queen's College, Oxford. It is headed Mr. John Dunnes
Satires^ and contains the five vSatires (which alone I have
accepted as Donne's own) followed by A Stornte^ A Calme^
and one song. The Curse (see p. 41), here headed Dirae.
As Mr. Chambers says [Poems of John Donne^ i, p. xxxvi),
this is probably just the kind of booke ' which Freeman read.

Ixxx l7itrodiictio7i.

The poems it contains are probably those of Donne's poems
which were first known outside the circle of his intimate
friends.

What seems to be a duplicate of Q is preserved among the
Dyce MSS. in the South Kensington Museum. This contains
the five Satyres, and the Siorine and Caline. The MvSS. are
evidently transcribed from the same source, but one is not a
copy of the other. They agree in such exceptional readings
as e.g. Saiyres, I. 58 ' Infanta of London '; 94 'goes in the
way ' &c. ; II. 86 ' In wringing each acre ' ; 88 ' Assurances
as bigge as glossie civill lawes '. The last suggests that the
one is a copy of the other, but again they diverge in such
cases as III. 49 ' Grants ' Dyce MS. ; ' Crates ' Q ; and IV.
215-16 'a Topclief would have ravisht him quite away ' Q^
where the Dyce MS. preser\'es the normal ' a Pursevant would
have ravisht him quite away ',

If manuscripts like Q and the Dyce MS. carry us back, as
they seem to do, to the form in which the Satyres circulated
before any of the later collections of Donne's poems were
made (between 1620 and 1630), they are clearly of great
importance for the editor. The text of the Satyres in 16))
and the later editions, which closely resembles that of one of
the later MS. collections, presents many variants from the older
tradition. It is a difficult matter to decide how far these may
be the corrections of the author himself, or of the collector and
editor.

W. This, the Westmoreland MS., belonging to Mr. Edmund
Gosse, is one of the most interesting and valuable manuscripts of
Donne's poems which have come down to us. It is bound in
its original vellum, and was written, Mr. Warner, late Egerton
Librarian, British Museum, conjectured from the handwriting,
'a little later than 1625'. This date agrees with what one
would gather from the contents, for the manuscript contains
sonnets which must have been written after 1617, but does not
contain any of the hymns written just at the close of Donne's life.

^is a much larger ' book ' than Q. It begins with the fi\'e

Text of Do?iries Poems. Ixxxl

Satyr es^ as that does. Leaving- one page blank, it then
continues with a collection of the Elegies numbered, thirteen in
all, of which twelve are Love Elegies, and one, the last, a F'uneral
Elegy, ' Sorrow who to this house." ^ These are followed by
an Epithalaimou (that generally called ' made at Lincolns
Inn ') and a number of verse letters to different friends, some
of which are not contained in any of the old editions. So
many of them are addressed to Rowland Woodward, or
members of his family, that Mr. Gosse conjectures that the
manuscript was prepared for him, but this cannot be proved. -
The letters are followed by the Holy Sonnets, these by
La Corona^ and the book closes (as many collections of the
poems do) with a bundle of prose Paradoxes, followed in
this case by the Epigrams. Both the Holy Sonnets and the
Epigrams contain poems not printed in any of the old
editions.

It should be noted that though W as a whole may have
been transcribed as late as 1625, it clearly goes back in
portions to an earlier date. The letters are headed e. g. To
Mr. H, W., To Mr. C. R., &c. Now the custom in manuscripts

' This is not the only manuscript in which this poem appears among
the Elegies following immediately on that entitled The Pictn7e, ' Here
take my picture, though I bid farewell.' It is thus placed in /'5jj. The
adhesion of two poems in a number of otherwise distinct manuscripts may
mean, I think, that they were written about the same time.

"^ There are, however, grounds for the conjecture besides the contents.
The Westmoreland MS. was secured, Mr. Gosse writes me, when the
library of the Earls of Westmoreland was disposed of, about the year 1892.
' The interest of this library was that it had not been disturbed since the
early part of the seventeenth century.- With the Westmoreland MS. of
Donne's Poems was attached a very fine copy of Donne's Psetidomartyr,
which contained, in what was certainly Donne's handwriting, the words
" Ex dono authoris: Row: Woodward " and a motto in Spanish " De
juegos el mejor es con la hoja ■'. There can be no doubt, I think, that
these two books belonged to Rowland Woodward and were given him by
Donne.' But is it likely that after 161 7 Donne would give even to a friend
a manuscript containing the most reprehensible of his earlier Elegies and
the Epithalamion made at Lincolns Inn ? It seems to me more probable
that the manuscript contains two distinct collections, made at different
times. The one is a transcript from an early collection, quite probably
Woodward's, containing Satires, Elegies, and one ICpithalamion. To
this the Divine Poems have been added.

II 917.3 f

Ixxxii Introduction.

and editions is to bring these headings up to date, changing
' To Mr. H. W; into ' To S^ Henry Wotton '. That they bear
headings which were correct at the date when the poems were
written points to their fairly direct descent from the original
copies.

If Q probably represents the kind of manuscript which
circulated pretty widely, W is a good representative of the
kind which circulated only among Donne's friends. Some of
the poems escaped being transcribed into larger collections
and were not published till our own day. The value of JVfor
the text of Donne's poems must stand high. For some of the
letters and religious poems it is our sole authority. Though
a unique manuscript now, it was probably not so always, for
Addl. MS. 23229 in the British Museum contains a single
folio which must have been torn from a manuscript identical
with IV. The handwriting is slightly different, but the order
of the poems and their text prove the identity.

A^j. This same manuscript (Addl. MS. 23229), which Is
a very miscellaneous collection of fragments, presented to the
Museum by John Wilson Croker, contains two other portions
of what seem to have been similar small ' books ' of Donne's
poems. The one is a fragment of what seems to have been
a carefully written copy of the Epithala'mion^ with Introductory
Eclogue, written for the marriage of the Earl of Somerset.
Probably it was one of those prepared and circulated at the
time. The other consists of some leaves from a collection of
the Satyres finely written on large quarto sheets.

G. This is a manuscript containing only the Metempsychosis^
or Progresse of the Soiile, now in the possession of Mr. Gosse,
who {Life &c. of fohn Domie, I. 141) states that it 'belonged
to a certain Bradon, and passed into the Phlllipps Collection '.
It is not without errors, but Its text Is, on the whole, more
correct than that of the manuscript source from which the
version of 1633 was set up in the first instance.

(2) In the second class I place manuscripts which are, or

Text of Donne s Poems. Ixxxiii

aim at being, complete collections of Donne's poems. Most of
these belong to the years between 1620 and 1633, They vary
considerably in accuracy of text, and in the care which has
been taken to include only poems that are authentic. They
were made probably by professional copyists, and some of
those whose calligraphy is most attractive show that the scribe
must have paid the smallest attention to the meaning of what
he was writing.

Of those which I have examined, two groups of manuscripts
seem to me especially noteworthy, because both show that
their collectors had a clear idea of what were, and what were
not, Donne's poems, and because of the general accuracy with
which the poems in one of them are transcribed. Taken with
the edition of 1633 they form an invaluable starting-point for
the determination of the canon of Donne's poems.

The first of these is represented by three manuscripts which
I have examined, D (Dowden), H^() (Harleian MS. 4955), and
Lee (Leconfield).

Z? is a small quarto manuscript, neatly written in a thin, clear
hand and in ordinary script. It was formerly in the Hasle-
wood collection, and is now in the possession of Professor
Edward Dowden, Trinity College, Dublin, by whose kindness
I have had it by me almost all the time that I have been at
work on my edition.

H^() is a collection of Donne's poems, in the British Museum,
bound up with some by Ben Jonson and others. It is a large
folio written throughout apparently in the same hand. It
opens with some poems and masques by Jonson. A certain
Doctor Andrewes' poems occupy folios 57-87. They are
sxgn^d Frajtc: Andrz7/a. London Augiisi 14. i62<). Donne's
poems follow, filling folios 88 to 144^. Thereafter follow
more poems by Andrewes, Jonson, and others, with some prose
letters by Jonson.

Lee. This is a large quarto manuscript, beautifully tran-
scribed, belongnng to Lord Leconfield and preserved at

f 2

Ixxxiv Introduction.

Petworth House. Many of the manuscripts in this collection
were the property of Henry, ninth Earl of Northumberland
(1564- 1 63 2), the friend who communicated the news of
Donne's marriage to his father-in-law.

These three manuscripts are obviously derived from one
common source. They contain the same poems, except that
D has one more than H^g^and both of these have some which
are not in Lee. The order of the poems is the same, except
that D and Lee show more signs of an attempt to group the
poems than H4g. The text, with some divergences, especially
on the part of Lec^ is identical. One instance seems to point
to one of them being the source of the others. In the
long Obsequus to the Ld. Harrington., Brother to the
Countess of Bedford., the original copyist, after beginning
1. 159 'Vertue whose flood', had inadvertently finished with
the second half of 1. 161, 'were \sie\ blowne in, by thy first
breath.' This error is found in all the three manuscripts.
It may, however, have come from the common source of this
poem, and there are divergences in order and text which make
me think that they are thus derived from one common source.
A special interest attaches to this collection, apart from the
relative excellence of its text and soundness of its canon, from
the probability that a manuscript of this kind was used for
a large, and that textually the best, part of the edition of 1633.
This becomes manifest on a close examination of the order of
the poems and of their text. Mr. Gosse has said, in speaking
of the edition of 1633: 'The poems are thrown together
without any attempt at intelligent order ; neither date, nor
subject, nor relation is in the least regarded.' This is not
entirely the case. Satires, Elegies, Epigrams, Songs are
grouped to some extent. The disorder which prevails is due
to two causes: (i) to the fact that the printer set up from a
variety of sources. There was no previous collected edition
to guide him. Different friends supplied collections, and of
a few poems there were earlier editions. He seems to have
passed from one of these to another as was most convenient at

Text of Donne s Poems. Ixxxv

the moment. Perhaps some were lent him only for a time.
The differences between copies of 16)} show that it was
prepared carefully, but emended from time to time while the
printing was actually going on. (2) The second source of the
order of the poems is their order in the manuscripts from
which they were copied. Now a comparison of the order in
16}} with that in D, H^g^ Lee reveals a close connexion
between them, and throws light on the composition of i6jj.

It is necessary, before instituting this comparison with i6jj,
to say a word on the order of the poems in Z?, ^^9, Lee
themselves, as it is not quite the same in all three, //^g is the
most irregular, perhaps therefore the earliest, each of the others
showing efforts to obtain a better grouping of the poems.
All three begin with the Satyres^ of which D and Lee have
five, H^g only four ; but the text of Lee differs from that of
the other two, agreeing more closely with the version of
16}} and of another group of manuscripts. They have all,
then, thirteen Elegies in the same order. After these H^^g
continues with a number of letters [The Storme, The Calnte,
To S'' Henry Wotton, To 6"'' Henry Goodyere, To the
Cotmiesse of Bedford, To S^ Edward Herbert^ and others)
intermingled with Funeral Elegies {Lady Markhant, Mris
Boulsired) and religious poems ( The Crosse^ The Annuntia-
Hon, Good Friday). Then follows a long series of lyrical
pieces, broken after The Funerall by A Letter to the Lady
Carey, and Mrs. Essex Rieh, the Epithalamion on the Pala-
tine marriage, and an Old Letter (' At once from hence ', p. 206).
The lyrical pieces are then resumed, and the collection ends
with the Somerset Eelogue and Epithalamion, the Letanye,
both sets of Holy Sonnets, a letter {To the Cou7itesse of
Salisbury), and the long Obsequies to the Ld. Harrington.

D makes an effort to arrange the poems following the
Elegies in groups. The Funeral Elegies come first, and two
blank pages are headed Ati Elcgye on Prince Henry. The
letters are then brought together, and are followed by the
religious poems dispersed in H^g. The lyrical poems follow

Ixxxvi Introduction.

piece by piece as in H^t), and the whole closes with the two
epithalamia and the Obsequies io the Ld. Harrington.

The order in Lee resembles that of H^g more closely than
that of D. The mixed letters, funeral elegies, and religious
poems follow the Elegies as in H^g, but Lee adds to them the
two letters {Lady Carey and The Countess of Salisbury) and
the Letanie which in H^g are dispersed through the lyrical
pieces. Lee does not contain any of the Holy SontietSy but
after The Letanie ten pages are left blank, evidently intended
to receive them. Thereafter, the lyrical poems follow piece
by piece as in Z>, H^g^ except that The Prohibition (' Take
heed of loving mee ') is omitted — a fact of some interest when
we come to consider i6)^. Lee closes, like Z>, with the epitha-
lamia and the Obsequies to the Lo: Harrington.

Turning now to i6)}^ we shall see that, whatever other
sources the editor of that edition used, one was a collection
identical with, or closely resembling, D, H^g., Lec^ especially
Lee. That edition begins with the Progresse of the Soule,
which was not derived from this manuscript. Thereafter
follow the two sets of Holy Sonnets., the second set containing
exactly the same number of sonnets, and in the same order, as
in Z>, H^g, whereas other manuscripts, e.g. B, O'F, S, Sg6,
which will be described later, have more sonnets and in a
different order ; and W., which agrees otherwise with B, O'F.,
S, Sg6^ adds three that are found nowhere else. The sonnets
are followed in i6)) by the Epigratns., which are not in D,
H^g, Lee., but after that the resemblance of i6}} to Z), H^^g,
Lee becomes quite striking. These manuscripts, we have seen,
begin with the Satyres. The edition, however, passes on at
once to the Elegies. Of the thirteen given in Z>, H^g, Lecy
16}) prints eight, omitting the first {The Bracelet)., the second
{Going to Bed)., the tenth {Loves Warr)., the eleventh {On
his Mistris), and the thirteenth {Loves Progresse). That the
editor, however, had before him, and intended to print, the
Satyres and the thirteen Elegies as he found them in his copy
of D, H^g, Lee, is proved by the following extract which
Mr. Chambers quotes from the Stationers' Register :

Text of Domies Poems. Ixxxvii

13" September, 1632
John Marriot. Entered for his copy under the hands of Sir
Henry Herbert and both the Wardens, a book
of verse and poems (the five Satires, the first,
second, tenth, eleventh and thirteenth Elegies
being excepted) and these before excepted to
be his, when he brings lawful authority.

vi^.
written by Doctor John Dunn

This note is intelligible only when compared with this
particular group of manuscripts. In others the order is
quite different.

This bar — which was probably dictated by reasons of pro-
priety, though it is difficult to see why the first and the eleventh
Elegies should have been singled out — was got over later as
far as xhe^Satyres were concerned. They are printed after all
the other poems, just before the prose letters. But by this
time the copy of Z>, ^^9, Lee had perhaps passed out of
Marriot 's hands, for the text of the Satyr es seems to show that
they were printed, not from this manuscript, but from one
represented by another group, which I shall describe later.
This is, however, not quite certain, for in Lee the version of
the Satyres given is not the same as in D^ ^49i but is that of
this second group of manuscripts. Several little details show
that of the three manuscripts Z>, H^g, and Lee the last most
closely resembles 16)}.

Following the Elegies in 16}) come a group of letters,
epicedes, and religious poems, just as in ^49, Lee {D re-groups
them) — Tke Stortne, The Calme, To Sir Henry Wotton,
('Sir, more than kisses'), The Crosse^ Elegie ott the Lady
Marckham, Elegie on Mris Boulsired (' Death I recant '), To
Sr Henry Goodyere, To Mr. Rowland Woodward^ To Sr
Henry Wootton ('Here's no more newes'). To the Countesse of
Bedford (' Reason is our Soules left hand '), To the Countesse
of Bedford (' Madam, you have refin'd '), To Sr Edward
Herbert^ at fulyers. Here 16)} diverges. Having got into
letters to noble and other people the editor was anxious to

Ixxxviii hitroductio7i.

continue them, and accordingly from another source (which I
shall discuss later) he prints a long series of letters to the
Countess of Bedford, the Countess of Huntingdon, Mr. T. W.,
and other more intimate friends (they are ' thou ', the Count-
esses ' you'), and Mrs. Herbert. He perhaps returns to Z?, H^c),
Lee in those to The Lady Carey and Mrs. Essex Riche^^from
Amyeus, and To the Couniesse of Salisbury^ and, as in that
manuscript, the Palatine and Essex epithalamia (to which,
however, i6)} adds that written at Lincoln's Inn) are followed
immediately by the long Obsequies to Lord Harrington.
Three odd Elegies follow, two of which {The Autumitall
and The Picture., ' Image of her') occur in Z>, H^(), Lee in the
same detached fashion. Other manuscripts include them
among the numbered Elegies. The Elegie on Prince Henry,
Psalme i)y (probably not by Donne), Resurrection., imperfect.
An hymne to the Saints, and to Marquesse Hamilton, An
Epitaph npon Shakespeare (certainly not by Donne), Sapho
to Philaenis, follow in i6}} — a queerly consorted lot. The
Elegie on Pritice Henry is taken from the Lachrymae Lach-
rymarum of Joshua Sylvester ( 1 6 1 2} ; the rest were possibly
taken from some small commonplace-book. This would
account for the doubtful poems, the only doubtful poems in
i6j^. These past, the close connexion with our manuscript
is resumed. The Annuntiation is followed, as in H^^c)., Lee,
by The Litanie. Thereafter the lyrical pieces begin, as in
these manuscripts, with the song, ' Send home my long strayd
eyes to me.' This is followed by two pieces which are not
in Z', H^g, Lee, — the impressive, difficult, and in manuscripts
comparatively rare Nocttirnall upon S. Lueies day, and the
much commoner Witchcraft by a picture. Thereafter the
poems follow^ piece by piece the order in D, H^g, Lee'^ until

* With the grouping of yd'jj 1 have adopted generally its order within
the groups, but the reader will see quite easily what is the order of the
Songs in i6jj and in D, H4g, Lee, if he will turn to the Contents and,
beginning at The Message (p. 43), will follow down to A Valediction : for-
bidding 7}ionrning (p. 49). He must then turn back to the beginning and
follow the list down till he comes to The Curse (p. 41), and then resume at
The Extasie (p. 51). If the seven poems, The Message \.o A Valediction :

Text of Donne s Poems. Ixxxix

llie Curse is reached.^ Then, in what seems to have been
the editor's or printer's regular method of proceeding in this
edition, he laid aside the manuscript from which he was
printing the Songs and Sonets to take up another piece of
work that had come to hand, viz. An Anatomie of the World
with A Funerall Elegie and Of the Progresse of the Soule,
which he prints from the edition of 1625. Without apparent
rhyme or reason these long poems are packed in between The
Curse and The Extasie. With the latter poem 16)) resumes the
songs and (with the exception of The Undertaking) follows the
order in Lee to The Dampe^ with which the series in the manu-
scripts closes. It has been noted that in Lec^ The Prohibition
(which in Z), H^g follows Breake of day and precedes The
A nniversarie) is omitted. This must have been the case in the
manuscript used for 16)), for it is omitted at this place and
though printed later was probably not derived from this
source.

With The Dainpe the manuscript which I am supposing
the editor to have followed in the main probably came to an
end. The poems which follow in 16}) are of a miscellaneous
character and strangely conjoined. The Dissolution (p. 64),
A leat Ring setit (p. 6^),A^egative Love (p. 66), The Prohibi-
tion (p. (i']). The Expiration (p. 68), The Cornputation (p. 69),
complete the tale of lyrics. A few odd elegies follow
(' Language thou art,' ' You that are she,' ' To make the doubt
clear '} with The Paradox, A Hyinne to Christ,, at the
Authors last going into Germany is given a page to itself,
and is followed by The Lafnentations of ferenty,, The
Sa tyres, and A Hymne to God the Father. Thereafter come
the prose letters and the Elegies upon the Author.

forbidding mourning, were brought to the beginning, the order of the
Songs and Sonets in i6j^-6g would be the same as in /djj.

The editor of i6jj began a process, which was carried on in /6jJ, of
naming poems unnamed in the manuscripts, and re-naming some that
already had titles. The textual notes will give full details regarding the
names, and will show that frequently a poem unnamed in D, H4g, Lee
remains unnamed in j6jj.

^ There is one exception to this which I had overlooked. In Z>, ///p,
Lee, The Undertaking (p. 10) comes later, following The Extasie.

xc hitrodtiction.

What this comparison of the order of the poems points to
is borne out by an examination of the text. The critical notes
afford the materials for a further verification, and I need not
tabulate the resemblances at length. In Elegie /F, for
example, 11. 7, 8, which occur in all the other manuscripts
and editions, are omitted by 16}} and by Z>, H^g^ Lee.
Again, when a song has no title in 16}} it has frequently none
in the manuscript. When there are evidently two versions of
a poem, as e.g. in The Good-morrow and The Flea., the
version given in 16}} is generally that of Z>, H^g, Lee.
Later editions often contaminate this with another version of
the poem. At the same time there are ever and again
divergences between the edition and the manuscript which are
not to be ignored, and cannot always be explained. Some
are due to error in one or the other, but some point either to
divergence between the text of the editor's manuscript and
ours, or to the use by the editor of other sources as well as this.
In the fifth elegy [ThePieiure)^ for example, 16)} twice seems
to follow, not Z>, H^g^^Lee., but another source, another group of
manuscripts which has been preserved; and in The Aniversarie
11. 23, 24, the version of 16)} is not that of /?, H4g., Lee but of
the same second group, which will be described later. On the
whole, however, it is clear that- a manuscript closely resembling
that now represented by these three manuscripts supplied the
editor of 16}) with the bulk of the shorter poems, especially
the older and more privately circulated poems, the Songs and
Sonets and Elegies. When he is not following this manu-
script he draws from miscellaneous and occasionally inferior
sources.

It would be interesting if we could tell whence this manu-
script was obtained, and whether it was a priori likely to be
a good one. On this point we can only conjecture, but it
seems to me a fairly tenable conjecture (though not to be built
on in any way) that the nucleus of the collection, at any rate,
may have been a commonplace-book which had belonged to
Sir Henry Goodyere. The ground for this conjecture is the
inclusion in the edition of some prose letters addressed to

Text of D 071716 S Po 67775. xci

this friend, one in Latin and seven in English. There is
indeed also one addressed to the Countess of Bedford ; but in
the preceding letter to Goodyere Donne says, ' I send you,
with this, a letter which I sent to the Countesse. It is
not my use nor duty to do so. But for your having it, there
were but two consents, and I am sure you have mine, and you
are sure you have hers.' He goes on to refer to some verses
which are the subject of the letter to the Countesse. There
can be no doubt that the letter printed is the letter sent to
Goodyere. The Burley MS. (see Pearsall- Smith's Life and
Letters of Sir He7iry Wotton, Oxford, 1907) gives us a good
example of how a gentleman in the seventeenth century dealt
with his correspondence. That contains, besides various letters,
as of Sidney to Queen Elizabeth on the Anjou marriage, and
other matter which recurs in commonplace-books, a number of
poems and letters, sent to Wotton by his friends, including
Donne, and transcribed by one or other of Wotton's secretaries.
The letters have no signatures appended, which is the case
with the letters in the 1633 edition of Donne's poems.
Wotton and Goodyere did not need to be reminded of the
authors, and perhaps did not wish others to know. The
reason then for the rather odd inclusion of nine prose letters
in a collection of poems is probably, that the principal manu-
script used by the printer was an ' old book ' ^ which had
belonged to Sir Henry Goodyere and in which his secretaries
had transcribed poems and letters by Donne. Goodyere's
collection of Donne's poems would not necessarily be
exhaustive, but it would be full ; it would not like the
collections of others include poems that were none of
Donne's; and its text would be accurate, allowing for the
carelessness, indifference, and misunderstandings of secretaries
and copyists.

^ When in 16 r 4 Donne contemplated an edition of his poems he wrote
to Goodyere : ' By this occasion I am made a Rhapsoder of mine own
rags, and that cost me more diligence to seek them, than it did to make
them. This made me aske to borrow that old book of you,' &c. Letters
(1651), p. 197.

xcii Introduction,

After Z?, H^i), Lec^ the most carefully made collection of
Donne's poems is one represented now by four distinct manu-
scripts :

Ai8. Additional MS. 18646, in the British Museum.

N. The Norton MS. in Harvard College Library, Boston, ot
which an account is given by Professor Norton in a note
appended to the Grolier Club edition.

TCC, A manuscript in the Library of Trinity College,
Cambridge.

TCD. A large manuscript in the Library of Trinity
College, Dublin, containing two apparently quite independent
collections of poems — the first a collection of Donne's poems
with one or two additional poems by Sir John Roe, Francis
Beaumont, Sir Thomas Overbury, and Corbet ; the second
a quite miscellaneous collection, put together some time in the
thirties of the seventeenth century, and including some of
Donne's poems. It is only the first of these which belongs to
the group in question.

These four manuscripts are closely connected with one
another, but a still more intimate relation exists between A 18
and TCC on the one hand, N and TCD on the other.
N and TCD are the larger collections; A 18 and TCC
contain each a smaller selection from the same body of poems.
Indeed it would seem that iV is a copy of TCD, A 18 of
TCC.

TCD, to start with it, is a beautifully written collection
of Donne's poems beginning with the Saiyres, passing on to
an irregularly arranged series of elegies, letters, lyrics and
epicedes, and closing with the Metempsychosis or Progresse
of the Soule and the Divine Poems, which include the hymns
written in the last years of the poet's life. N has the same
poems, arranged in the same order, and its readings are nearly
always identical with those of TCD, so far as I can judge
from the collation made for me. The handwriting, unlike
that of TCD, is in what is known as secretary hand and is
somewhat difficult to read. What points to the one manu-

Text of Donne s Poems. xciii

script beitjg a copy of the other is that in ' Sweetest Love,
I do not go ' the scribe has accidentally dropped stanza 4,
by giving its last line to stanza 3, and passing at once to
the fifth stanza. Both manuscripts make this mistake, whereas
A18 and TCC contain the complete poem. In other places
N and TCD agree in their readings where A 18 and TCC
diverge. If the one is a copy of the other, TCD is
probably the more authoritative, as it contains some marginal
indications of authorship which A'' omits.

TCC is a smaller manuscript than TCD^ but seems to be
written in the same clear, fine hand. It does not contain the
Saiyyes, the Eleg^ (XI. in this edition) The Bracelet, and the
epistles The Storme and The Cahne, with which N and TCD
open. It looks, however, as though the sheets containing
these poems had been torn out. Besides these, however,
TCC omits, without any indication of their being lost, an
Elegie to the Lady Bedford (' You that are she 'j, the Palatine
Epithalamion, a long series of letters ^ which in N, TCD
follow that To M.M.H. and precede Sap ho to Philaenis,
the elegies on Prince Henry and on Lord Harington, and The
Lamentatio7is of Jeremy. There are occasional differences
in the grouping of the poems ; and TCC does not contain
some poems by Beaumont, Corbet, Sir John Roe, and Sir
Thomas Overbury which are found in N and TCD. In TCD
these, with the exception of that by Beaumont, are carefully
initialled, and therefore not ascribed to Donne. In N these
initials are in some cases omitted ; and some of the poems have
found their way into editions of Donne's poems.

Presumably TCC is the earlier collection, and when TCD
was made, the copyist was able to add fresh poems. It is clear,
however, that in the case of even those poems which the two

' Five are to the Countess of Bedford—' Reason is ', ' Honour is', ' You
have refin'd ', 'To have written then', and 'This Twy-light'. One is to
the Countess of Huntingdon, ' Man to Gods image' ; one to the Countess
of Salisbury, ' Fair, great and good ' ; and one to Lady Carey, ' Here where
by all.'

xciv hitrodiiction,

have in common, the one manuscript is not simply a copy of
the others. There are several divergences, and the mistake
referred to above, in ' Sweetest Love, I do not go \ is not made
in TCC. Strangely enough, a similar mistake is made by
TCC in transcribing Z(9Z/^j' Deitie and is reproduced in Ai8.

Ai8, indeed, would seem to be a copy of TCC. It is not
in the same handwriting, but in secretary hand. It omits the
opening Satyres, &c., as does TCC, but there is no sign of
excision. Presumably, then, the copy was made after these
poems were, if they ever were, torn out of TCC. Wherever
TCC diverges from TCD, Ai8 follows TCC^

Whoever was responsible for this collection of Donne's
poems, it was evidently made with care, at least as regards
the canon. Very {ew poems that are not certainly by
Donne are included, and they are correctly initialled. The
only uninitialled doubtful poems are A Paradox, ' Whoso
terms Love a fire,' which in all the four manuscripts follows
' No Lover saith, I love ', and Beaumont's letter to the Countess
of Bedford, which begins, ' Soe may my verses pleasing be.'
In JV, TCD this follows Donne's letter to the same lady, ' You
that are she and you.' It is regrettable that the text of the
poems is not so good as the canon is pure. The punctuation
is careless. There are numerous stupid blunders, and there
are evidences of editing in the interest of more regular metre
or a more obvious meaning. At times, however, it would seem
that the copyist is following a different version of a poem or
poems (e. g. the Satyr es) from that given in D, H^g, and
other manuscripts, and is embodying corrections perhaps
made by the author himself It is quite credible that Donne,
in sending copies of his poems at different times to different
people, may have revised and amended them. It is quite clear,
as my notes will show, that of certain poems more than one
version (each correct in itself) was in circulation.

Was Ai8, N, TC, or a manuscript resembling it one of the

^ In citing this collection I use TC for the two groups TCC, TCD.

Text of Donne s Poems. xcv

sources of the edition of i6}) ? In part, I think, it was. The
most probable case at first sight is that of the Saiyres. These,
we have seen, Marriot was at first prohibited from printing.
Otherwise they would have followed the Epigrams^ and im-
mediately preceded the Elegies. As it is, they come after all
the other poems ; they are edited with some cautious dashes ;
and their text is almost identical with that of A^, TCD. In
the first satire the only difference between i6)) and tV, TCD
occurs in 1. 70, where vV, TCD^ with all the other manuscripts
read —

Sells for a little state his libertie ;

Sells for a little state high libertie ;

' high ' is either a slip or an editorial emendation. There are
other cases of similar editing, not all of which it is possible to
correct with confidence ; but a study of the textual notes will
show that in general 16)) follows the version preserved in
A^, TCD^ and also in Ly^ (of which later), when the rest of
the manuscripts present an interestingly different text. But
strangely enough this version of the Saiyres is also in Lee.
This is the feature in which that manuscript diverges most
strikingly from D and H^g. Moreover in some details in
which 16)) differs from A 18, N, TC it agrees with Lee. It is
possible therefore that the Saiyres were printed from the same
manuscript as the majority of the poems.

Again in the Letters not found in Z>, H^g, Lee there is
a close but not invariable agreement between the text of 16)}
and that of this group of manuscripts. Those letters, which
follow that To Sir Edward Herbert., are printed in 16^} in
the same order as in this edition (pp. 195-226), except that the
group of short letters beginning at p. 203 (' All haile sweete
Poet ') is here amplified and rearranged from W. Now in A18,
N, TC these letters are also brought together ( A^, TCD adding
some which are not in A 18, TCC), and the special group
referred to, of letters to intimate friends, are arranged in
exactly the same order as in 16)} ; have the same headings,
the same omissions, and the same accidental linking of two

xcvi I?2tf^oductio?i,

poems. In the other letters, to the Countesses of Bedford,
Huntingdon, Salisbury, &c., the textual notes will show some
striking resemblances between the edition and the manuscripts.
In the difficult letter, ' T'have written then ' (p. 195), 16))
follows i^^, TCD where O'F gives a different and in some
details more correct text. In ' This twilight of two yeares '
(p. 198) the strange reading of 1. 35, 'a prayer prayes,' is
obviously due to N^ TCD, where ' a praiser prayes ' has
accidentally but explicably been written ' a prayer praise '.
In the letter To the Cou7ttesse of Himtt7igdon (p. 201) the
16)} version of 11. 25, 26 is a correct rendering of what N', TCD
give wrongly :

Shee guilded us, But you are Gold ; and shee
Vs inform'd, but transubstantiates you.

On the other hand there are some differences, as e. g. in the
placing of 11. 40-2 in ' Honour is so sublime ' (p. 218), which
make it impossible to affirm that these poems were taken
direct from this group of manuscripts as we know them, with-
out alteration or emendation. The Progi^esse of the Soit/e or
Metempsychosis, as printed in 16)}, must have been taken in
the first instance from this manuscript. In both the manuscripts
and the edition, at 1. 83 of the poem a blank space is left after
'did ' ; in both, 1. 137 reads, ' To see the Prince, and soe fill'd
the waye ' ; in both, ' kinde ' is substituted for ' kindle ' at 1. 1 50 ;
in 1. 180 the ' uncloth'd child' of 16}) is explicable as an
emendation of the ' encloth'd ' of A 18, N, TC \ and similarly
the ' leagues o'rpast ', 1. 296 of 16)), is probably due to the
omission of ' many ' before ' leagues ' in A18, N, TC— o'rpast '
supplies the lost foot. It is clear, however, from a comparison
of different copies that as 16}) passed through the press this
poem underwent considerable correction and alteration ; and
in its final printed form there are errors which I have been
enabled to correct from G,

The paraphrase of Lamentations, and the Epithalamion
made at Lincolns Inn (which is not in D, H^g, Lee) are
other poems which show, in passages where there are diver-
gent readings, a tendency to follow the readings of A 18, N,

T'eXt of D 071716 S Poe77tS. xcvii

7"C, though in neither of these poems is the identity complete.
It is further noteworthy that to several poems unnamed in
D, Hj^g, Lee the editor of i6)} has given the title which these
bear in Ai8, N, TCC, and TCD, as though he had access to
both the collections at the same time.

These two groups of manuscripts, which have come down
to us, thus seem to represent the two principal sources of the
edition of 16)}. What other poems that edition contains were
derived either from previously printed editions (The Anni-
versaries and the Elegy on Pritice Henry) or were got from
more miscellaneous and less trustworthy sources.

A third manuscript collection of Donne's poems is of
interest because it seems very probable that it or a similar
collection came into the hands of the printer before the second
edition of 1635 was issued. A considerable number of the
errors, or inferior readings, of the later editions seem to be
traceable to its influence. At least it is remarkable how often
when i6}y and the subsequent editions depart from 16)} and
the general tradition of the manuscripts they have the support
of this manuscript and this manuscript alone. This is the
manuscript which I have called

O'F^ because it was at one time in the possession of the
Rev. T. R. O'Flaherty, of Capel, near Dorking, a great student
of Donne, and a collector. He contributed several notes on
Donne to Notes and Qtieries. I do not know of any more
extensive work by him on the subject.

This manuscript has been already described by Mr. R.
Warwick Bond in the Catalogue of Ellis and Elvey, 1903. It
is a large but somewhat indiscriminate collection, made
apparently wuth a view to publication. The title-page states
that it contains ' The Poems of D. J. Donne (not yet imprinted)
consisting of

Divine Poems, beginning Pag. i

Satyres 57

Elegies 113

Epicedes and Obsequies 1 6 r

II 917. 3 g

xcviii hitroduction.

Letters to severall personages 189

Songs and Sonnets 245

Epithalamions 3 1 7

Epigrams 337

With his paradoxes and problems 421

finished this 12 of October 1632.'

The reader will notice how far this arrangement agrees with,

how far it differs from, that adopted in 1635.

Of the twenty-eight new poems, genuine, doubtful, and
spurious, added in /<5j/, this manuscript contains twenty,
a larger number than I have found in any other single manu-
script. An examination of the text of these does not, however,
make it certain that all of them were derived from this source
or from this source only. The text, for example, of the Elegie
XI. The Bracelet, in 16)^, is evidently taken from a manu-
script differing in important respects from O'F and resembling
closely Cy and P. Elegie XII, also. His parting from her,
can hardly have been derived from O'F^ as i6}j; gives an
incomplete, O'F has an entire, version of the poem. In others,
however, e.g. Elegie XIII. Julia \ Elegie XVI. On his
Mistris ; Satyre, ' Men write that love and reason disagree,' it
will be seen that the text of i6)y agrees more closely with
O'F than with any of the other manuscripts cited. The
second of these. On his Mistris, is a notable case, and so are
the four Divine Sonnets added in 16}^. Most striking of all
is the case of the Song, probably not by Donne, ' Soules joy
now I am gone,' where the absurd readings * Words ' for
' Wounds ' and ' hopes joyning ' for ' h*pp-joyning ' (or perhaps
■ lipps-joyning') must have come from this source. One can
hardly believe that two independent manuscripts would
perpetrate two such blunders. Taken with the many changes
from the text of 16}} in which 16)^ has the support of OF,
one can hardly doubt that among the fresh manuscript
collections which came into the hands of the printer of 16)^
(often only to mislead him) OF was one.

Besides the twenty poems which passed into /^jr/, OF
attributes some eighteen other poems to Donne, of which i^^^

Text of Don?tes Poems, xcix

are probably genuine.' Of the other manuscript collections
I must speak more shortly. There is no evidence that any of
them was used by the seventeenth -century editors.

B is a handsome, vellum-bound manuscript belonging to
the Earl of EUesmere's library at Bridgewater House. I am,
I think, the first editor who has examined it. The volume
bears on the fly-leaf the autograph signature ('J. Bridgewater ')
of the first Earl of Bridgewater, the son of Donne's early
patron, Elizabeth's Lord Keeper and later Lord Chancellor. On
the title-page ' Dr Donne ' is written in the same hand. John
Egerton, it will be remembered, was, like Donne, a volunteer in
Essex's expedition to the Azores in 1597. In 1599 he and
his elder brother Thomas were in Ireland, where the latter was
killed, leaving John to be his father's heir. The book- number,
inscribed on the second leaf, is in the handwriting of the
second Earl of Bridgewater, the Elder Brother of Milton's
Conms. The manuscript has thus interesting associations,
and links with Donne's earliest patron. I had hoped that it
might prove, being made for those who had known Donne all
his life, an exceptionally good manuscript, but can hardly say
that my expectations were fulfilled. It was probably put
together in the twenties, because though it contains the Holy
Sonnets it does not contain the hymns written at the close of
the poet's life. It resembles O'F^ S^ Sg6^ and /*, rather than
either of the first two collections which I have described, Dy
H^g^Lec and AiS.N^ 7'C, in that it includes with Donne's
poems a number of poems not by Donne,^ but most of them

^ Additional lines to the Anmintiation and Passion, 'The greatest and
the most conceald impostor ', ' Now why should Love a footeboys place
despise ', ' Believe not him whom love hath made so wise ', ' Pure link of
bodies where no lust controules', 'Whoso terms love a fire', Upon his
scornefull Mistresse ('Cruel, since that thou dost not fear the curse'),
The Hower Glass ('Doe but consider this small Dust'), ' If I freely may
discover', .S"(?«^('Now you have kill'd me with your scorn'), 'Absence,
heare thou my protestation ', Song (' Love bred of glances '), ' Love if
a god thou art ', ' Create Lord of Love how busy still thou art ', ' To sue
for all thy Love and thy whole hart '.

* 'Believe not him whom love hath made so wise', On the death of
Mris Boulsired ('Stay view this stone'), Against Absence ('Absence,
heare thou my protestation '), ' Thou send'st me prose and rhyme ',

g 2

Introductio7i.

apparently by his contemporaries, Sir John Roe, Francis
Keaumont, Jonson, and other of the wits of the first decade of
the seventeenth century, the men who collaborated in writing
witty poems on Coryat, or Characters in the style of Sir
Thomas Overbury. In the case of some of these initials are
added, and a later, but not modern, hand has gone over the
manuscript and denied or queried Donne's authorship of others.
Textually also B tends to range itself, especially in certain
groups of poems, as the Satyres and Holy Sonnets, with O'F^
Sg6, IV when these differ from Z>, H4g,Lec and AiS, N, TC.
In such cases the tradition which it represents is most correctly
preserved in W. In a few poems the text of B is identical
with that oi S()6. On the whole B cannot be accepted in any
degree as an independent authority for the text. It is im-
portant only for its agreements with other manuscripts, as
helping to establish what I may call the manuscript tradition,
in various passages, as against the text of the editions.
Still less valuable as an independent textual authority is

P. This manuscript is a striking example of the kind of
collections of poems, circulating in manuscript, which gentle-
men in the seventeenth century caused to be prepared, and
one cannot help wondering how they managed to understand
the poems, so full is the text of gross and palpable errors.
/* is a small octavo manuscript, once in the Phillipps collection,
now in the possession of Captain C. Shirley Harris, Oxford.
On the cover of brown leather is stamped the royal arms of
James I. On p. i is written, ' 1623 me possidet Hen. Cham-
pernowne de Dartington in Devonia, generosus.' Two other
members of this old, and still extant, Devonshire family have
owned the volume, as also Sir Edward Seymour (Knight
Baronett) and Bridgett Brookbrige. The poems are written

Tempore Hen : j (' The state of Fraunce, as now it stands '), A fragment
(' Now why shuld love a Footboyes place despise'), To J. D. from Mr.
H. W. ('Worthie Sir, Tis not a coate of gray,' see II. p. 141), 'Love bred
of glances twixt amorous eyes', To a Watch restored to its mystres ('Goe
and count her better houres '), ' Deare Love continue nyce and chast ',
' Cruell, since thou doest not feare the curse ', On the blessed virgin Marie
(' In that, 6 Queene of Queenes '),

Text of Donne s Poems, ci

in a small, clear hand, and in Elizabethan character. Captain
Harris has had a careful transcript of the poems made, and
he allowed me after collating the original with the transcript
to keep the latter by me for a long time.

The collection is in the nature of a commonplace-book, and
includes a prose letter to Raleigh, and a good many poems
by other poets than Donne, but the bulk of the volume is
occupied with his poems,' and most of the poems are signed
'J. D. Finis.' The date of the collection is between 1619,
when the poem When he zvent with the Lo Doncastey was
written, and 1623, the date on the title-page. Neither for text
nor for canon is P an authority, but the very carelessness with
which it is written makes its testimony to certain readings
indisputable. It makes no suggestion of conscious editing.
In certain poems its text is identical with that of Cy, even to
absurd errors. It sometimes, however, supports readings
which are otherwise confined to C^'i^and the later editions of
the poem, showing that these may be older than 1632-5.

Cy, The Carnaby MS. consists of one hundred folio

' Of 128 items in the volume 99 are by Donne, and I have excluded
some that might be claimed for him. The poems certainly not by Donne
are 'Wrong not deare Empresse of my heart ', 'Good folkes for gold or
hire', 'Love bred of glances twixt amorous eyes', 'Worthy Sir, Tis not
a coat of gray ' (here marked ' J. D '.), ' Censure not sharply then ' (marked
' B. J.'), 'Whosoever seeks my love to know', 'Thou sendst me prose
and rimes' (see II. p. 166), 'An English lad long wooed a iasse of Wales',
' Marcella now grown old hath broke her glasse', ' Pretus of late had
office borne in London ', To his mistresse (' O love whose power and
might'), Her answer ('Your letter I receaved'), 7'he Mar: B. to the
Lady Fe. Her. (' Victorious beauty though your eyes') - a poem generally
attributed to the Earl of Pembroke, A poem ('Absence heare my pro-
testation'), 'True love findes witt but hee whom witt doth move', Earle
of Pembroke ' If her disdain ', Ben Ruddier ' Till love breeds love ', ' Good
madam Fowler doe not truble mee', ' Oh faithlesse world; and the most
faithlesse part, A womans hart', 'As unthrifts greeve in straw for their
pawn'd beds' (marked 'J. D.'), 'Why shuld not pilgrimes to thy body
come' (marked ' F. B.'), On Mrs. Bttlstreed, ' Mee thinkes death like one
laughing lies', 'When this fly liv'd shee us'd to play' (marked 'Cary'),
The Epitaph (' Underneath this sable hearse '), a couple of long heroical
epistles (with notes appended) entitled Sir Philip Sidney to the Lady
Penelope Rich and The Lady Penelope Rich to Sir Philipe Sidney. The
latter epistle after some lines gives way quite abruptly to a different poem,
a fragment of an elegy, which I have printed in Appendix C, p. 463.

ci i I?lt7'0duCti07l .

pages bound in flexible vellum, and is now in the Harvard
College Library, Boston, It is by no means an exhaustive
collection ; the poems are chaotically arranged ; the text
seems to be careless, and the spelling unusually erratic ; but
most of the poems it contains are genuine,^ This manu-
script is not as a whole identical with P^ but some of the
j^oems it contains must have come from that or from a common
source.

JC. The John Cave MS. is a small collection of Donne's
poems now in the possession of Mr. Elkin Matthews,
w^ho has kindly allowed me to collate it. It was formerly in
Mr. O'Flaherty's possession. The original possessor had been
a certain John Cave, and the volume opens with the following
poem, written, it will be seen, while Donne was still alive :

Oh how it joys me that this quick brain'd Age
can nere reach thee (Donn) though it should engage
at once all its whole stock of witt to finde
out of thy well plac'd w-ords thy more pure minde.
Noe, wee are bastard Aeglets all ; our eyes
could not endure the splendor that would rise
from hence like rays from out a cloud. That Man
who first found out the Perspective which can
make Starrs at midday plainly seen, did more
then could the whole Chaos of Arte(s) before
or since ; If I might have my wish 't shuld bee
That Man might be reviv'd againe to see
If hee could such another frame, whereby
the minde might bee made see as farr as th' eye.
. Then might we hope to finde thy sense, till then
The Age of Ignorance I'le still condemn.

lO. CA.

Jun. 3. 1620.

^ The exceptions are one poor epigram :

Oh silly John surprised with joy
For Joy hath made thee silly
Joy to enjoy thy sweetest J one
Jone whiter than the Lillie ;

and two elegies, generally assigned to F. Beaumont, ' I may forget to eate '
and ' As unthrifts greive in straw '.

Text of Donne s Poems. ciii

The manuscript is divided into three parts, the first contain-
ing the five Satyres, the Litany and the Storme and Calme.
The second consists of Elegies and Epigrammes and the third
of Miscellanea^ Poems ^ Elegies^ Sonnets by the same Author,
The elegies in the second part are, as in Z>, ^^9, Lec^ and W^
thirteen in number. Their arrangement is that of W^ and,
like ^,yC gives The Comparisofi^viWich. D, H^g, Lecdo not^
but drops Loves Progress^ which the latter group contains.
The text of these poems is generally that of W^ but here
and throughout JC abounds in errors and emendations. It
contains one or two poems which were published in the
edition of 1650, and which I have found in no other manu-
script except OE. In these JC supplies some obvious
emendations. The poems in the third part are very irregu-
larly arranged. This is the only manuscript, professing to be
of Donne's poems, which contains the elegy, ' The heavens
rejoice in motion,' which the younger Donne added to the
edition of 1650. It is not a very correct, but is an interesting
manuscript, with very few spurious poems. At the other end
of the manuscript from Donne's, are poems by Corbet.

What seems to be practically a duplicate of JC is preserved
in the Dyce Collection at the South Kensington Museum. It
belonged originally to a certain 'Johannes Nedlam e Collegio
Lincolniense ' and is dated 1625. Cave's poem 'Upon
Doctor Donne's Satyres ' is inscribed and the contents and
arrangement of the volume are identical with those oi JC
except that one poem, The Dampe^ is omitted, probably by
an oversight, in the Dyce MS. After my experience
of JC I did not think it necessary to collate this manuscript.
It was from it that Waldron printed some of the unpublished
poems of Donne and Corbet in A Collectiojt of Miscellaneous
Poetry (1802).

71^0 and PPji, i.e. Harleian MS. 4064 in the British
Museum, and Rawlinson Poetical MS. 31, in the Bodleian
Library, are two manuscripts containing a fairly large number
of Donne's poems intermingled with poems by other and

civ hilroduction.

contemporary authors. A note on the fly-leaf of RPji
declares that the manuscript contains ' Sir John Harringtons
poems written in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth', which is
certainly not an accurate description.' Some of the poems
must have been written as late as 1610, and they are by
various authors, Wotton, Jonson, Sir Edward Herbert,
Sir John Roe, Donne, Beaumont, and probably others, but
names of authors are only occasionally given. Each manu-
script starts with the words ' Prolegomena Quaedam ', and the
poem, ' Paynter while there thou sit'st.' The poems follow
the same order in the two manuscripts, but of poems not by
Donne RP)i contains several which are not in H^o^ and, on
the other hand, of poems by Donne Hj^o inserts at various
places quite a number, especially of songs, which are not in
RP)i. The latter is, in short, a miscellaneous collection of
Elizabethan and early Jacobean poems, including several of
Donne's; the former, the same collection in which Donne's
poems have become by insertion the principal feature.
I have cited the readings of H40 throughout ; those of RP^i
only when they differ from H^o^ or when I wish to emphasize
their agreement. Wherever derived from, the poems are
generally carefully and intelligently transcribed. They
contain some unpublished poems of Jonson, vSir Edward
Herbert, and probably Daniel.

L']/f. The Lansdowne MS. 740, in the British Museum, is an
interesting collection of Donne's mainly earlier and secular
poems, along with several by contemporaries,^ The text of

* The note may point to some connexion of the MS. with the Harington
family. The MS. contains an unusually large number of poems addressed
to the Countess of Bedford, and ascribes, quite probably, the Elegy ' Death
be not proud ' to the Countess herself.

"^ The poems not by Donne are A Satire : To Sr Nicholas Smith, 1602
('Sleep next society') ; Sir Thomas Overbury's ' Each woman is a Breefe
of Womankind ' and his epitaph 'The spann of my dales measurd, here
1 rest'; a poem headed Bash, beginning '1 know not how it comes to pass';
Verses upon Bishop Fletcher who married a woman of France (' If any aske
what Tarquin ment to marrie'); Fletcher Bishop of London ('It was a
question in Harroldrie ') ; 'Mistres Aturney scorning long to brooke ' ;
' Wonder of Beautie, Goddesse of my sence ' ; ' Faire eyes doe not thinke
scorne to read of Love '; two sonnets apparently by Sir Thomas Roe ; six

Text of Donne s Poems. cv

the Satyr es connects this collection with Ai8,N, TC, but it is
probably older, as it contains none of the Divine Poems and
no poem written later than 1610, Its interest, apart from the
support which it lends to the readings of other manuscripts,
centres in the evidence it affords as to the authorship of some
of the unauthentic poems which have been ascribed to Donne.

kS. The Stephens MS., now in the Harvard College Library,
Boston, is the manuscript on which Dr. Grosart based his
edition (though he does not reproduce it either consistently or
with invariable accuracy) in 1873 — an unhappy choice even
were it legitimate to adopt any single manuscript in preference
to the edition of 1633. Of all the manuscripts I have ex-
amined (I know it only through the collation made for me
and from Dr. Grosart 's citations) it is, I think, without excep-
tion the worst, the fullest of obvious and absurd blunders.
There are too in it more evidences of stupid editing than in P^
whose blunders are due to careless copying by eye or to
dictation, and therefore more easy to correct.

The manuscript is dated, at the end, ' 19th July 1620,' and
contains no poems which are demonstrably later than this date,
or indeed than 1610. As, however, it contains several of the
Divine Poems, including La Coro7ia, but not the Ho/y
Sonnets, it affords a valuable clue to the date of these poems,
—of which more elsewhere. The collection is an ambitious
one, and an attempt has been made at classification. Six
Satires are followed by twenty-seven Elegies (one is torn out)
under which head love and funeral elegies are included, and
these by a long series of songs with the Divine Poems inter-
spersed. Some of the songs, as of the elegies, are not by
Donne.^

consecutive poems by Sir John Roe ("see pp. 401-6, 408-10); 'Absence
heare thou,' ; To the Countess of Rutland (' Oh may my verses pleasing
be ') ; To Stcknesse (' Whie disease dost thou molest ') ; ' A Taylor thought
a man of upright dealing' ; ' Unto that sparkling wit, that spirit of fier ' ;
* There hath beene one that strove gainst natures power.'

^ Satyra Sexta ('Sleepe next Society'), Elegia Undecima ('True Love
findes wit'), Elegia Vicesima ('Behold a wonder': see Grosart ii. 249),
Elegia Vicesima Secunda (* As unthrifts mourne '), Elegia vicesima

cvi Introduction,

Sg6. Stowe MS, 961 is a small folio volume in the British
Museum, containing a collection of Donne's poems very neatly
and prettily transcribed. It cannot have been made before
1630 as it contains all the three hymns written during the
poet's last illnesses. Indeed it is the only manuscript which
I have found containing a copy of the Hymne to God^ nty
God in my Sicknes. It is a very miscellaneous collection.
Three satires are followed by the long obsequies to the Lord
Harington, and these by a sequence of Letters, Funeral
Elegies, Elegies, and Songs intermingled. It is regrettable
that so well-written a manuscript is not more reliable, but its
text is poor, its titles sometimes erroneous, and its ascriptions
inaccurate.'^

(3) In the third class I place manuscripts which are not
primarily collections of Donne's poems but collections of
seventeenth-century poems among which Donne's are included.
It is not easy to draw a hard and fast line between this class
and the last because, as has been seen, most of the manuscripts
at the end of the last list contain poems which are not, or
probably are not, by Donne. Still, in these collections Donne's
work predominates, and the tendency of the collector is to
bring the other poems under his aegis. Initials like J. R.,
F. B., J. H. disappear, or J. D. takes their place. In the case
of these last collections this is not so. Poems by Donne are
included with poems which the collector assigns to other wits.
Obviously this class could be made to include many different

septima (' Deare Tom: Tell her'), To Mr. Ben: Jonson 9° Novevtbris
160J (' If great men wronge me'), To Mr. Ben : Jonson (' The state and
mens affairs '), ' Deare Love, continue nice and chaste ', ' Wherefore
peepst thou envious Daye ', 'Great and good, if she deride me', To the
Blessed Virgin Marie (* In that 6 Queene of Queenes '), ' What if I come
to my Mistresse bed ', ' Thou sentst to me a heart as sound ', ' Believe
your glasse', A Paradox of a Painted Face ('Not kisse! By Jove
I will').

'^ The poems not by Donne are not numerous, but they are assigned to
him without hesitation. They are ' As unthrifts grieve in straw ', ' Thou
sentst me Prose ', ' Dear Love continue ', ' Madam that flea ', The Houre
Glass (' Doe but consider this small dust'), A Paradox of a Painted Face
('Not kiss, by Jove'), 'If I freely may discover', 'Absence heare thou',
' Love bred of glances '.

Text of Do7ines Poems, cvii

kinds of collections, ranging from those in which Donne is
a prominent figure to those which include only one or two of
his poems. But such manuscripts have comparatively little
value and no authority for the textual critic, though they are
not without importance for the student of the canon of Donne's
poetry. I shall mention only one or two, though I have
examined a good many more.

A2J. Additional MS. 25707, in the British Museum, is a large
and interesting collection, written in several different hands, of
early seventeenth-century poems, Jacobean and Caroline. It
contains an Elegie by Henry Skipwith on the death of King
Charles I, but most of the poems are early Jacobean, and either
the bulk of the collection was made before this and some other
poems were inserted, or it is derived from older collections.
Indeed, most of the poems by Donne were probably got from
some older collection or collections not unlike some of those
already described. They consist of twelve elegies arranged in
the same order as inyC, W,, and to some extent O'F, which is
not the order of Z>, i^^p, Lee and 16)} ; a number oi Sojigs with
some Letters and Obsequies following one another sometimes
in batches, at times interspersed with poems by other writers ;
the five Satyres^ separated from the other poems and showing
some evidences in the text of deriving from a collection like Q
or its duplicate in the Dyce collection.^ The only one of the
Divine Poems which A2^ contains is The Crosse. No poem
which can be proved to have been written later than i6io is
included.

The poems by Donne in this manuscript are generally, but
not always, initialled J. D., and are thus distinguished from
others by F. B., H. K., N. H., H. W., Sr H. G., T. P., T. G.,
G. Lucy., No. B., &c. The care with which this has been done
lends interest to those poems which are here ascribed to
Donne but are not elsewhere assigned to him. A2^ (with its
partial duplicate C) is the only manuscript which attributes to

1 Note the readings I. 58 ' The Infanta of London ', IV. 38 * He speaks
no language '.

cviii Introduction,

'J. D.' the Psalm, ' By Euphrates flowery side,' that was printed
in i6}) and all the subsequent editions.^

C. A strange duplicate of certain parts of A 2^ is a small
manuscript in the Cambridge University Library belonging to
the Baumgartner collection. It is a thin folio, much damaged by
damp, and scribbled over. A long poem, /;/ cladeni Rheenseii
(' \'erses upon the slaughter at the Isle of Rhees '), has been used
by the cataloguer to date the manuscript, but as this has
evidently been inserted when the whole was bound, the rest of the
contents may be older or younger. The collection opens with
three of the Elegies contained in A2^. It then omits eleven
poems which are in A 2^^ and continues with twenty Songs 2iiV\A
Obsequies, following the order of A2J but omitting the inter-
vening poems. Some nine more poems are given, following
the order of A2J, but many are omitted in C which are found
in A2J, and the poems in C are often only fragments of the
whole poems in A2J. Evidently C is a selection of poems
either made directly from A2J, or from the collection of
Donne's poems (with one or two by Beaumont and others)
which A2J itself drew from.

Aio. Additional MS. 10309, in the British Museum, is a
little octavo volume which was once the property of Margaret
Bellasis, probably the eldest daughter of Thomas, first Lord
Fauconberg. It is a very miscellaneous collection of prose
(Hall's Characteyismes of Vice) and verse. Of Donne's
undoubted poems there are very few, but there is an interesting
group of poems by Roe or others (the authors are not named
in the manuscript) which are frequently found with Donne's,
and some of which have been printed as his.'^

^ The other poems here ascribed to J. D. are To my Lo : of Denbrook
(sic, i.e. Pembroke), ' Fye, Fye, you sonnes of Pallas', A letter "written by
Sr H. G. attd J. D. a/ternis vicibus (' Since every tree '), ' Why shuld not
Pillgryms to thy bodie come ', ' O frutefull Garden and yet never till'd ',
Of a Lady in the Black Masque. See Appendix C, pp. 433-7.

^ 'The Heavens rejoice in motion', ' Tell her if she to hired servants
show ', ' True love finds wit ', * Ueare Love continue nice and chaste ',
' Shall I goe force an Elegie ?', 'Men write that Love and Reason disagree',
'Come Fates: I feare you not', 'If her disdaine '. The authorship of
these is discussed later.

Text of Domies Poems. cix

M. This is a manuscript bought by Lord Houghton and
now in the library of the Marquis of Crewe. It is entitled

A Collection of

Original Poetry

written about the time of
Ben: Jonson
qui ob. 1637

A later hand, probably Sir John vSimeon's, has added ' Chiefly
in the Autograph of Dr. Donne Dean of St. Pauls', but this is
quite erroneous. It is a miscellaneous collection of poems by
Donne, Jonson, Pembroke, Shirley, and others, with short
extracts from Fletcher and Shakespeare. Donne's are the
most numerous, and their text generally good, but such a
collection can have no authority. It is important only as
supporting readings and ascriptions of other manuscripts. I
cite it seldom.

TCD {Second Collection)} The large manuscript volume in
Trinity College, Dublin, contains two collections of poems
(though editors have spoken of them as one) of very different
character and value. The first I have already described. It
occupies folios i to 292. On folio 293 a new hand begins
with the song, 'Victorious Beauty though your eyes,' and from
that folio to folio 565 (but some folios are torn out) follows a
long and miscellaneous series of early seventeenth-century
poems. There are numerous references to Buckingham, but
none to the Long Parliament or the events which followed, so
that the collection was probably put together before 1640.

A note on the first page in a modern hand says, ' The pieces which I
have extracted for the "Specimens" are, Page 91, 211, 265.' What
'Specimens' are referred to I do not know: the pieces are ' You nimble
dreams ', signed H. (i. e. John Hoskins) ; ' Upon his mistresses inconstancy'
(' Thou art prettie but inconstant ') ; and Cupid and the Clowne. The
manuscript was purchased at Bishop Heber's sale in 1836.

' I refer to it occasionally as TCD{IJ), and (once it has been made plain
that this is the collection referred to throughout) as simply TCD.

ex Introduction.

The poems are ascribed to different authors in a very haphazard
and untrustworthy fashion. James I is credited with Jonson's
epigram on the Union of the Crowns ; Donne's The Baite is
given to Wotton ; and Wotton's ' O Faithless World ' to Robert
Wisedom. Probably there is more reliance to be put on the
ascriptions of later and Caroline poems, but for the student of
Donne and early Jacobean poetry the collection has no value.
Some of Donne's poems occur, and it is noteworthy that the
version given is often a different one from that occurring in the
first part of the volume. Probably two distinct collections
have been bound up together.

Another collection frequently cited by Grosart, but of little
value for the editor of Donne, is the Farmer-Chethani MS.^
a commonplace-book in the Chetham Library, Manchester,
which has been published by Grosart. It contains one or two
of Donne's poems, but its most interesting contents are the
* Gulling Sonnets ' of Sir John Davies, and some poems by
Raleigh, Hoskins, and others. Nothing could be more unsafe
than to ascribe poems to Donne, as Grosart did, because they
occur here in conjunction with some that are certainly his.

A similar collection, which I have not seen, is the Hazlewood-
KingsboroMgk MS.^ as Dr. Grosart called it. To judge from
the analysis in Thorpe's Catalogue, 1831, this too is a mis-
cellaneous anthology of poems written by, or at any rate
ascribed to, Shakespeare, Jonson, Bacon, Raleigh, Donne, and
others. There is no end to the number of such collections,
and it is absurd to base a text upon them.

The Btirley MS.^ to which I refer once or twice, and which
is a manuscript of great importance for the editor of Donne's
letters, is not a collection of poems. It is a commonplace-
book of Sir Henry Wotton's in the handwriting of his sec-
retaries. Amid its varied contents are some letters, unsigned
but indubitably by Donne ; ten of his Paradoxes with a
covering letter ; and a few poems of Donne's with other poems.
Of the last, one is certainly by Donne {H. W. in Hibernia
belligeranti)^ and I have incorporated it. The others seem to

Text of Donne s Poems, cxi

me exceedingly doubtful. They are probably the work of
other wits among Wotton's friends. I have printed a selection
from them in Appendix C.^

Of the manuscripts of the first two classes, which alone could
put forward any claim to be treated as independent sources of
the text of an edition of Donne's poems, it would be impossible,
I think, to construct a complete genealogy. Different poems,
or different groups of poems in the same manuscript, come
from different sources, and to trace each stream to its fountain-
head would be a difficult task, perhaps impossible without
further material, and would in the end hardly repay the trouble,
for the difficulties in Donne's text are not of so insoluble
a character as to demand such heroic methods. The interval
between the composition of the poems and their first publica-
tion ranges from about forty years at the most to a year or
two. There is no case here of groping one's way back through
centuries of transmission. The surprising fact is rather that so
many of the common errors of a text preserved and transmitted
in manuscript should have appeared so soon, that the text and
canon of Donne's poems should present an editor in one form
or another with all the chief problems which confront the
editor of a classical or a mediaeval author.

The manuscripts fall into three main groups (i) Z>, H^g^
Lee. These with a portion of i6}) come from a common
source. (2) A 18^ N^ TCC^ TCD. These also come from
a single stream and some parts of 16)} follow them. L"]^ is
closely connected with them, at least in parts. (3) A2j, B^
Cy^JC^ O'P^ -P, 5", Sg6., W. These cannot be traced in their
entirety to a single head, but in certain groups of poems they
tend to follow a common tradition which may or may not be
that of one or other of the first two groups. Of the Elegies^
for example, A2jyJC^ (9'^and ^transcribe twelve in the same
order and with much the same text. Again, B, O'F^ Sg6, and
W have taken the Holy So7inets from a common source, but

' Since Mr. Pearsall-Smith transcribed these poems, which I subsequently
collated, the house at Burley-on-the-Hill has been burned down and the
pianuscript volume has perished.

cxii Litroduction,

O'F has corrected or altered its readings by a reference to a
manuscript resembling Z?, H^()^Lec^ while [Fhas a more correct
version than the others of the common tradition, and three
sonnets which none of these include. Generally, whenever
B, GF, Sg6, and IV derive from the same source, IV is much
the most reliable witness.

Indeed, our first two groups and JV have the appearance of
being derived from some authoritative source, from manuscripts
in the possession of members of Donne's circle. All the others
suggest, by the headings they give to occasional poems, their
misunderstanding of the true character of some poems, their
erroneous ascriptions of poems, that they are the work of
amateurs to whom Donne was not known, or who belonged to
a generation that knew Donne as a divine, only vaguely as
a wit.

These being the materials at our command, the question is,
how are we to use them to secure as accurate a text as possible
of Donne's poems, to get back as close as may be to what the
poet wrote himself. The answer is fairly obvious, though it
could not be so until some effort had been made to survey the
manuscript material as a whole.

Of the three most recent editors— the first to attempt to
obtain a true text— of Donne's poems, each has pursued a
different plan. The late Dr. Grosart ^ proceeded on a principle

* The Complete Poems of John Donne, D.D., Dean of St PauPs. For
the First Time Fully Collected and Collated With The Original and
Early Editions And MSS. And Enlarged With Hitherto Unprinted
And Inedited Poems From MSS. &'c. . , . By The Rev. Alexander B.
Grosart, &'c. The Fuller Worthies' Library, 12,72-2,. Dr. Grosart's favourite
manuscript was the Stephens {S). When that failed him he used Addl. MS.
18643 (AiS), whose relation to the manuscripts in Trinity College, Dublin
and Cambridge {TCD, TCC), he did not suspect, though he collated these.
Some poems he printed from the Hazlewood-Kingsburgh MS. or the
P'armer-Chetham MS. The first two are not good texts of Donne's
poems, the last two are miscellaneous collections. The three first Satyres
Dr. Grosart printed from Harleian MS. 5110 (H^i)\ and he used other
sources for the poems he ascribed to Donne, It cannot be said that he
always recorded accurately the readings of the manuscript from which he
printed. I have made no effort to record all the differences between Grosart's
text and my own.

The description of the editions which Grosart gives at ii, p. liii is
amazingly inaccurate, considering that he claimed to have collated * all

T'ext of Donne s Poems, cxiii

which makes it exceedingly difficult to determine accurately
what is the source of, or authority for, any particular reading
he adopted. He printed now from one manuscript, now from
another, but corrected the errors of the manuscript by one or
Other of the editions, most often by that of 1669. He made
no estimate of the relative value of either manuscripts or
editions, nor used them in any systematic fashion.

The Grolier Club edition ^ was constructed on a different
principle. For all those poems which 16}} contains, that
edition was accepted as the basis ; for other poems, the first
edition, whichever that might be. The text of 16}} is repro-
duced very closely, even w^hen the editor leans to the acceptance
of a later reading as correct. Only one or two corrections are

the early and later printed editions '. He describes /(5jp, /<5^p, j6§o^ and
16^4 as identical with one another, and declares that the younger Donne
is responsible only for i66g^ which appeared after his death.

' The Poems of John Donne From The Text of The Edition of i6jj
Revised By Jatnes Russell Lowell With The Various Readings of The
Other Editions Of The Seventeenth Century, And With A Preface, An
Introduction, And Notes By Charles Eliot Norton. New York. 1895.
In preparing the text from Lowell's copy of i6jj, emended in pencil by
him, Professor Norton was assisted by Mrs. Burnett, the daughter of
Mr. Lowell. As I could not apportion the responsibility for the text
I have spoken throughout my textual notes and remarks of ' the Grolier
Club editor' {Grolier for short). I have accepted Professor Norton as
the sole author of the commentary. For instances where the punctuation
has been altered, and the meaning, in my opinion, obscured, 1 may refer
to the textual notes on The Legacie (p. 20), The Dreanie (p. yj), A tioc-
turnall upon S. Lttcies day (p. 45). I3ut I have cited and discussed most
of the cases in which I disagree with the Grolier Club editors. It is for
readers to judge whether at times they may not be right, and I have
gone astray. The Grolier Club edition only came into my hands when
1 had completed my first collation of the printed texts. Had I known it
sooner, or had the edition been more accessible, I should probably not
have ventured on the arduous task of editing Donne. It is based on
the best text, and the editors have been happier than most in their inter-
pretation and punctuation of the more difficult passages.

Professor Norton made no use of the manuscripts in preparing the
text, but he added in an appendix an account of the manuscript which,
following him, I have called N, and he gave a list of variants which
seemed to him possible emendations. Later, in the Child Memorial
Volume of Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature (1896), he gave
a somewhat fuller description of A'^ and descriptions of S (the Stephens
MS.) and Cy (the Carnaby MS.). Of the readings which Professor Norton
noted, several have passed into my edition on the authority of a wider
collation of the manuscripts.

II 9ns h

cxiv Introduction.

actually incorporated in the text. But the punctuation has
been freely altered throughout, and no record of these changes
is preserved in the textual notes even when they affect the
sense. In more than one instance the words of j6}^ are
retained in this edition but are made to convey a different
meaning from that which they bear in the original.

The edition of Donne's poems prepared by Mr. E. K.
Chambers^ for the Muses Library was not based, like
Dr. Grosart's, on a casual use of individual manuscripts and
editions, nor like the Grolier Club edition on a rigid adherence
to the first edition, but on an eclectic use of all the seventeenth-
century editions, supplemented by an occasional reference to
one or other of the manuscript collections, either at first hand
or through Dr. Grosart.

Of these three methods, that of the Grolier Club editor is,
there can be no doubt, the soundest. The edition of 1633
comes to us, indeed, with no a priori authority. It was not

^ Poems of John Donne Edited By E. K, Chambers. With An Intro-
duction By George Saintsbury. London aftd New York. iSg6. Of the
editions Mr. Chambers says: 'Nor can it be said that anyone edition
always gives the best text ; even for a single poem, sometimes one, some-
times another is to be preferred, though, as a rule, the edition of 1633 is
the most reliable, and the readings of i66g are in many cases a return
to it ' (vol. i, p. xliv). A considerable portion of Mr. Chambers' edition
would seem to have been ' set up ' from a copy of the 1639 edition, the
earlier and later readings being then either incorporated or recorded.
The result is that the i6jj or i6jj-j^ readings have been more than
once overlooked. This applies especially to the Epicedes and the
Divine Poems.

As with the Grolier Club edition, so with Mr. Chambers' edition, I have
recorded and discussed the chief differences between my text and his.
I have worked with his edition constantly beside me. I used it for my
collations on account of its convenient numbering of the lines. To
Mr. Chambers' commentary also I owe my first introduction to the wide
field of the- manuscripts. His knowledge of seventeenth-century literature
and history, which even in 1896 was extensive, has directed me in taking
up most of the questions of canon and authorship which I have investigated.
It is easy to record one's points of disagreement with a predecessor ; it is
more difficult to estimate accurately how much one owes to his labours.

Mr. Chambers, too, has ' modernized the spelling and corrected the
exceptionally chaotic punctuation of the old editions '. Of the latter changes
he has, with one or two exceptions, preserved no record, so that when,
as is sometimes the case, he has misunderstood the poet, it is impossible
10 get back to the original text of which the stops as well as the words
are a part.

Text of Donne s Poems. cxv

published, or (like the sermons) prepared for the press ^ by
the author ; nor (as in the case of the first folio edition of
Shakespeare's plays) was it issued by the author's executors.
But if we apply to i6)) the a posteriori tests described by
Dr. Moore in his work on the textual criticism of Dante's
Divina Comniedia^ if we select a number of test passages,
passages where the editions vary, but where one reading can
be clearly shown to be intrinsically the more probable, by
certain definite tests,- we shall find that i6)) is, taken all over,

* It is very unlikely that Donne had in his possession when he died
manuscript copies of his early poems. (l) Walton makes no mention of
them when enumerating the works which Donne left behind in manu-
script, including 'six score sermons all written with his own hand; also
an exact and laborious treatise concerning self-murder, called Biathanatos\
as well as elaborate notes on authors and events. (2) In 1614, when
Donne thought of publishing his poems, he found it necessary to beg
for copies from his fi iends : ' By this occasion I am made a Rhapsoder
of mine own rags, and that cost me more diligence to seek them, then it
did to make them. This made me aske to borrow that old book of you.'
To Sir H. G., Vigilia St. Tho. 1614. (3) Jonson and Walton both tell us
that Donne, after taking Orders, would have been glad to destroy his
early poems. The sincerity of this wish has been doubted because of
what he says in a letter regarding Biathanatos : ' I only forbid it the
press and the fire.' But Biathanatos is a very different matter from the
poems. It is a grave and devout, if daring, treatise in casuistry. No one
can enter into Donne's mind from 1617 onwards, as ascetic devotion
became a more and more sincere and consuming passion, and believe
that he kept copies of the early poems or paradoxes, prepared for the
press like his sermons or devotions.

* Contributions To The Textual Criticism of The Divina Coniinedia, &^l\
By the Rev. Edward Moore, D.D., ^'c. Cambridge, i88g. The tests which
Dr. Moore lays down for the judgement, on internal grounds, of a reading
are — I state them shortly in my own words— (l) That is the best reading
which best explains the erroneous readings. I have sometimes recorded
a quite impossible reading of a manuscript because it clearly came from
one rather than another of two rivals, and thus lends support to that reading
despite its own aberration. (2) Generally speaking, 'Difficilior lectio
potior,' the more difficult reading is the more likely to be the original. This
applies forcibly in the case of a subtle and difficult author like Donne.
The majority of the changes made in the later editions arise from the
tendency to make Donne's thought more commonplace. Even in i6jj
errors have crept in. The obsolete words ' lation ' (p. 94, 1. 47), 'crosse'
(p. 43, 1. 141 have been altered ; the old-fashioned and metaphorically
used idiom ' in Nature's gifts ' has confused the editor's punctuation ; the
subtle thought of the epistles has puzzled and misled. (3) 'Three minor
considerations may be added which are often very important, when
applicable, though they are from the nature of the case less frequently
available.' Moore. These are id) the consistency of the reading with
sentiments expressed by the author elsewhere. I have used the Sermons

h 2

cxvi httroduction.

far and away superior to any other single edition, and, I may
add at once, to any single manuscript.

Moreover, any careful examination of the later editions, of
their variations from i6}}^ and of the text of the poems which
they print for the first time, shows clearly that some method
more trustworthy than individual preference must be found if
we are to distinguish between those of their variations which
have, and those which have not, some authority behind them ;
those which are derived from a fresh reference to manuscript
sources, and those which are due to carelessness, to misunder-
standing, or to unwarrantable emendation. Apart from some
such sifting, an edition of Donne based, like Mr. Chambers', on
an eclectic use of the editions is exactly In the same position as
would be an edition of Shakespeare based on an eclectic use
of the Folios, helped out by a quite occasional and quite
eclectic reference to a quarto. A plain reprint of 16)} like
Alford's (of such poems as he publishes) has fewer serious
errors than an eclectic text.

It is here that the manuscripts come to our aid. To take,
indeed, any single manuscript, as Dr. Grosart did, and select
this or that reading from it as seems to you good, is not
a justifiable procedure. This is simply to add to the editions
one more possible source of error. There is no single manu-
script which could with any security be substituted for /6y.
Our analysis of that edition has made it appear probable that
a manuscript resembling Z?, H^g^ Lee was the source of
a large part of its text. But it would be very rash to prefer
D, H^g^ Lee as a whole to 16^}} It corrects some errors in
that edition ; it has others of its own. Even W^ which has

and other prose works to illustrate and check Donne's thought and
vocabulary throughout, (b) The relation of the reading to the probable
source of the poet's thought. A Scholastic doctrine olten lurks behind
Donne's wit, ignorance of which has led to corruption of the text.
See 'J'he Drcame, p. 37, 11. 7, 16 ; To Sr Hemy IVoiioti, p. 180, 11. 17-8.
(t) The relation of a reading to historical fact. In the letter To Sr Henry
IVotto?!, p. 187, the editors, forgetting the facts, have confused Cadiz with
Calais, and the Azores with St. Michael's Mount.

^ It is worth while to compare the kind of mistakes in which a manu-
script abounds with those which occur in a printed edition. The tendency
of the copyist was to write on without paying much attention to the sense,

Text of Donne s Poems. cxvii

a completer version of some poems than i6))^ in these
poems makes some mistakes which i6}) avoids.

If the manuscripts are to help us it must be by collating
them, and establishing what one might call the agreement of
the manuscripts whether universal or partial, noting in the
latter case the comparative value of the different groups.
When we do this we get at once an interesting result. We
find that in about nine cases out of ten the agreement of the
manuscripts is on the side of those readings of i6j} which are
supported by the tests of intrinsic probability referred to
above,' and on the other hand we find that sometimes the
agreement of the manuscripts is on the side of the later editions,

dropping words and lines, sometimes two consecutive half-lines or whole
stanzas, ignoring or confounding punctuation, mistaking words, &c. He
was, if a professional copyist or secretary, not very apt to attempt emenda-
tion. The kind of errors he made were easily detected Avhen the proof
was read over, or when the manuscript was revised with a view to printing.
Words or half-lines could be restored, &c. But in such revision a new
and dangerous source of error comes into play, the tendency of the editor
to emend.

^ Take a few instances where the latest editor, very naturally and
explicably, securing at places a reading more obvious and euphonious,
has departed from i6jj and followed i6jj or i66g. I shall take them
somewhat at random and include a few that may seem still open to
discussion. In The Undertaking (p. lo, 1. 18), for ' Vertue atlir'd in
woman see ', i6jj, Mr. Chambers reads, with id^s-dg, ' Vertue in woman
see.' So :

Loves Vsury, p. 13, 1. 5 :

let my body raigne /<5jj let my body range idj^-Sg^ Chambers
Aire and Angels, p. 22, 1. ig :

Ev'ry thy hair 1633 Thy every hair i6^o-6g, Chambers
The Curse, p. 41, 11. 3, 10:

His only, and only his purse 1633-34 Him, only for his purse

i66g. Chambers

who hath made him such 1633 who hath made them such

i66g, Chambers
A Valediction, p. 50, 1. 16 :

Those things which elemented it 1633 The thing which elemented it

i66g. Chambers
The Relique, p. 62, 1. 13 :

mis-devotion 1633-34 mass-devotion i66g, Chambers
Elegie II, p. 80, 1. 6:

is rough 1633, i66g is tough 1633-34, Chambers
Elegie VI, p. 88, 11. 24, 26:

and then chide 1633 and there chide i633-6g, Chambers

her upmost brow 1633 her utmost brow 1633- 6g, Chambers (an

oversight).

cxviii Introduction.

and that in such cases there is a good deal to be said for the
later reading.^

The first result of a collation of the manuscripts is thus to
vindicate i6}}, and to provide us with a means of distinguish-
ing among later variants those which have, from those which
have not, authority. But in vindicating j6)} the agreement
of the manuscripts vindicates itself. If ^'s evidence is found
always or most often to support A^ a good witness, on those
points on which A's evidence is in itself most probably
correct, not only is ^'s evidence strengthened but ^'s own

Epithalamions, p. 129, 1. 60:

store, 163^ starres, i6j^-6g, Chambers
Ibid., p. 133,1. 55:
I am not then from Court /djj And am I then from Court ?

/(5jj-dp, Chambers
Satyres, p. 169, 11. 37-41 :

The Iron Age that was, when justice was sold, now
Injustice is sold deerer farre ; allow
All demands, fees, and duties ; gamsters, anon
The mony which you sweat, and sweare for, is gon
Into other hands: /^jj

The iron Age that was, when justice was sold (now
Injustice is sold dearer) did allow
All claim'd fees and duties. Gamesters, anon
The mony which you sweat and swear for is gon
Into other hands. 163^-^4, Chambers {no italics', ' that ' o ;v?Ai-

tiife pronoun, I take it)
The Calme, p. 179, 1. 30 :

our brimstone Bath i6jj a brimstone bath i6j^-6p, Chambers
To Sr Henry Wotton, p. 180, 1. 17 :

dung, and garlike /<5jj dung, or garlike i6jj-6^, Chambers
Ibid., p. 181, 11. 25, 26:

The Country is a desert, where no good,
Gain'd, as habits, not borne, is understood. /<5jj

The Country is a desert, where the good,
Gain'd inhabits not, borne, is not understood.

/djj-j^. Chambers.
In all these passages, and I could cite others, it seems to me (I have
stated my reasons fully in the notes) that if the sense of the passage be
carefully considered, or Donne's use of words (e.g. 'mis-devotion'), or
the tenor of his thought, the reading of -?6jj is either clearly correct or
has much to be said for it. Now in all these cases the reading has the
support of all the manuscripts, or of the most and the best.

' e.g. 'their nothing' p. 31, 1. 53; 'reclaim'd' p. 56, I. 25; 'sport'
p. 56, 1. 27.

lext of Do?i7ie s Poems, cxix

character as a witness is established, and he may be called in
when A^ followed by C, an inferior witness, has gone astray.
In some cases the manuscripts alone give us what is obviously
the correct reading, e.g. p. 25, 1. 22^ ' But wee no more' for
' But now no more '; p. 72, 1. 26, ' his first minute ' for ' his
short minute '. These are exceptionally clear cases. There
are some where, I have no doubt, my preference of the
reading of the manuscripts to that of the editions will not
be approved by every reader. I have adopted no rigid rule,
but considered each case on its merits. All the circumstances
already referred to have to be weighed — which reading
is most likely to have arisen from the other, what is Donne's
usage elsewhere, what Scholastic or other ' metaphysical ' dogma
underlies the conceit, and what is the source of the text of
a particular poem in 16}}.

For my analysis of this edition has thrown light upon what
of itself is evident — that of some poems or groups of poems
16)} provides a more accurate text than of others, viz. of those
for which its source was a manuscript resembling Z>, H^^^Lec^
but possibly more correct than any one of these, or revised by
an editor who knew the poems. But in printing some of the
poems, e.g. The Progyesse of the Soule^ a number of the
letters to noble ladies and others,^ the Epithalamion
made at Lincolns Inne^ The Prohibition^ and a few
others, for which Z?, H^g, Lee was not available, 16)}
seems to have followed an inferior manuscript, A 18^ Ny TC
or one resembling it. In these cases it is possible to correct
16}) by comparing it with a better single manuscript, as G or
Wy or group of manuscripts, as Z?, H^g^ Lee. Sometimes
even a generally inferior manuscript like O'F seems to offer
a better text of an individual poem, at least in parts, for

' The /<5jj text of these letters, which is generally that of AiS^ N, TC,
is better than I was at one time disposed to think, though there are some
indubitable errors and perhaps some original variants. The crucial
reading is at p. 197, 1. 58, where i6jj and Ai8, N, TC read ' not naturally
free ', while 1635-6^ and CfF read ' borne naturally free ', at first sight
an easier and more natural text, and adopted by both Chambers and
Grosart. I$ut consideration of the passage, and of what Donne says
elsewhere, shows that the 1633 reading is certainly right.

cxx hitroduction.

occasionally the correct reading has been preserved in only
one or two manuscripts. Only W^ among eleven manuscripts
which I have recorded (and I have examined others) preserves
the reading in the Epithalainion made at Lincohts l7ine^

P- 143. 1- 57 :

His steeds nill be restrain'd

— which is quite certainly right. Only three manuscripts have

the, to my mind, most probably correct reading in Saiyre /,

1. 58, p. 147:

The Infanta of London ;

and only two, Q and. the Dyce MS. which is its duplicate,

the tempting and, I think, correct reading in Saiyre /F, 1. 38,

p. 160 :

He speaks no language.

Lastly, there are poems for which i6j^ is not available.
The authenticity of these will be discussed later. Their text
is generally very corrupt, especially of those added in i6yo
and i66g. Here the manuscripts help us enormously. With
their aid I have been able to give an infinitely more readable
text of the fine Elegie XII, ' Since she must go ' ; the brilliant
though not very edifying Elegies XVII, XVIII, and XIX ; as
well as of most of the poems in the Appendixes. The work
of correcting some of these had been begun by Dr. Grosart
and Mr. Chambers, but much was still left to do by a wider
collation. Dr. Grosart was content with one or two generally
inferior manuscripts, and Mr. Chambers mentions manuscripts
which time or other reasons did not allow him to examine, or
he could not have been content to leave the text of these poems
as it stands in his edition.

One warning which must be borne in mind when making
a comparison of alternative readings has been given by
Mr. Chambers, and my examination of the manuscripts bears
it out : ' In all probability most of Donne's poems existed in
several more or less revised forms, and it was sometimes a
matter of chance which form was used for printing a particular
edition.' The examination of a large number of manuscripts
has shown that it is not probable, but certain, that of some

T'ext of Donne s Poems, cxxi

poems (e.g. The Flea, A Lecttire upon the Shadow, The Good-
Morrow, Elegie XI. The Bracelet) more than one distinct ver-
sion was in circulation. Of the Satyr es, too, many of the variants
represent, I can well believe, different versions of the poems
circulated by the poet among his friends. And the same may
possibly be true of variants in other poems. Our analysis of
i6)) has shown us what versions were followed by that edition.
What happened in later editions was frequently that the readings
of two different versions were combined eclectically. In the
present edition, when it is clear that there were two versions,
my effort has been to retain one tradition pure, recording the
variants in the notes, even when in individual cases the reading
of the text adopted seemed to me inferior to its rival, provided
it was not demonstrably wrong.

In view of what has been said, the aim of the present edition
may be thus briefly stated :

(i) To restore the text of i6)) in all cases where modern
editors have abandoned or disguised it, if there is no evidence,
internal or external, to prove its error or inferiority ; and to
show, in the textual notes, how far it has the general support
of the manuscripts.

(2) To correct 16}} when the meaning and the evidence of
the manuscripts point to its error and suggest an indubitable
or highly probable emendation.

(3) To correct throughout, and more drastically, by help of
the manuscripts when such exist, the often carelessly and
erroneously printed text of those poems which were added in
16)^., i64<), i6jo, and i66g.

(4) By means of the commentary to vindicate or defend my
choice of reading, and to elucidate Donne's thought by
reference to his other works and (but this I have been able to
do only very partially) to his scholastic and other sources.

As regards punctuation, it was my intention from the outset
to preserve the original, altering it only {a) when, judged by
its own standards, it was to my mind wrong — stops were dis-
placed or dropped, or the editor had misunderstood the poet ;
(<$) when even though defensible the punctuation was misleading.

cxxii Introduction.

tested frequently by the fact that it had misled editors. In
doing this I frequently made unnecessary changes because it
was only by degrees that I came to understand all the subtleties
of older punctuation and to appreciate some of its nuances.
A good deal of my work in the final revision has consisted in
restoring the original punctuation. In doing this I have been
much assisted by the study of Mr. Percy Simpson's work
on Shakespearian Pimctuation. My punctuation will not
probably in the end quite satisfy either the Elizabethan purist,
or the critic who would have preferred a modernized text.
I will state the principles which have guided me.

I do not agree with Mr. Chambers that the punctuation, at
any rate of i6}}^ is ' exceptionally chaotic '. It is sometimes
wrong, and in certain poems, as the Satyres^ it is careless.
But as a rule it is excellent on its own principles. Donne,
indeed, was exceptionally fastidious about punctuation and
such typographical details as capital letters, italics, brackets, &c.
The LXXX Sermons of 1640 are a model of fine rhetorical
and rhythmical pointing, pointing which inserted stops to show
you where to stop. The sermons were not printed in his life-
time, but we know that he wrote them out for the press, hoping
that they might be a source of income to his son.

But Donne did not prepare his poems for the press. Their
punctuation is that of the manuscript from which they were
taken, revised by the editor or printer. One can often recognize
in D the source of a stop in J<5y, or can see what the pointing
and use of capitals would have been had Donne himself super-
vised the printing. The printer's man was sometimes careless ;
the printer or editor had prejudices of his own in certain
things ; and Donne is a difficult and subtle poet. All these
circumstances led to occasional error.

The printer's prejudice was one which Donne shared, but
not, I think, to quite the same extent. Compared, for example,
with xhe A nmversart'es (printed in Donne's lifetime) i^jf^ shows
a fondness for the semicolon,^ not only within the sentence,

* The 16^0 printer delighted in colons, which he generally substituted
for semicolons indiscriminately.

Text of Donne s Poems, cxxiii

but separating sentences, instead of a full stop, when these are
closely related in thought to one another. In an argumentative
and rhetorical poet like Donne the result is excellent, once
one grows accustomed to it, as is the use of commas, \\'here we
should use semicolons, within the sentence, dividing co-ordinate
clauses from one another. On the other hand this use of semi-
colons leads to occasional ambiguity when one which separates
two sentences comes into close contact with another within the
sentence. For example, in Satyre III, 11. 69-72, how should
an editor, modernizing the punctuation, deal with the semi-
colons in 11. 70 and 71 ? Should he print thus .-• —

But unmoved thou
Of force must one, and forc'd but one allow ;
And the right. Ask thy father which is shee ;
Let him ask his.

With trifling differences that is how Chambers and the
Grolier Club editor print them. But the lines might run, to
my mind preferably —

But unmoved thou
Of force must one, and forc'd but one allow.
And the right; ask thy father which is shee,
Let him ask his.

' And the right ' being taken as equivalent to ' And as to the
right '. One might even print —

And the right } Ask, &c.

One of the semicolons is equivalent to a little more than a
comma, the other to a little less than a full stop.

Another effect of this finely-shaded punctuation is that the
question is constantly forced upon an editor, is it correct ?
Has the printer understood the subtler connexion of Donne's
thought, or has he placed the semicolon where the full stop
should be, the comma where the semicolon ? My solution of
these difficulties has been to face and try to overcome them.
I have corrected the punctuation where it seemed to me, on its
own principles, definitely wrong ; and I have, but more spar-
ingly, amended the pointing where it seemed to me to disguise

cxxiv hitroduction.

the subtler connexions of Donne's thought or to disturb the rhe-
toric and rhythm of his verse paragraphs. In doing so I have
occasionally taken a hint from the manuscripts, especially D
and IV^ which, by the kindness of Mr. Gosse and Professor
Dowden, I have had by me while revising the text. But if I
occasionally quote these manuscripts in support of my punctua-
tion, it is only with a view to showing that I have not departed
from the principles of Elizabethan pointing. I do not quote
them as authoritative. On questions of punctuation none of the
extant manuscripts could be appealed to as authorities. Their
punctuation is often erratic and chaotic, when it is not omitted
altogether. Finally, I have recorded every change that I have
made. A reader should be able to gather from the text
and notes combined exactly what was the text of the
first edition of each poem, whether it appeared in i6}} or
a subsequent edition, in every particular, whether of word,
spelling, or punctuation. My treatment of the last will not, as
I have said, satisfy every reader. I can only say that 1 have
given to the punctuation of each poem as much time and
thought as to any part of the work. In the case of Donne
this is justifiable. I am not sure that it would be in the case
of a simpler, a less intellectual poet. It would be an easier
task either to retain the old punctuation and leave a reader to
correct for himself, or to modernize. With all its refinements,
Elizabethan punctuation erred by excess. A reader who gives
thought and sympathy to a poem does not need all these com-
mands to pause, and they frequently irritate and mislead.

CANON.

The authenticity of all the poems ascribed to Donne in the
old editions is a question which has never been systematically
and fully considered by his editors and critics. A number
of poems not included in these editions have been attributed
to him by Simeon (1856), Grosart (1873), and others on very
insufficient grounds, whether of external evidence or internal
probability. Of the poems published in 7(5y, one, Basse's An
Epitaph upon Shakespeare^ was withdrawn at once ; another.

Ca7i07i of Do?tnes Poems. cxxv

the metrical Psalme 7^7, has been discredited and Chambers
drops it.^ Of those which were added in 16}^, one, To Ben
lonson. 6 Ian. i6oj, has been dropped by Grosart, the Groh'er
Club edition, and Chambers on the strength of a statement made
to Drummond by Ben Jonson.^ But the editors have accepted
Jonson's statement without apparently giving- any thought to
the question whether, if this particular poem is by Roe, the
same must not be true of its companion pieces, To Ben.
lonson. g Noventbris, 160}. and To Sir Tho. Roe. 160).
They are inserted together in i6)j, and are strikingly similar
in heading, in style, and in verse. Nor has any critic, so far
as I know, taken up the larger question raised by rejecting one
of the poems ascribed to Donne in i6}j, namely, are not all the
poems then added made thereby to some extent suspect, and
if so can we distinguish those which are from those which are
not genuine ? I propose then to discuss, in the light afforded
by a wider and more connected survey of the seventeenth-
century manuscript collections, the authenticity of the poems
ascribed to Donne in the old editions, and to ask what, if any,
poems may be added to those there published.

For this discussion an invaluable starting-point is afforded
by the edition of 1633, the manuscript group Z>, H^fg, Lee, and
the manuscript ^xow^i A18, N, TCC, TCD.. Taken together,
and used to check one another, these three collections provide
us with a corpus of indubitable poems which may be used as
a test by which to try other claimants. Of course, it must be
clearly understood that the only proof which can be offered

' Mr. Chambers has reprinted a good many of these, but only in an
Appendix and under the title of Doubtful Poems. He has added a few
more from A2^, from Coryats Crudities, and from some manuscripts in
the Bodleian Library. If printed at all it is a pity that these poems were
not reproduced more correctly. Textually the appendices are much the
worst part of Mr. Chambers' edition. In most cases he has, I presume,
taken the poems over as they stand from Simeon and Grosart.

"^ All three editors have also dropped the song ' Ueare Love continue
nice and chaste', David Laing having pointed out {Archaeologia Scotica,
iv. 73-6) that this poem occurs in the Hawthornden MSS. with the
signature 'J. R.' Chambers also rejects the sonnet On the Blessed Virgin
Mary, probably by Henry Constable, and all three editors exclude the
lines On the Sacranieni.

cxxvi Introductio7i,

that Donne is the author of many poems is, that they are
ascribed to him in edition after edition and manuscript after
manuscript, and that they bear a strong family resemblance.
There is no edition issued by himself or in his lifetime.^

Bearing this in mind we find that in the edition of 1633 there
are only two poems — Basse's Epitaph on Shakespeare and
the Psalme 7^7, bbth already mentioned — for the genuineness
which there is not strong evidence, internal and external.
But these two poems are the only ones not contained in Z?»
H^g, Lee or in A 18, N, TC. In Z?, H^g, Lee, on the other
hand, there are no poems which are not, on the same evidence,
genuine. There are, however, some which are not in 16))^
seven in all. But of these, five are the Elegies which, we have
seen above, the editor of 16}} was prohibited from printing.
The others are the Lecture up07i the Shadow (why omitted in
16}} I cannot say) and the lines ' My fortune and my choice '.
There are poems in 16}} which are not in D, Hj^g, Lee.
These, with the exception of poems previously printed, as the
A nniversaries and the Elegie on Prince Henry, are all in A iS,
N, TC. This last collection does contain some twelve poems
not by Donne, but of these the majority are found only in N
and TCD, and they make no pretence to be Donne's. Three
are initialled 'J. R.' (in 7"CZ>),and two of these, with some poems
by Overbury and Beaumont, are not part of the Donne col-
lection but are added at the end. Another poem is initialled
* R. Cor.' The only poems which are included among Donne's
poems as though by him are The Paradox (' Whoso terms Love
a fire ') and the Letter or Elegy, ' Madam soe may my verses
pleasing be.' Of these, the first is in all four manuscripts, the
second only in iVand TCD. Neither is in D, H^g, Lee, or 16)).
The last is by Beaumont, and follows immediately a letter by
Donne to the same lady, the Countess of Bedford. Doubtless
the two poems have come from some collection in which they

^ I have given with each poem a list of the editions and manuscripts
(known to me) in which it is contained. A glance at these will show the
weight of the external evidence. Of internal evidence every man must be
judge for himself.

Canon of Donne s Poems. cxxvii

were transcribed together, ultimately from a commonplace-
book of the Countess herself The former may be by Donne,
but has probably adhered for a like reason to his paradox,
' No lover saith ' (p. 302), which immediately precedes it.

We have thus three collections, each of which has kept its
canon pure or very nearly so, and in which any mistake by one
is checked by the absence of the poem in the other two. It
cannot be by accident that these collections are so free from the
unauthentic poems which other manuscripts associate with
Donne's. Those who prepared them must have known what
they were about. Marriot must have had some help in securing-
a text on the whole so accurate as that of 16}}^ and in avoiding
spurious poems on the whole so well. When that guidance
was withdrawn he was only too willing to go a-gathering what
would swell the compass of his volume. If then a poem does
not occur in any of these collections it is not necessarily
unauthentic, but as no such poem has anything like the wide
support of the manuscripts that these have, it should present its
credentials, and approve its authenticity on internal grounds if
external are not available.

We start then with a strong presumption, coming as close to
demonstration as the circumstances of the case will permit, in
favour of the absolute genuineness of all the poems in 16)}
(a glance down the list headed ' Source ' in the ' Contents ' will
show what these are) except the two mentioned, and of all the
poems added in 16} j^ or later editions, which are also in
D, H^g, Lee and A 18, N, TC} These last (to which I prefix
the date of first publication) are —

i6)y. A Lecture upon the Shadow.

i6}j. Elegie XI. The Bracelet.

i6)y. Elegie XVI. On his Mistris.

i66g. Elegie XVIII. Love's Progresse.

i66(). Elegie XIX, Going to Bed.

1802."^ Elegie XX. Love's Warr.

' To these must of course be added poems already published in Donne's
name. See II. Ivi.
^ In F. G. Waldron's A Collection of Miscellaneous Poetry. 1802.

cxxviii hitroduction.

(These are the five Elegies suppressed in i6)^ — at sucli long-
intervals did they find their way into print.)
i6}^. On himselfe.
We may add to these, without lengthy investigation, the
four Holy Sonnels added in i6)j; : —

I. ' Thou hast made me.'

III. ' O might those sighs and tears.'

V. ' I am a little world.'

VIII. 'Iffaithfullsoules.'
For these (though in none of the three collections) we have,
besides internal probability, the evidence of W^ clearly an un-
exceptionable manuscript witness. Walton, too, vouches for
the authenticity of the Hytnne to God my God, z« 7ny sicknesse,
which indeed no one but Donne could have written.

This leaves for investigation, of poems inserted in i6)^^
164^, i6jo, or j66c}, the following: —

1. Song. ' Soules joy, now I am gone.'

2. Farewell to love.

3. Song. ' Deare Love, continue nice and chaste.'

4. Sonnet. The Token.

5. ' He that cannot chuse but love.'

6. Elegie (XIII in 16) f). ' Come, Fates ; I feare you not.'

7. Elegie XII (XIIII in 16}^). His parting from her.

' Since she must goe, and I must mourne.'

8. Elegie XIII (XV in i6}y). Jzdia.

' Harke newes, 6 envy.'

9. Elegie XIV (XVI in 16} j). A Tale of a Citizen and

his Wife. ' I sing no harme.'
10. Elegie XVII. Variety. ' The heavens rejoice.'

II. Satyre (VI in /^^j, VII in i66g).

' Men write that love and reason disagree.'

12. Satyre (VI in i66g).

' Sleep, next society and true friendship.'

13. To the Countesse of Huntington.

' That unripe side of earth, that heavy clime.'

14. A Dialogue between Sr Henry Wotton and Mr. Donne.

' If her disdayne least change in you can move.'

Ca7i07i of Don?ies Poems. cxxix

15. To Ben lohnson, 6. Jan. 1603.

' The state and mens affaires.'

16. To Ben lohnson, 9. Novembris, 1603.

' If great men wrong me.'

17. To Sir Tho. Roe. 1603.

Deare Thom : ' Tell her, if she to hired servants
shew.'

18. Elegie on Mistresse Boulstred.

' Death be not proud.'

19. On the blessed Virgin Mary.

' In that, 6 Queene of Queenes.'

20. Upon the translation of the Psalmes by Sir Philip

Sydney and the Countesse of Pembroke his Sister.
' Eternall God, (for whom who ever dare).'

21. Ode.

' Vengeance will sit.'

22. To Mr. Tilman after he had taken Orders.

* Thou, whose diviner soule hath caus'd thee now.'

23. On the Sacrament.

' He was the Word that spake it.'

Of these twenty-three poems there is none which does not
seem to me fairly open to question, though of some I think
Donne is certainly the author.

Seven of the twenty-three (3, 6, 11, 12, 15, 16, 17) I have
gathered together in my Appendix A, with two (' Shall I goe
force' and ' True love finds witt ', the first of which ^ was printed
in Le Prince d'Aitiouy^ 1660, and reprinted by Simeon,
1856, and Grosart, 1872), as the work not of Donne but of
Sir John Roe. The reasons which ha\'e led me to do so are
not perhaps singly conclusive, but taken together they form
a converging and fairly convincing demonstration. The
argument starts from Ben Jonson's statement to Drummond
of Hawthornden regarding the Epistle at p. 408 (15 above) :
' That Sir John Roe loved him ; and that when they two were

' Chambers includes it in his Appendix A, Doubtful Poetns, but seems
to lean to the view that it is by Roe. The second is printed as Donne's
by Grosart and as presumably Donne's by Chambers.
II ei7-3 i

cxxx Introduction.

ushered by my Lord Suffolk from a Mask, Roe writt a moral
Epistle to him, which began. That next to playes the Court
and the State were the best. God threatneth Kings, Kings
Lords [as] Lords do us.' Dynmmojid's Conversations ivith
Jonson^ ed. Laing.

Now this statement of Jonson's is confirmed by some at any
rate of the manuscripts which contain the poem (see textual
notes) since these append the initials 'J. R.' But all the
manuscripts which contain the one poem contain also the next,
' If great men wrong me,' and though none have added the
initials 'J. R.', B^ in which it has been separated from ' The
state and mens affairs ' by two other poems, appends ' doubtfull
author ' (the whole collection being professedly one of Donne's
poems). The third poem. To Sr Tho. Roe, i6oj (p. 410), is in
the same way found in all the manuscripts (except two, which
are one, H^o and RP^i) which contain the epistles to Jonson,
generally in their immediate proximity, and in B initialled
'J. R.' In the others the poem is unsigned, and in Zj^ a much
later hand has added 'J. D.'

Of the other poems, the first — the poem which w^as in
i66() printed as Donne's seventh Satyre, was dropped in 77/9
but restored by Chalmers, Grosart, and Chambers — is said in B
to be ' By Sir John Roe ', and it is initialled ' J. R.' in TCD.
Even an undiscriminating manuscript like O'F adds the note
' Quere, if Donnes or Sr Th : Rowes ', the more famous Sir
Thomas Roe being substituted for his (in 1632) forgotten
relative. Of the remaining five poems only two, ' Dear Love,
continue nice and chaste ' (p. 406) and ' Shall I goe force an
Elegie?' (p. 410) are actually initialled in any of the manu-
scripts in which I have found them.

But the presence or absence of a name or initials is not
a conclusive argument. It depends on the character of the
manuscript. That 'Sleep next Society' is initialled ' J. R,'
in so carefully prepared a collection of Donne's poems as TCD
is valuable evidence, and the initials in a collection so well
vouched for as HN, Drummond's copy of a collection of
poems in the possession of Donne, can only be set aside by

Cano7i of Do7t?ies Poems. cxxxi

a scepticism which makes all historical questions insoluble.
But no reliance can be placed upon the unsupported statement
of any other of the manuscripts in which some or all of these
poems occur, any more than on that of the 1635 and later
editions. The best of them {H^o, RP}i) are often silent, and
the others are too often mistaken to be implicitly trusted. If
we are to get the truth from them it must be by cross-
examination.

For the second proof on which my ascription of the poems
to Roe is based is the singular regularity with which they
adhere to one another. If a manuscript has one it generally
has the rest in close proximity. Thus B^ after giving thirty-
six poems by Donne, of which only one is wrongly ascribed,
continues with a number that are clearly by other authors as well
as Donne, and of ten sequent poems five are ' Sleep next
Society,' ' The State and mens affairs,' ' True love finds witt,'
' If great men wrong mee,' ' Dear Thom: Tell her if she.' A
fragment of ' Men say that love and reason disagree ' comes
rather later. H40 and RP)i give in immediate sequence
' The State and mens affeirs,' ' If great men wrong me,' ' True
Love finds witt,' ' Shall I goe force an elegie,' ' Come Fates ;
I fear you not.' -^7^, a collection not only of poems by
Donne but of the work of other wits of the day, transcribes in
immediate sequence ' Deare Love continue,' ' The State and
mens affairs,' ' If great men wrong mee,' ' Shall I goe force an
elegie,' ' Tell her if shee,' ' True love finds witt,' ' Come Fates,
I fear you not,' Lastly A 10^ a quite miscellaneous collection,
gives in immediate or very close sequence '[Dear Thom:]
Tell her if she,' ' True love finds witt,' ' Dear Love continue
nice and chaste,' ' Shall I goe force an elegie,' ' Men write that
love and reason disagree.' ' Come Fates ; I fear you not '
follows after a considerable interval.

It cannot be by an entire accident that these poems thus
recur in manuscripts which have so far as we can see no com-
mon origin.^ And as one is ascribed to Roe on indisputable

^ In (9'/^ and S, where they also occur, they are more dispersed ; but
these manuscripts have, like /6jj, adopted a classification of the poems

i 2

cxxxii hitrochiction.

three on very strong evidence, it is a fair inference, if borne
out by a general resemblance of thought, and style, and verse,
that they are all by Roe.

To my mind they have a strong family resemblance, and
very little resemblance to Donne's work. They are witty, but
not with the subtle, brilliant, metaphysical wit of Donne ; they
are obscure at times, but not as Donne's poetry is, by too swift
and subtle transitions, and ingeniously applied erudition ;
there are in them none of Donne's peculiar scholastic doctrines
of angelic knowledge, of the microcosm, of soul and body, or
of his chemical and medical allusions ; they are coarse and
licentious, but not as Donne's poems are, with a kind of witty
depravity, ItaUan in origin, and reminding one of Ovid and
Aretino, but like Jonson's poetry with the coarseness of
the tavern and the camp. On both Jonson's and Roe's work
rests the trail of what was probably the most licentious and
depraving school in Europe, the professional armies serving
in the Low Countries.

For a brief account of Roe's life will explain some features
of his poetry, especially the vivid picture of life in London in
the Satire, ' Sleep next Society,' which is strikingly different
in tone, and in the aspects of that life which are presented,
from anything in Donne's Satyr es. Roe has been hitherto
a mere name appearing in the notes to Jonson's and to
Donne's poems. No critic has taken the trouble to identify
him. Gifford suggested or stated that he was the son of
Sir Thomas Roe, who as Mayor of London was knighted in
1569. Mr. Chambers accepts this and when referring to
Jonson, Epigram 98, on Roe the ambassador, he adds, ' there
are others in the same collection to his uncles Sir John Roe
and William Roe.' Who this uncle was they do not tell us,
but Hunter in the Chorus Vaitini notes that, if Gifford's
conjecture be sound, then he must be John Roe of Clapham
in Bedfordshire, the eldest son of the Lord Mayor.

they contain which involves their distribution as songs, elegies, letters and
satires. Aio is the most significant witness. This manuscript contains
very few poems by Donne. Why should it select just this suspicious group ?

Ca7ion of Do7ines Poems. cxxxiii

It is a quaint picture we thus get of the famous am-
bassador's uncle (he was older than ' Dear Thom's ' father) —
a kind of Sir Toby Belch, taking- the pleasures of the town
with his nephew, and writing a satire which might make
a young man blush to read. But in fact John Roe of Clapham
was never Sir John, and he was dead twelve years before 1603,
when these poems were written.^ Sir John Roe the poet was
the cousin, not the uncle, of the ambassador. He was the
eldest son of William Rowe (or Roe) of Higham Hill, near
Walthamstow, in the county of Essex.^ William Roe was the
third son of the first Lord Mayor of the name Roe.'' He had
two sons, John and William, the latter of whom is probably the
person addressed in Jonson's,^z^rrt7//7;/<?j", cxxviii. John was
born, according to a statement in Morant's History of Essex
(i 768), on the fifth of May, 1581. This harmonizes with the fact
that when the elder William Roe died in 1596 John was still
a minor and thereby a cause of anxiety to his father, who in his
will, proved in 1596, begs his wife and executors to 'be suiters
for his wardeshipp, that his utter spoyle (as much as in them
is) male be prevented '. This probably refers to the chance
of a courtier being made ward and despoiling the lad. The
following year he matriculated at Queen's College, Oxford.^

^ Among the marriage licences granted by the Bishop of London in
1601 {Harlcian Society Publicaiiotis) is the following: 'Henry Sackford
the younger, of the Charter House, Gent ; 27, father dead, and Sarah Rowe
of St Johns in St John's Street, co. Middlesex, Maiden, dau. of John Rowe
of Clapham, Beds, Esq. deed (i. e. deceas'd) about 9 years since,' &c.

* See the genealogies given in the Harleuut Society Publications, \-ol.
xiii, 1878, from the Visitation of Essex 161 2 (pp. 282-3) and the Visitation
of Essex 1634 (p. 479).

' The oldest was the John Rowe of Clapham, Beds. The second,
Henry, was also Mayor of London and was knighted in 1603. The fourth,
Robert, was the father of the ambassador, and died while his son was
a child. There were two daughters— Mary, who married Thomas Randall,
and PLlizabeth, who married William Garret of Dorney, co. Bucks. The son
of the latter couple was Donne's intimate friend George Gerrard or Garrard.

* Row, John, of Essex, arm. matric. 14 Oct., 1597, aged 16. (Joseph
Foster, Alicmni Oxonienses, iii, 1284). The Provost of Queen's has
kindly informed me that in the College books his name is entered simply
as* Rowe' and as having entered ' Ter. Mich. 1597 '. He tells me further
that in Andrew Clark's edition of the University Matriculation Registers
it is stated that the date of his matriculation was between Oct. 14 and
Dec. 3, 1597. There can be no doubt, I think, that this is our Roe.

cxxxiv Introduction,

How long he stayed there is not known, probably not long.
The career he chose was that of a soldier, and his first service
was in Ireland. If he went there with Essex in 1599 he is
perhaps one of that general's many knights. But he may
have gone thither later, for he evidently found a patron in
Mountjoy. In 1605 that nobleman, then Earl of Devonshire,
wrote to Sir Ralph Winwood, Ambassador to the United
Provinces, first to recommend Roe to him as one wishing to
follow the wars and therein to serve the States ; and then to
thank him for his readiness to befriend Sir John Roe, He
adds that he will be ever ready to serve the States to requite
any favour Roe shall receive.^ By 1608 he was dead, for
a list of captains discharged in Ireland since 1603 gives the
following : ' Born in England and dead in 1608 —Sir John Roe.' -
Such in brief outhne is the life of the man who in 1603,
possibly between his Irish and Low Country campaigns,
appears in London as one, with his more famous cousin
Thomas, of the band of wits and poets whose leader was
Jonson, whose most brilliant star was Donne. Jonson's
epigrams and conversations enable us to fill in some of the
colours wanting in the above outline. The most interesting
of these shows Roe to have been in Russia as well as Ireland
and the Low Countries, and tells us that he was, like ' Natta
the new knight ' in his Satyre, a duellist :

XXXII.
ON SIR lOHN ROE.

What two brave perills of the private sword

Could not effect, not all the furies doe.
That selfe-devided Belgia did afford ;

What not the envie of the seas reach 'd too.

There are not likely to have been two in the County of Essex with the
right to be called * armiger '. Had his father still lived he would have
been entered as ' fil. gen. ' or ' fil. arm."

^ Hist. MSS. Com. : Biiccleugh MSS. (Montague House), vol. i, pp.
56, 58. The letters are dated May 13, Nov. 7.

* Calenda?- of State Papers. Ireland, 1606-8, p. 538. I owe this and
the last reference to Mr. Murray L. R. lieavan, University Assistant in
History, Aberdeen University.

Canon of Donne s Poems. cxxxv

The cold of Mosco^ and fat Irish ayre,

His often change of clime (though not of mind)

What could not worke ; at home in his repaire
Was his blest fate, but our hard lot to find.

Which shewes, where ever death doth please t' appeare,
Seas, serenes, swords, shot, sicknesse, all are there.

In his conversations with Drummond Jonson as usual gave
more intimate and less complimentary details : ' Sir John Roe
was an infinite spender, and used to say, when he had no
more to spend he could die. He died in his (i.e. Jonson's)
arms of the pest, and he furnished his charges 2olb., which
was given him back,' doubtless by his brother William.
Morant states that ' Sir John the eldest son, having no issue,
sold this Manor (i.e. Higham-hill) to his father-in-law Sir
Reginald Argall, of whom it was purchased by the second
son — Sir William Rowe '.

Such a career is much more likely than Donne's to have
produced the satire ' Sleep, next Society ', with its lurid
picture of cashiered captains, taverns, stews, duellists, hard
drinkers, and parasites. It is much more like a scene out of
Bartholomew Fair than any of Donne's five Satyres. Nor was
Donne likely at any time to have written of James I as Roe
does. He moved in higher circles, and was more politic.
But Roe had ability, ' Deare Love, continue nice and chaste '
is not quite in the taste of to-day, but it is a good example of
the paradoxical, metaphysical lyric ; and there are both
feeling and wit in ' Come, Fates ; I feare you not ', unlike as it
is to Donne's subtle, erudite, intenser strain.

Returning to the list of poems open to question on
pp. cxxviii-ix we have sixteen left to consider. Of some of
these there is very little to say.

Nos. I and 14 are most probably by the Earl of Pembroke,
and the Earl of Pembroke collaborating with Sir Benjamin
Rudyard. Both were wits and poets of Donne's circle. The
first song,

* Soules joy, now I am gone '

is ascribed to Donne only in i6)^~6g^ and is there inaccurately

cxxxvi Introduction,

printed. It is assigned to Pembroke in the younger Donne's
edition of Pembroke and Ruddier's Poems (1660), a bad witness,
but also by Lansdowne MS. ']']']^ which Mr. Chambers justly
calls ' avery good authority '.' The latter, however, believes the
poem to be Donne's because the central idea — the inseparable-
ness of souls — is his, and so is the contemptuous tone of

Fooles have no meanes to meet,
But by their feet.

But both the contemptuous tone and the Platonic thought
were growing common. We get it again in Lovelace's

If to be absent were to be
Away from thee.

The thought is Donne's, but not the airy note, the easy style,
or the tripping prosody. Donne never writes of absence in this
cheerful, confident strain. He consoles himself at times with
the doctrine of inseparable souls, but the note of pain is never
absent. He cannot cheat his passionate heart and senses with
metaphysical subtleties.

The song Fayewell to love, the second in the list of poems
added in i6}j, is found only in 6^'/^ and Sg6. There is there-
fore no weighty external evidence for assigning it to Donne,
but no one can read it without feeling that it is his. The
cynical yet passionate strain of wit, the condensed style, and the
metaphysical turn given to the argument, are all in his manner.
As printed in i6)j the point of the third stanza is obscured.
As I have ventured to amend it, an Aristotelian doctrine is
referred to in a way that only Donne would have done in
quite such a setting.

The three Elegies, XII, XIII, and XIV (7. 8, 9 in the list),
must also be assigned to Donne, unless some more suitable
candidate can be advanced on really convincing grounds. The
first of the three, Hi's parting from her, is so fine a poem that it

' Other poems by 1 emliroke are found in the manuscript collections of
Uonne's poems. A schol.iriy i-dition f>f the poems of Pembroke and
Rudyard would be a boon. Many ascribed to them by the younger Donne
in his edition of 1660 could be removed and others added from manuscript
sources.

Ca/i07? of Donne 5 Poems. cxxxvii

is difficult to think any unknown poet could have written it. In
sincerity and poetic quality it is one of the finest of the Elegies^
and in this sincerer note, the absence of witty paradox, it differs
from poems like The Bracelet 2lX\A The Per/time and resembles
the fine elegy called Hi's Picture and two other pieces that
stand somewhat apart from the general tenor of the Elegies^
namely, the famous elegy On his Mistins, in which he dissuades
her from travelling with him as a page :

By our first strange and fatal interview,

and that rather enigmatical poem The Expostiilatioii ^ which
found its way into Jonson's Underivoods :

To make the doubt clear that no woman's true.
Was it my fate to prove it strong in you ?

All of these poems bear the imprint of some actual experience,
and to this cause we may perhaps trace the comparative
rareness with which His parting from her is found in manu-
scripts, and that it finally appeared in a mutilated form. The
poet may have given copies only to a few friends and desired
that it should not be circulated. In the Second Collection of
poems in TCD it is signed at the close, ' Sir Franc : Wryoth-
lesse.' Who is intended by this I do not know. The ascrip-
tions in this collection are many of them purely fanciful. Still,
that the poem is Donne's rests on internal evidence alone.

Of the other two elegies, Jiilia^ which is found in only two
manuscripts, B and O'F, is quite the kind of thing Donne
might have amused himself by writing in the scurrilous style
of Horace's invectives against Canidia, frequently imitated by

* It is one of the worst printed in 1635 and i66c} (where it first appeared
in full), and has admitted of many emendations from the manuscripts.
Grosart has already introduced some from the Hazlewood-Kingsborough
MS., but he left some gross errors. In the lines,

That I may grow enamoured on your mind,
When my own thoughts I there reflected find,

all the three modern editions are content still to read,

When my own thoughts I there neglected find

— a strange reason for being enamoured. Some difficult and perhaps
corrupt lines still remain.

cxxxviii Introductio7i,

Mantuan and other Humanists. The chief difficulty with
regard to the second, A Tale of a Citizen and his Wife^ is to
find Donne writing in this vein at so late a period as 1609 or
1 610, the date implied in several of the allusions. He was
already the author of religious poems, including probably La
Corona. In 1610 he wrote his Litanie^ and, as Professor
Norton points out, in the same letter in which he tells of the
writing of the latter he refers to some poem of a lighter nature,
the name of which is lost through a mutilation of the letter,
and says, ' Even at this time when (I humbly thank God) I ask
and have his comfort of sadder meditations I do not condemn
in myself that I have given my wit such evaporations as those,
if they be free from profaneness, or obscene provocations,'
Whether this would cover the elegy in question is a point on
which p)erhaps our age and Donne's would not decide alike.
Donne's nature was a complex one. Jack Donne and the
grave and reverend divine existed side by side for not a little
time, and even in the sermons Donne's wit is once or twice
rather coarser than our generation would relish in the pulpit.
But once more we must add that it is possible Donne has in
this case been made responsible for what is another's. Every
one wrote this occasional poetry, and sometimes WTOte it well.

There is no more difficult poem to understand or to assign
to or from Donne than the long letter headed To the Countesse
of Huntington y 13 on the list, which, for the time being, I
have placed in the Appendix B. On internal grounds there
is more to be said for ascribing it to Donne than any other
single poem in this collection. Nevertheless I have resolved
to let it stand, that it may challenge the attention it deserves.^
The reasons which led me to doubt Donne's authorship are
these :

(i) The poem was not included in the 1633 edition, nor is it

' In forming this Appendix it was not my intention to remove these
poems dogmatically from under theaegis of Donne's name. I wished rather
to separate them from those which are indubitably his and facilitate
comparison. Further evidence may show that I have erred as to one or
other. This letter is the only one about which I feel any doubt myself.
I have taken as much trouble with their text as with the rest of the poems.

Canon of Donne s Poems. cxxxix

found in either of the groups D, H^g, Lee and Ai8, N, TCC,
TCD. It was added in 16)') with four other spurious poems,
the dialogue ascribed to Donne and W'otton but assigned by
the great majority of manuscripts to the Earl of Pembroke and
Sir Benjamin Rudyard, the two epistles to Ben Jonson, and the
Elegy addressed to Sir Thomas Roe, which we have assigned,
for reasons given above, to Sir John Roe. The poem is found
in only two manuscript collections, viz. P and the second,
miscellaneous collection of seventeenth -century poems in TCD.
In both of these it is headed Sr Walter Ashtoii (or Aston) to
the Count esse 0/ Htinti>igtoHe^?Lr\d no reference whatsoever is
made to Donne. I do not attach much importance to this title.
Imaginary headings were quite common in the case of poems
circulating in manuscript. Poems are inscribed as having been
written by the Earl of Essex or Sir Walter Raleigh the night
before he died, or as found in the pocket of Chidiock Tich-
bourne. Editors have occasionally taken these too seriously.
Drayton's Het^oicall Epistles made it a fashion to write such
letters in the case of any notorious love affair or intrigue.
The manuscript P contains a long imaginary letter from Sir
Philip Sidney to Lady Mary Rich and a fragment of her reply.
In the same manuscript the poem, probably by the Earl of
Pembroke, ' Victorious beauty though your eyes,' is headed
The Mar: B to the Lady Fe : Her., i.e. the Marquis of
Buckingham to — I am not sure what lady is intended. The
only thing which the title given to the letter in question suggests
is that it was not an actual letter to the Countess but an
imaginary one.

(2) Of Donne's relations with Elizabeth Stanley, who in 1603
became the Countess of Huntingdon, his biographers have not
been able to tell us very much. He must have met her at the
house of Sir Thomas Egerton when her mother, the dowager
Countess of Derby, married that statesman in 1600, Donne
says:

I was your Prophet in your yonger dayes.
And now your Chaplaine, God in you to praise.

(p. 203, 11. 69-70.)

cxl hitro due ti 071 .

Donne's friend, Sir Henry Goodyere, seems to have had
relations with her either directly or through her first cousin, the
Countess of Bedford, for Donne writes to him from Mitcham,
' I remember that about this time you purpose a journey to
fetch, or meet the Lady Huntington,^ This fact lends support
to the view of Mr. Chambers and Mr. Gosse that she is ' the
Countesse' referred to in the following extract from a letter to
Goodyere, which has an important bearing on the poem under
consideration. Very unfortunately it is not dated, and
Mr. Chambers and Mr. Gosse differ widely as to the year in
which it may have been written. The latter places it in April,
1 615, when Donne was on the eve of taking Orders, and was
approachinghis noble patronesses for help inclearing himself of
debt. But Mr. Chambers points to the closing reference to * a
Christningat/'^r/^rtw',anddatesthe letter 1605-6, when Donne
was at Peckham after leaving Pyrford and before settling at
Mitcham. I am not sure that this is conclusive, for in Donne's
unsettled life before 161 5 Mrs. Donne might at any time
have gone for her lying-in or for a christening festival to the
house of her sister Jane, Lady Grimes, at Peckham. But the
tone of the letter, melancholy and reflective, is that of the
letters to Goodyere written at Mitcham, and the general theme
of the letter, a comparison of the different Churches, is that of
other letters of the same period. The one in question {Letters
1651, p. 100; Gosse, Life,, ii. "]"]) seems to be almost a con-
tinuation of another {Letters^ 1651, p. 26; Gosse, Lije,, i.
225). Whatever be its date, this is what Donne says : ' For
the other part of your Letter, spent in the praise of the
Countesse, I am always very apt to beleeve it of her, and can
never beleeve it so well, and so reasonably, as now, when it is
averred by you ; but for the expressing it to her, in that sort
as you seeme to counsaile, I have these two reasons to decline
it. That that knowledge which she hath of me, was in the
beginning of a graver course then of a Poet, into which (that
I may also keep my dignity) I would not seeme to relapse.
The Spanish proverb informes me, that he is a fool which
cannot make one Sonnet, and he is mad which makes two.

Ca?ion of Do7i7ies Poems, cxli

The other strong reason is my integrity to the other Countesse'
(i. e. probably the Countess of Bedford. The words which
follow seem to imply a more recent acquaintance than is com-
patible with so late a date as 1 615), 'of whose worthinesse though
I swallowed your words, yet I have had since an explicit faith,
and now a knowledge ; and for her delight (since she descends
to them) I had reserved not only all the verses which I should
make, but all the thoughts of womens worthinesse. But because
I hope she will not disdain, that I should write well of her
Picture, I have obeyed you thus far as to write ; but intreat
you by your friendship, that by this occasion of versifying,
I be not traduced, nor esteemed light in that Tribe, and that
house where I have lived. If those reasons which moved you
to bid me write be not constant in you still, or if you meant
not that I should write verses ; or if these verses be too bad,
or too good, over or under her understanding, and not fit;
I pray receive them as a companion and supplement of this
Letter to you,' &c. If this was written in 161 5 it is incompatible
with the fact (supposing the poem under consideration to be
by Donne) that he had already written to the Countess of
Huntingdon a letter in a very thinly disguised tone of amatory
compliment. If, however, it was written, as is probable, earlier,
the reference may be to this very poem. Perhaps Goodyere
thought it ' over or under ' the Countess's understanding and
did not present it.

(3) Certainly, looking at the poem itself, one has difficulty
in declaring it to be, or not to be, Donne's work. Its meta-
physical wit and strain of high-flown, rarefied compliment
suggest that only he could have written it ; in parts, on the other
hand, the tone does not seem to me to be his. It is certainly
very different from that of the other letters to noble ladies. It
carries one back to the date of the Elegies. If Donne's, it is
a further striking proof how much of the tone of a lover even
a married poet could assume in addressing a noble patroness.
Would Donne at any time of his life write to the Countess of
Huntingdon in the vein of p. 418, 11. 21-36, or the next para-
graph, 11. yt-'}^) ? One could imagine the l^arl of Pembroke,

cxlii liitroductmi.

or some one on a level of equality socially with the Countess,
writing so ; not a dependent addressing a patroness. The
only points of style and verse which might serve as clues are
( i) the peculiar use of ' young ', e. g. 1. 84 ' youngest flatteries *,

I. 13 ' younger formes'. With which compare in the: Letter
to Wotton, here added, at p. 188 :

Ere sicknesses attack, yong death is best.

(2) A recurring pattern of line to which Sir Walter Raleigh
drew my attention :

35. Who first looked sad, griev'd, pin'd, and shew'd his
pain.

61. Love is wise here, keeps home, gives reason sway.

88. You are the straight line, thing prais'd, attribute.
113. Such may have eye and hand, may sigh, may speak.
I have not found this pattern elsewhere, and indeed the
versification throughout seems to me unlike that of Donne.
Donne's decasyllabic couplets have two quite distinctive
patterns. The one is that of the Satyres. In these the
logical or rhetorical scheme runs right across the metrical
scheme— that is, the sense overflows from line to line, and the
pauses come regularly inside the line. A good example is
the paragraph beginning at p. 156, 1. 65.

Graccus loves all as one, &c.

In the Elegies and in the Letters the structure is not so
irregular and unmusical, but is periodic or paragraphic, i. e.
the lines do not fall into couplets but into larger groups knit
together by a single sentence or some closely connected
sentences, the full meaning or emphasis being well sustained
to the close. Good examples are Elegie I. 11. i to 16,
Elegie IV. 11. 13 to 26, Elegie V. 1. 5 to the end, Elegie VIII,

II. I to 34. Excellent examples are also the letter To the
Countesse of Salisbury and the Hymn to the Saints and the
Marqnesse Harnylton. Each of these is composed of three
or four paragraphs at the most. Now in the poem under
consideration there are two, or three at the most, paragraphs
which suggest Donne's manner, viz. 11. i to 10, 11. 11 to 16, and

Cano7i of Donne s Poems. cxlili

11. 37 to 46. But the rest of the poem is almost monotonously
regular in its couplet structure. To my mind the poem is not
unlike what Rudyard might have written. Indeed a fine piece
of verse by Rudyard, belonging to the dialogue between him
and the Earl of Pembroke on Love and Reason, is attributed
to Donne in several manuscripts. The question is an open
one, but had I realized in time the weakness of the positive
external evidence I should not have moved the poem, I have
been able to improve the text materially.

With regard to the Elegie on Mistris Botdstred (18 on the
list) I cannot expect readers to accept at once the conjecture
I have ventured to put forward regarding the authorship, for
I have changed my own mind regarding it. Two Elegies,
both perhaps on Mris. Boulstred, Donne certainly did write, viz.

Death I recant, and say, unsaid by mee

What ere hath slip'd, that might diminish thee ;

and another, entitled Deaths beginning

Language thou art too narrow, and too weake
To ease us now ; great sorrow cannot speake.

Both of these are attributed to Donne by quite a number of
manuscripts and are very characteristic of his poetry in this
kind, highly charged with ingenious wit and extravagant
eulogy. It is worth noting that in the Hawthornden MS. the
second bears no title (it is signed 'J. D.'), and that it is not
included in Z?, ^^9, Lee. It is certainly Donne's ; it is not
quite certain that it was written on Mris, Boulstred. Indeed,
as I have pointed out elsewhere, the reference to Judith in a
verse letter which seems to have been sent to Lady Bedford
with the poem, and the tenor of the poem, suggest that Lady
Markham is the subject of the elegy. Jonson, in speaking of
Mris. Boulstred, says, 'whose Epitaph Done made,' which points
to a single poem ; but he may have been speaking loosely, or
be loosely reported.

In contrast to these two elegies that beginning ' Death be
not proud ' is found in only five manuscripts, B^ Hjfo^ O'F^ P,

cxliv hitroduction.

RP}i. Of these H40 and RP)i are really one, and in them
the poem is not ascribed to Donne. In two others, O'F 2xA
P^ the poem is given in a very interesting and suggestive
manner, viz. as a continuation of ' Death I recant '. What this
suggests is the fairly obvious fact that the second poem is to
some extent a reply to the first. ' Death I recant ' is answered
by ' Death be not proud '. If O'F and P are right in their
arrangement, then Donne answers himself. Beginning in one
mood, he closes in another ; from a mood which is almost
rebellious he passes to one of Christian resignation. This was
the view I put forward in a note to the Cambridge History of
Literature (iv. 216). I had hardly, however, sent off my
proofs before I felt that there was more than one objection to
this view. There is in the first place nothing to show that
' Death I recant ' is not a poem complete in itself; there is no
preparation for the recantation. In the second place, ' Death
be not proud ' is as a poem slighter in texture, vaguer in
thought, in feeling more sentimental and pious, than Donne's
own Epicedes. Whoever wrote it had a warmer feeling for
Mris. Boulstred than underlies Donne's rather frigid hyper-
boles. This suggested to me that the poem was indeed an
answer to ' Death I recant ', but by another person, another
member of Lady Bedford's entourage. In this mood I came
on the ascription in -fl'^o, viz. ' By C. L. of B.' This indicated
no one whom I knew ; but in RP^i it appeared as ' By L. C.
of B.,' i. e. Lucy, Countess of Bedford. We know that the
Countess did write verses, for Donne refers to them. In
a letter which Mr. Gosse dates 1609 (Gosse's Life, &c., i. 217;
Letters^ 1651, p. d"]) he speaks of some verses written to him-
self: 'They must needs be an excellent exercise of your wit,
which speak so well of so ill.' That the Countess of Bedford
could have written ' Death be not proud ', we cannot prove in
the absence of other examples of her work ; that if she could
she did, is very likely. She had probably asked Donne for
some verses on the death of her friend. He replied with
' Death I recant '. The tone, which if not pagan is certainly
not Christian, while it is untouched by any real feeling for the

Canofi of Do7mes Poems. cxlv

subject of the elegy, displeased her, and she replied in lines at
once more ardent and more resigned. At any rate, whether
by Lady Bedford or not, the poem is not like Donne's work,
and the external evidence is against its being his. B attri-
butes it to ' F. B.', i. e. Francis Beaumont. It is right, on the
other hand, to point out that Donne opens one of the Ho/y
Sonnets with the exclamation used here :

Death be not proud !

I have left the question of authorship an open one. Personally
I cannot bring myself to think that it is Donne's.

The sonnet On the Blessed Virgin Mary (19 on the list), ' In
that O Queene of Queenes, thy birth was free,' is included
among Donne's poems in i6}j and in B, O'F, 5, Sg6. There
is little doubt that it is not Donne's but Henry Constable's. It
is found in a series of Spiritual Sonnets by H. C, in Harl. MvS.
7553, f. 41, which were first published by T. Park in Helico7iia^
ii. 1815, and unless all of these are to be given to Donne this
cannot. It is not in his style, and Donne more than once
denies the Immaculate Conception in the full Catholic sense of
the doctrine. Nothing could more expressly contradict this
sonnet than the lines in the Second A nniversarie:

Wliere thou shalt see the blessed Mother-maid
Joy in not being that, which men have said.
Where she is exalted more for being good.
Then for her interest of Mother-hood.

Of the next three poems (20, 21, 22 on the list), the second,
the Ode beginning ' Vengeance will sit above our faults ', seems
to me very doubtful, although on second thoughts I have
re-transferred it from the Appendix to the place among the
Divine Poems which it occupies in i6)j. Against its authen-
ticity are the following considerations: (i) It is not at all in
the style of Donne's other specifically religious poems. The
I elevated, stoical tone is more like Jonson's occasional religious
pieces than Donne's personal, tormented. Scholastic Divine
Poems. (2) Of the manuscripts in which it apf>ears, B^ Cy,

II »17-3 k

cxlvi httrodtictioit.

H40, RP)i, O'F, P, S, the best, RP)i, assigns it, not to
Donne, but to ' Sir Edward Herbert ', i. e. Lord Herbert of
Cherbury.^ Mr. Chambers, indeed, inadvertently stated that
in this manuscript ' it is said to have been written to George
Herbert '. The name ' Sr Edw. Herbert ' is written beside
the poem, and that in such cases is meant to indicate the
author of the poem. It seems to me quite possible that it was
written by Lord Herbert, but until more evidence be forth-
coming I have let it stand, because (i) the letters ' I. D,' printed
after the poem show that the poem must have been so initialled
in the manuscript from which it was printed, and (2) because,
though not in the style of Donne's later religious poems, it is
somewhat in the style of the philosophical, stoical letter which
Donne addressed to Sir Edward Herbert at the siege of Juliers
in 1 610. The poem was possibly composed at the same time.
(3) The thought of the last verse, our ignorance of ourselves,
recurs in Donne's poems and prose. Compare Negative Love

(p. 66) :

If any who deciphers best,
What we know not, our selves,

and the passage quoted in the note to this poem.

The poem Upon the translation of the Psalmes by Sir
Philip Sydney, and the Countesse of Pembroke his Sister^ if
by Donne, was probably written late in his life and never
widely circulated. It occurred to me that the author might be
John Davies of Hereford, who was a dependent of the Coun-
tess and her two sons, and who made a calligraphic copy of
the Psalms of Sidney and his sister, from which they were
printed by Singer in 1823. But Professor Saintsbury con-
siders, I think justly, that the ' wit ' of the opening lines,

Eternall God (for whom who ever dare
Seeke new expressions, doe the Circle square,
And thrust into strait corners of poore wit
Thee who art cornerlesse and infinite),

* H40 has no ascription. In the poem just discussed the ascription
made correctly, at least intelligibly, in RP31, was transposed in H40.
This must be the later collection. See II. p. cxiv.

Canon of Donne s Poems, cxlvii

is above Davies' level, and indeed the whole poem is. The
lines To Mr. Tilntan after he had taken orders (22 on the
list) were also probably privately communicated to the person
to whom they were addressed. The best argument for their
genuineness is that Walton seems to quote from them when
he describes Donne's preaching.

For they doe
As Angels out of clouds, from Pulpits speake,

must have suggested 'always preaching to himself, like an
angel from a cloud, but in none '. This does not, however,
carry us very far. Walton had seen the editions of 1635 and
1639 before he wrote these lines in 1640,

The verse On the Sacrament (23 on the list) is probably
assigned to Donne by a pure conjecture. It is very frequently
attributed to Queen Elizabeth.

Of the two poems added in i64() the lines Upon Mr.
Thomas Coryats Crtidtties are of course Donne's. They
appeared with his name in his lifetime, and Donne is one of
the friends mentioned by Coryat in his letters from India.
The Token (4 on the list) may or may not be Donne's. It
is found in several, but no very good, manuscripts. Its wit
is quite in Donne's style, though not absolutely beyond the
compass of another. The poems which the younger Donne
added in 16^0 are in much the same position, ' He that cannot
chose but love ' (5 on the list) is a trifle, whoever wrote it.
'The heavens rejoice in motion ' (10 on the list) is in a much
stronger strain of paradox, and if not Donne's is by an ambitious
and witty disciple. If genuine, it is strange that it did not find
its way into more collections. It is found in A 10^ where a few
of Donne's poems are given with others by Roe, Hoskins, and
other wits of his circle. It is also, however, given in JC^ a
manuscript containing in its first part few poems that are not
demonstrably genuine. As things stand, the balance of evidence
is in favour of Donne's authorship.

Besides the Elegies XVIII and XI X^ which are Donne's, as
we have seen, and the Satyre ' Sleep next Society ', which is

k 2

cxl vi i i Iittrodiiction .

not Donne's, the edition of 1669 prefixed to the song Breake
of Day a fresh stanza :

Stay, O sweet, and do not rise.

It appears in the same position in S()6, but is given as a separate
poem in ^2/, C, O'F, and P. It certainly has no connexion
with Donne's poem, for the metre is entirely different and the
strain of the poetry less metaphysical.

The separate stanza was a favourite one in Song-Books of
the seventeenth century. It was printed apparently for the
first time in 1612, in The First Set of Madrigals and Motets
of five Paris : apt for Viols and Voices. Newly composed
by Orlando Gibdo>7S. Here it begins

Ah, dearc hart why doe you rise?

In the same year it was printed in A Pilgrunes Solace.

Wherein is contained Mnsicall Harnionie of ^^ ^f and j
parts, to be sung and plaid ruith the Lute and Viols. By
fohn Dowland. The stanza begins

vSweet stay awhile, why will you rise ?

Mr. Chambers conjectures that the affixing of Dowlands
initials to the verse in some collection led to Donne being
credited with it, which is quite likely ; but we are not sure
that Dowland wrote it, and the common theme appears to have
drawn the poems together. In The A cademy of Complements ,
Wherein Ladies, Gentlezvomen.^ Schollers^ and Strangers may
accomodate their Conrtly practice zuith gentile Ceremojiies,
Compleme)ital a7noroiis high expressions^ and Formes of
speaking or writi)ig of Letters most in fashion (1650) the
verse is connected with a variation of the first stanza of Donne's
poem so as to make a consistent song :

Lie still, my dear, why dost thou rise .-^
The light that shines comes from thine eyes.
The day breaks not, it is my heart,
Because that you and I must part.

Stay or else my joys will die.

And perish in their infancv-

Cano7i of Donne s Poems. cxlix

"Tis time, 'tis day, what if it be ?
Wilt thou therefore arise from me ?
Did we h'e down because of night,
And shall we rise for fear of light ?
No, since in darkness we came hither.
In spight of light we'll lye together.
Oh ! let me dye on thy sweet breast
Far sweeter than the Phoenix nest.

It was probably some such combination as this which
suggested to the editor of /(569 to prefix the stanza to Donne's
poem. The poem in The Academy of Co)npli)ne)its was
repeated in Wits Interpreter^ the English Parnassus, a
sure guide to those Admirable Acconiplishmenis that
compleat our English Gentry in the most acceptable Quali-
Jicatio7is of Discourse or liyiting{i6^^). But the first stanza
is given again in this collection as a separate poem.

The translation of the Psalme /j/, which was inserted in
i6}^ and never withdrawn (as the Epitaph on Shakespeare
was) is pretty certainly not by Donne. The only manuscript
which ascribes it to him is A 2^ followed by C. On the other
hand it is assigned to Francis Davison, editor of the Poetical
Rhapsody, in RP61 (Bodleian Library). In one manuscript,
Addl. MS. 27407, the poem is accompanied with a letter, un-
signed and undirected, which speaks of this as one out of several
translations made by the author. The handwriting and style
of the letter are not Donne's, but the letter explains why this
one Psalm is found floating around by itself. It was, the
translator says, a freer paraphrase than the others. Apparently
it proved a favourite.

When one turns from the poems attributed to Donne in the
old editions to those which some of the more recent editors
have added, one launches into a sea which I have no intention
of attempting to navigate in its entirety. Both Sir John
Simeon and Dr. Grosart were disposed to cry ' Eurei- a ' too
readily, and assigned to Donne a number of poems culled from
various manuscripts for the genuineness of which there is no
evidence external or internal. I shall confine my remarks to
the few poems I have myself incorporated for the first time in

cl Introduction,

an edition of Donne's poems ; to the Song ' Absence hear
my protestation ', which it is now the fashion to ascribe to
Donne absolutely, letting evidence ' go hang ' ; and to the four
poems which Mr. Chambers printed from A2^. I have added
some more in my Appendix C, because they are interesting
dSia-TTora illustrative of the influence in seventeenth-century
poetry of Donne's realistic passion and his paradoxical wit.

Of the poems which appear here for the first time in a
collected edition, it is-not necessary to say much of those which
are taken from IV, the Westmoreland MS. now in the posses-
sion of Mr. Gosse, who with the greatest and most spontaneous
kindness has permitted me to print them all. These include
two Epigrams, four additional Letters, and three Holy Sonnets.
The Epigrams, the Holy Sonnets, and two of the Letters have
been already printed by Mr. Gosse in his Ltye of John Donne,
1899. There can be no doubt of their genuineness. They enlarge
a series of Letters and a series of Sonnets which appear in 16}}
and in all the best manuscript collections. In their arrangement
I have followed Wxn preference to 16)), which is based on A 18,
N, TC. Of the letter taken from the Burley MS. there may
be greater doubt in some minds. To me it seems unquestionably
Donne's (aut Donne aut Diabolus), an addition to the series of
letters which he wrote to Sir Henry Wotton between the return
of the Islands Expedition and Essex's return from Ireland. The
Burley MS. is a commonplace-book of Wotton 's and includes
poems which we know as Donne's, e.g. ' Come, Madam, come ' ;
some of his Paradoxes with a covering letter ; other letters
which from their substance and style seem to be Donne's ; and
a number of poems, including this which alone of all the
doubtful poems in the manuscript is initialled 'J. D.' The
manuscript contains work by Donne. Does this come under
that head ? Only internal evidence can decide. Of the other
poems in the manuscript, most of which I print in Appendix C,
none are certainly Donne's.

' Absence heare my protestation ' was printed in Donne's
lifetime in Davison's A Poetical Rhapsody (1602, 1608, 1621),
but with no reference to Donne's authorship, although his

Canon of Donne s Poems, cli

name was yearly growing a more popular hostel for wandering,-
unclaimed poems.* It was not printed in any edition of his
poems from i6^) to 77/9. It is not found in either of the most
trustworthy manuscript collections, Z>, H^g^ Lec^ or Ai8^ N,
TC. It is found in B, Cy, Lj4, O'F, P, Sg6, but none of
these can be counted an authority. In 1711 it was for the
first time ascribed to Donne in T/te Grove, a miscellaneous
collection of poems, on the authority of ' an old Manuscript
of Sir John Cotton's of Stratton in Huntington-Shire '. On the
other hand, in one well authenticated manuscript, ffN', it is
transcribed by William Drummond of Hawthornden from what
he describes as a collection of poems ' belonging to John Don '
(not ' 4)/ Donne '), and, with another poem, is initialled ' J. H.'
That other poem called

//is Melancholy.

Love is a foolish melancholy, &c.,
is by a Manchester manuscript ( Farmer- Chetham MS., ed.
Grosart, Chetham Society Publications, Ixxxix, xc) assigned
to ' Mr. Hoskins', and in another manuscript {A 10) it is signed
' H ' with the left leg of H so written as to suggest JH run
together. Clearly at any rate the onus probandi lies with
those who say the poem is by Donne. Internally it has never
seemed to me so since I came to know Donne well. The
metaphysical, subtle strain is like Donne, as it is in Soides Joy,
but here as there (though there is more feeling in Absence, the
closing line has a very Donne-like note of sudden angriish, ' and
so miss her') the tone is airier, the prosody more tripping.
The stressed syllables are less weighted emotionally and vocally.
Compare

vSweetest love, I do not goe,
For wearinesse of thee

Nor in hope the world can show

A fitter Love for me ;
or

Draw not up seas to drowne me in thy spheare,
Weepe me not dead, in thine armes, but forbeare
To teach the sea, what it may doe too soone ;

^ Absence is printed, again unsigned, in Wit Restored in severall Select
Poeins 7tot formerly published. (1658.)

clii l7itroductio7i.

with the more tripping measure, in which one touches the
stressed syllables as with tiptoe, of

By absence this good means I gaine.

That I can catch her

Where none can watch her,
In some close corner of my braine.

There are more of Hoskins' poems extant, but the manu-
script volume of poems which he left behind (' bigger than those
of Dr. Donne') was lost in 1653.

Four poems were first printed as Donne's by Mr. Chambers
(op. cit., Appendix B). They are all found in Addl. MS.
25707 (^2/), and, so far as I know, there only, I have placed
them first in Appendix C, as the only pieces in that Appendix
which are at all likely to be by Donne. A2^ is a manuscript
written in a number of different hands, some six within the
portion that includes poems by Donne. The relative age
of these it would be impossible to assign with any confidence.
What looks the oldest (I may call it A) is used only for three
poems, viz. Donne's Elegye: ' What \sic\ that in Color it was
like thy haire,' his Obsequies Upon the Lord Harrington yt
last died^ and the Elegie of Loves progresse. It is in Eliza-
bethan secretary's hand, and seems to me identical with the
writing in which the same poems are copied in C, the Cam-
bridge University Library MS. A second hand, B, inserts the
larger number of the poems unquestionably by Donne in close
succession, but a third hand, C, transcribes several by Donne
along with poems by other wits, as Francis Beaumont. A
fourth hand, D, seems to be the latest because it is the
handwriting in which the Index was made out, and the poems
inserted in this hand are inserted in odd spaces left by the other
writers. Now of the poems in question, one, A letter written
by S' H : G : and J. D. alter nis vicibits, is copied by D, and
the same hand adds immediately An Elegie on the Death of
my never enoitgh L ainented master King Charles the First,
by Henry Skipwith. The poem attributed to Donne was
therefore not entered here till after 1649. But of course it may
have come from an older source, and it has quite the appearance

Canon of Donne s Poems. cliii

of being genuine. Whoever made the collection would seem
to have had access to some of Goodyere's work, for this poem
is almost immediately preceded by an Epithalamioii of the
Princess Mariage^ by S"" H. G., and a little earlier the Good
Friday poem by Donne is headed Mr J. Diui goeivg from
Sir H. G. on goodfriday senl him back this Medifacon 07i the
ivaye. That reads like a note by Goodyere himself. If this be
what happened, the copyist may have ascribed to Donne some
of Goodyere's own verses. Certainly there is nothing in the
other three poems, ' O Fruitful garden,' ' Fie, fie, you sons of
Pallas,' ' Why chose she black ' (all in the handwriting C)
which would warrant our ascribing them to Donne, Later in
the collection a coarse poem, ' Why should nofPilgrims to thy
body come,' in a fifth hand, is signed J, D,, but P assigns it to
F. H,, and it is more in Beaumont's style. Poems by and on
Beaumont occupy a considerable space in A2y, He is a quite
possible candidate for the authorship of some of the poems
assigned to Donne in the hand C.

Mr, Hazlitt attributes to Donne {General Index to Hazliil's
Handbook, (Sr., p. 228) a Funeral Elegie on the death of Philip
Stanhope, who died at Christ Church in 1625. I have not
been able to find the volume in which it appears ; but, as it is
said to be by John Donne Alumnus^ the author must be the
younger Donne.

COMMENTARY.

by

COMMENTARY.

Donne is a * metaphysical ' poet. The term was perhaps first applied ^^'rt-
by Dryden, from whom Johnson borrowed it : * He ' (Donne) ' affects Poetry.
the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses,
where nature only should reign ; and perplexes the minds of the fair
sex with the speculations of philosophy, where he should engage their
hearts, and entertain them with the softness of love.' Essay on
Satire. 'The metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to
show their learning was their whole endeavour.' Johnson, Life of
Cowley. The parade of learning, and a philosophical or abstract
treatment of love had been a strain in mediaeval poetry from
the outset, manifesting itself most fully in the Tuscan poets of
the ' dolce stil nuovo ', but never altogether absent from mediaeval
love-poetry. The Italian poet Testi (1593- 1646), describing his
choice of classical in preference to Italian models (he is thinking
specially of Marino), says : * poiche lasciando quel concetti meta-
fisici ed ideali di cui sono piene le poesie italiane, mi sono
provato di spiegare cose piu domestiche, e di maneggiarle con effetti
pill famigliari a imitazione d'Ovidio, di Tibullo, di Properzio, e degli \^
altri migliori.' Donne's love-poetry is often classical in spirit; his
conceits are the 'concetti metafisici' of mediaeval poetry given a
character due to his own individuality and the scientific interests
of his age.

A metaphysical poet in the full sense of the word is a poet who
finds his inspiration in learning; not in the world as his own
and common sense reveal it, but in the world as science and
philosophy report of it. The two greatest metaphysical poets of
Europe are Lucretius and Dante. What the philosophy of Epicurus
was to Lucretius, that of Thomas Aquinas was to Dante. Their
poetry is the product of their learning, transfigured by the imagination,
md it is not to be understood without some study of their thought
ind knowledge.

Donne is not a metaphysical poet of the compass of Lucretius and \
Dante. He sets forth in his poetry no ordered system of the universe. \

II 917.3 3

Commentary,

Do Hue's
Learning.

Classical
Literature.

Italian.

French.

The ordered system which Dante had set forth was breaking in pieces
while Donne Hved, under the criticism of Copernicus, GaHleo, and
others, and no poet was so conscious as Donne of the effect on the
imagination of that disintegration. In the two Anniversaries
mystical religion is made an escape from scientific scepticism. More-
over, Donne's use of metaphysics is often frivolous and flippant, at
best simply poetical. But he is a learned poet, and he is a philosophical
poet, and without some attention to the philosophy and science
underlying his conceits and his graver thought it is impossible to
understand or appreciate either aright. Failure to do so has led
occasionally to the corruption of his text.

Walton tells us that Donne's learning, in his eleventh year when he
went to Oxford, ' made one then give this censure of him, " That this
age had brought forth another Picus Mirandula ; of whom story says
that he was rather born than made wise by study." ' ' In the most
unsettled days of his youth ', the same authority reports, ' his bed was
not able to detain him beyond the hour of four in the morning ; and
it was no common business that drew him out of his chamber till
past ten ; all which time was employed in study ; though he took
great liberty after it.' ' He left the resultances of 1,400 authors, most
of them abridged and analysed with his own hand.' The lists of
authors prefixed to his prose treatises and the allusions and definite
references in the sermons corroborate Walton's statement regarding
the range of Donne's theological and controversial reading.

Confining attention here to Donne's poetry, and the spontaneous
evidence of learning which it affords, one would gather that his
reading was less literary and poetic in character than was Milton's
during the years spent at Horton. It is clear that he knew the
classical poets, but there are few specific allusions. Ovid, Horace,
and Juvenal one can trace, not any other with certainty, nor in
his sermons do references to Virgil, Horace, or other poets abound.

Like Milton, Donne had doubtless read the Italian romances.
One reference to Angelica and an incident in the Orlando Furioso
occur in the Saiyres, and from the same source as well as from an
unpublished letter we learn that he had read Dante. Aretino is
the only other Italian to whom he makes explicit reference.

One of Regnier's satires opens in a manner resembling the fourth
of Donne's, and in a letter written from France apparently in 161 2 he
refers to ' a book of French Satires ', which Mr. Gosse conjectures to

I

Commentary,

be Regnier's. The resemblance may be accidental, for Donne's Satyres
were written before the publication of Regnier's (1608, 1613), and
Donne makes no explicit mention of him or any other French poet.
We learn, however, from his letters that he had read Montaigne and
Rabelais ; and it is improbable that he did not share the general
interest of his contemporaries in the poetry of the Ple'iade. The one
poet to whom recent criticism has pointed as the inspiration of Donne's
metaphysical verse is the Protestant poet Du Bartas. Mr. Alfred
Horatio Upham ( The French Influence in English Literature. New
York, 1908), and following him Sir Sidney Lee {The French Renais-
sance in Etig/and. Oxford, 19 10), have insisted strongly on the
importance of this influence. The latter goes so far as to say that
* Donne clothed elegies, eclogues, divine poems, epicedes, obsequies,
satires, in a garb barely distinguishable from the style of Du Bartas
and Sylvester ', and that the metaphysical style in English poetry is a
heritage from Du Bartas.

I confess this seems to me a somewhat exaggerated statement.
When I turn from Donne's passionate and subtle songs and elegies to
Sylvester's hum-drum and yet ' conceited ' work, I find their styles
eminently distinguishable. Mr. Upham indeed allows that Donne's
genius makes ' vital and impressive ' what in the original is ' vapid and
commonplace '. He pleads for no more than an ' element of French
suggestion '.

Of the most characteristic features of Du Bartas's rhetoric, his
affected antitheses, his studied alliterative effects, and especially his
double-epithets ' aime-carnage ', ' charme-souci ', ' blesse-honneur ',
Sylvester's ' forbidden-Bit-lost-glory ', ' the Act-simply-pure ', &c., Mr.
Upham admits that Donne makes sparing use. Donne uses a fair
number of compounds but the majority of these are nouns and verbs.
Of the epithets only one or two are of the sentence-compressing
character which the French poet cultivated. The most like is
' full-on-both-side-written rolls '. The real link between Du Bartas
and Donne is that they are metaphysical poets. P'ollowing
Lucretius, whom he often translates, the Frenchman set himself
to give a scientific account of the creation of the universe as
outlined in Genesis. He describes with the utmost minuteness of
detail, and necessarily uses similes better fitted to elucidate and
illustrate than to give poetic pleasure, drawn from the most everyday
sources as well as arts and sciences. It was part of the programme

B 2

Commentary,

of the Pleiade thus to annex the vocabulary of learning and the
crafts. Now Donne may have read Du Bartas in the original, or he may
have seen some parts of Sylvester's translation (it did not appear till
1598), as it was in preparation, though to a Catholic, as Donne was,
the poem would not have the attraction it had for Protestant poets
in England, Holland, and Germany. The bent of his own mind was
to metaphysics, to erudition, and also to figures realistic and surprising
rather than beautiful. It would be rash to deny that he may have
found in Du Bartas a style which he preferred to the Italianate
picturesqueness of sonneteers and idyllists, and been encouraged
to follow his bent. That he borrowed his style from Du Bartas
is nonproven: and there are in his work strains of feeling, thought,
and learning which cannot be traced to the French poet. Two
poets more essentially unlike it would be difficult to imagine. There
are very few passages where one can trace or conjecture echoes or
borrowings (see note, II. p. 193). I agree indeed with Mr. Upham that
the poems which most strongly suggest that Donne had been reading
Du Bartas are the First and Second ^««/wr5ar/Vi', which Sir Sidney Lee
inadvertently calls early poems. Here at least he is often dealing with
the same themes. One can illustrate his thought from Du Bartas.
Perhaps it was the latter's poem which suggested the use of marginal
notes, giving the argument of the poem.
Spanish. We know from Donne's explicit statement that his library was full
both of Spanish poets and Spanish theologians, and there has been
some talk of Spanish influence in his poetry. But no one has adduced
evidence. Gongora is out of the question, for Gongora did not begin
to cultivate the extravagant conceits of his later poetry till he came
under the influence of Carillo's posthumous poems in 161 1
(Fitzmaurice Kelly : Spanish Literature, 283-5) 5 ^lo^ is there much
resemblance between his high-flown Marinism and Donne's meta-
physical subtleties. It is possible that Spanish mysticism and
religious eloquence have left traces in Donne's Divine Poems and
sermons. The subject awaits investigation.
Scholastic A Commentator on Donne is, therefore, not called on to trace
s i)h' literary echoes in his poetry as Bishop Newton and others have done
in Milton's poems. It is reading of another kind, though a kind also
traceable in Milton, that he has to note. Donne was steeped in
Scholastic Philosophy and Theology. Often under his most playful
conceits lurk Scholastic definitions and distinctions. The question

Commentary, 5

of the influence of Plato on the poets of the Renaissance has been
discussed of recent years, but generally without a sufficient preliminary
inquiry as to the Scholastic inheritance of these poets. Doctrines
that derive ultimately, it may be, from Plato and Aristotle were familiar
to Donne and others in the first place from Aquinas and the theology
of the Schools, and, as Professor Picavet has insisted {Esquisse d'lote
histoire gene'rale et comparee des philosophies me'dievales. Paris, 1907),
they entered the Scholastic Philosophy through Plotinus and were
modified in the passage.* The present editor is in no way a specialist
in Scholasticism, and such notes and extracts as are given here
concern passages where some inquiry was necessary to fix the text and
to elucidate the meaning. They are intended simply to do this as
far as possible, and to suggest the direction which further investi-
gation must follow. An expert will doubtless note many allusions
that have escaped notice. Whenever possible I have endeavoured
to start from Donne's own sermons and prose works.

Donne is as familiar with the Fathers as with the Schoolmen, The
especially Tertullian and Augustine, and of them too he makes ^'^"""'
use in poems neither serious nor edifying. His work with Morton
had familiarized him with the whole range of Catholic controversy
from Bellarmine to Spanish and German Jesuit pamphleteers and
casuists. The Progresse of the Souk reveals his acquaintance witii
Jewish apocryphal legends.

But Donne's studies were not confined to Divinity. When a Law- La-M.
student he was ' diverted by the worst voluptuousness, which is an
hydroptic immoderate desire of humane learning and languages ' ;
but his legal studies have left their mark in his Sottgs and Sonets.
Of Medicine he had made an extensive study, and the poems abound
in allusions to both the orthodox Galenist doctrines and the new
Paracelsian medicine with its chemical drugs and homoeopathic cures. '^
In Physics he knows, like Milton, the older doctrines, the elements,

1 The influence of Scholastic Philosophy and Theology in English poetry
deserves attention. When Milton states that

They also serve who only stand and wait,
he has probably in mind the opinion of Dionysius the Areopagite (adopted by
Aquinas), that the four highest orders of angels (Dominations, Thrones, Cherubs,
and Seraphim) never leave God's presence to bear messages.

^ In the Letters to Severall Persons of Honour, &r. (1651, 1654"), pp. M'Si
Donne gives a short sketch of the history of medical doctrines from Hippocrates
through Galen to Paracelsus, but declares that the new principles are attributed
to the latter ' too much to his honour'.

Commentary,

their concentric arrangement, the origin of winds and meteors, &c.,
and at tlic same time is acutely interested in the speculations of the
newer science, of Copernicus and Galileo, and the disintegrating effect
of their doctrines on the traditional views.
Travels. A special feature of Donne's imagery is the use of images drawn
from the voyages and discoveries of the age. Sir Walter Raleigh
has not included Donne among the poets whom he discusses in con-
sidering the influence of the Voyages on Poetry and Imagination
{The English Voyages of the Sixteetith Century. Glasgow, 1906, iii), but
perhaps none took a more curious interest. His mistress is ' my
America, my Newfoundland ', his East and West Indies ; he sees, at
least in imagination,

a Tenarif, or higher Hill
Rise so high like a Rocke, that one might thinke
The floating Moone would shipwracke there, and sinke ;

he sails to heaven, the Pacific Ocean, the Fortunate Islands, by the
North-West Passage, or through the Straits of Magellan.

In attempting to illustrate these and other aspects of Donne's
erudition as displayed in his poetry it has been my endeavour not
so much to trace them to their remote sources as to discover the
form in which he was familiar with a doctrine or a theory. Next to
his own works, therefore, I have had recourse to contemporary or
but slightly later works, as Burton's Anato??iy of Melancholy and
Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica. I have made constant use of
the Snnwia Theologtae of St. Thomas Aquinas, using the edition
in Migne's Patrologiae Ctirsus Completus (1845). By Professor
Picavet my attention was called to Bouillet's translation of Plotinus's
Enneads with ample notes on the analogies to and developments of
Neo-PIatonic thought in the Schoolmen. I have also used Zellcr's
Philosophie der Griechen,on Plotinus, and 'ii\siXX\a.c\Cs History of Dog?na.
Throughout, my effort has been rather to justify, elucidate, and
suggest, than to accumulate parallels.

*^* In the following notes the LXXX Sermons &"c. (1640), Fifty
Sermons 6^^. (1649), and XXVI Sermons or'r. (1669/70) are referred to
thus : — 80. 19. 189, i.e. \)^q LXXX Sermons, the nineteenth sermon,
page 189. References to page and line simply of the poems are to
the first volume of this edition. References to the second are given
thus, II. p. 249.

Commentary,

THE PRINTER TO &c.

See Text and Canon of Donne's Poems, p. lix.

Page i, 11. 17-18. it ivould have come to us from beyond the Seas :
e. g. from Holland.

11. 19-20. My charge and pains in procuring of it: A significant
statement as to the source of the edition.

Page 3. Hexastichon Bibliopolae.

1. I. his last preach d, and printed Booke, i. e. Deaths Duell or a Con-
solation to the Soule against the dying Life and living Death of the body.
Delivered in a sermon at Whitehall^ before the Kings Majesty in the
beginning of Lent i6)o, <2^c. . . . Being his last Sermon and called by
■ his Majesties household the Doctors owne Funerall Sertnon. 16^2, 16}).

This has for frontispiece a bust of Donne in his shroud, engraved
by Martin Di[oeshout] from the drawing from which Nicholas Stone
cut the figure on Donne's tomb (Gosse's Life, d^c. ii. 288). Walton's
account of the manner in which this picture was prepared is well
known. See H. p. 249.

Page 4. William, Lord Craven, e^=r. This is the younger Donne's
dedication. See Text and Canon, e^^., p. Ixx.

AV'illiam Craven (1606-1697) entered the service of Maurice,
Prince of Nassau in 1623. He served later, i63r," under Gustavus
Adolphus ; and became a devoted adherent of Elizabeth of Bohemia
and the cause of the Palatine house. He lost his estates in the
Rebellion, but after the Restoration was created successively Baron
Craven of Hampsted-Marsham, Viscount Craven of Uffington, and
Earl of Craven. He was an early member of the Royal Society.

Of the younger John Donne, D.C.L., whose life was dissolute and
poetry indecent, perhaps the most pleasing relic is the following poem
addressed to his father. It is found in C>'-/^and has been printed by
Mr. Warwick Bond :

A Letter.

No want of duty did my mind possesse,

I through a dearth of words could not expresse

That w''" I feare I doe too soone pursue

W*-'' is to pay my duty due to you.

For, through the weaknesse of my witt, this way

I shall diminish what I hope to pay.

And this consider, T'was the sonne of May

And not Apollo that did rule the day.

Had it bin hee then somthing would have rose ;

In grateful! verse or else in thankfuU prose

I would have told you (father) by my hand

That I yo' sonne am prouder of yo' band

8 Commentary,

Then others of theyr freedome, And to pay
Thinke it good service to kneele downe and pray.

Yo' obedient sonne
Jo. Donne.

Pages 5, 6. The three poems by Jonson were printed in the
sheets hastily added by the younger Donne in 1650 to the edition of
Donne's poems prepared for the press in 1649. See Text a?id Canon,
&-'c. They were taken from Jonson's Epigrams (16 16), where they
are Nos. xxiii., xciv., and xcvi. Of Donne as a poet Jonson uttered
three memorable criticisms in his Conversations with Drummond
(ed. Laing, Shakespeare Society, 1842):

' He esteemeth John Done the first poet in the world for some
things.'

' That Done for not keeping of accent deserved hanging.'

' That Done himself, for not being understood, would perish.'

SONGS AND SONETS.

Of all Donne's poems these are the most difficult to date with any
definiteness. Jonson, Drummond notes, 'affirmeth Done to have
written all his best pieces ere he was twenty-five years old,' that
would be before 1598, jthe year in which Donne became secretary to
Sir Thomas Egerton. This harmonizes fairly well with such indica-
tions of date as are discoverable in the Elegies, poems similar in
V theme and tone to the Songs^ind Sonets.] Mr. Chambers pushes the
more daring and cynical of these poerns in both these groups further
back. He says, 'All Donne's Love-poems . . . seem to me to fall
into two divisions. There is one, marked by cynicism, ethical laxity
and a somewhat deliberate profession of inconstancy. This I believe
to be his earliest style, and ascribe the poems marked by it to the
period before 1596. About that date he became acquainted with
Anne More, whom he evidently loved devotedly and sincerely ever
after. And therefore from 1596 onwards I place the second division,
with its emphasis of the spiritual, and deep insight into the real
things of love.' This is a little too early. Anne More was only
twelve years old in 1596, and it is unlikely that she and Donne were
known to each other before 1598. Their affection probably ripened
later. It almost seems from Donne's letters to his friends as though
about 1599 he was proffering at least courtly adoration to some other
lady.

Moreover, it is to conceive somewhat inadequately of Donne's
complex nature to make too sharp a temporal division between his
gayer, more cynical effusions and his graver, even religious pieces.
The truth about Donne is well stated by Professor Norton : * Donne's
"better angel" and his "worser spirit" seem to have kept up a

Songs and Sonets,

continual contest, now the one, now the other, gaining the mastery
in his

Poor soul, the centre of his sinful earth.' ^

The 'evaporations' which he allowed his wit from time to time till
he took orders showed always a cer^in ' ethical laxity ' and ' cynicism '
of outlook on men and women, ^he Elegie JCIV (if it be Donne's,
and Mr. Chambers does not question its authenticity), the lines Upon
Mr. Thomas Coryats Crudities, the two frankly pagan Epithalamia ^
on the Princess Elizabeth and the Countess of Somerset, to say
nothing of Ignatius^Jus Conclave, were all written long after his
marriage and when he was already the author of moral epistles and
' divine poems \j Even Professor Norton's statement exaggerates the
'contest' a little. These things were evaporations of wit, and even a
serious man in the seventeenth century allowed to his wit satyric
gambols which disconcert our staider and more fastidious taste.
I am quite at one with Mr. Chambers in accepting his marriage
as a turning-point in the history of Donne's life and mind. But it /
would be rash to affirm that none of his wittier lyrics were written
after this date^

Donne's ' songs and sonets ' seem to me to fall into three rather
than two classes, though there is a good deal of overlapping.
Donne's.- wit is always touched with passion; his passion is always
witty. In the first class I would place those which are frankly ^

' evaporations ' of more or less cynical_wit, the poems in which he ^
parades his own inconstancy or enlarges on the weaknesses of women, ^ '^ J
poems such as ' Goe and calsiie ', Womans constancy, The ItidiffereJit,
Loves Vsury, The Legacie, Cotnmunitie, Confined Love, Love_s Alchyjnie, •
The Flea, The Message, Witchcraft by a picture. The Apparition,
Lovej__De^tie, Loves diet, The JVill, A /cat Ring sent. Negative love, ^
Fareivell to love. In another group the wit in Donne, whether gaily
or passionately cynical, is subordinate to the lover, pure and simple,
singing, at times with amazing simplicity and intensity of feeling, the ^
joys of love and the sorrow of parting. Such are The good-morrow,
The Sunne Rising, The Canonization, Lovers' infiniteness, ' Sweetest
love, I do not goe,' A Feaver, Air^^jidjingells {touched with cynical
humi?ur at the close), Breake of day, The Anniversarie, A Valediction ':
of the booke. Loves growth,- The Dreame,-A Valediction: of iveeping^^
The Baite, A Valediction : Jvrbidding_mournifig, The Kxta'sie, The
Prohibition, The Expiration, Lecture upon the Shadow. It would,
of course, be rash to say that all such poems were addressed to
his wife. Some, like The Baite, are purely literary in origin ; others
present the obverse side of the passion portrayed in the first group,
its happier moments. But one must believe that those in which
ardour is combined with elevation and delicacy of feeling were
addressed to Anne More before and after their marriage.

In the third and smallest group, which includes, however, such fine

I o Commentary,

examples of his subtler moods as The Funerall, The Biossofne, The
Frimrose, Donne adopts the tone (as sincerely as was generally the
case) of the Petrarchian lover whose mistress's coldness has slain
him or provokes his passionate protestations. Some of these must,
I think, have been written after Donne's marriage. The titles one
or two be^ connect them with Mrs. Herbert and the Countess of
Bedford. The two most enigmatical poems in the Son^s and Sonets
are Ttvicknafn Garden and A jiodurnall upon S. Lticies day. ^ Yet
the very names 'Twicknam Garden' and ' S. Lucies day' suggest a
reference to the Countess of Bedford. It is possible that the last
was written when Lady Bedford was ill in December, 1612? 'My
Lady Bedford last night about one of the clock was suddenly, and
has continued ever since, speechless, and is past all hopes though
yet alive,' writes the Earl of Dorset on November 23, 1612. It is
probable that on December 13 she was still in a critical condition,
supposing the illness to have been that common complaint of an age
of bad drains, namely typhoid fever, and Donne may have written in
anticipation of her death. But the suggestion is hazardous. The
third verse speaks a stronger language than that of Petrarchian
adoration. Still it is difficult for us to estimate aright all that was
allowed to a ' servant ' under the accepted convention. It is note-
worthy that the poem is not included in any known MS. collection
made before 1630. The Countess died in 1627.

Page 7. The Good-morrow.

The MSS. point to two distinct recensions of this poem. The one
which is given in the group of MSS. Z>, H4(), Lee, and in 16)}, reads,
3. countrey pleasures childishly 4. snorted 14. one world 17. better.
The other, which is the most common in the MSS., reads, 3. childish
pleasures seelily 4. slumbred 14. our world 17. fitter. The edition of
1635 shows a contamination of the two due to the fact that the
printer ' set up ' from 16}}, and he or the editor corrected from a MS.
collection, probably A18, N, TC In TCD the second recension is
given in the collection of Donne's poems in the first part of the
MS. ; in the second part, a miscellaneous collection of poems, the
poem is given again, but according to the other version. It does not
seem to me possible to decide absolutely the relative authority of
the two versions, but to my mind that of 1633 and Z>, Ji4g, Lee
seems the more racy and characteristic. It probably represents
the first version of the poem, whether Donne or another be respons-
ible for the alterations. The only point of importance to be decided
is whether ' better ' or ' fitter ' expresses more exactly what the poet
meant to say. The 1635 editor preferred ' fitter', thinking probably
that the idea of exact correspondence is emphasized, ' where find
two hemispheres that fit one another more exactly ? ' But this is
not, I think, what Donne meant. The mutual fittingness of the
lovers is implied already in the idea that each is a whole world to the

Songs a?id Sonets, 1 1

other.7 Gazing in each other's eyes each beholds a hemisphere of this
worldt The whole cannot, of course, be reflected. And where could
either find a better hemisphere, one in which there is as here neither
'sharpe North' nor 'declining West', neither coldness nor alteration.

I. 13. Let Maps to other. The edition may have dropped the 's',
which occurs in most of the MSS., but the plural without ' s ' is
common even till a later period : 'These, as his other, were naughty
things.' Bunyan, The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, p. 106
(Cambridge English Classics). ' And other of such vinegar aspect
That they'll not show their teeth in way of smile.' Shakespeare,
Merchant of Venice, i. i. 54.

II. 20-1. Lf our tivo loves be one, <^c. If our two loves are one,
dissolution is impossible ; and the same is true if, though two, they
are always alike. What is simple— as God or the soul — cannot be
dissolved; nor compounds, e.g. the Heavenly bodies, between whose
elements there is no contrariety. ' Impossibile autem est quod forma
separetur a se ipsa. Unde impossibile est, quod forma subsistens
desinat esse. Dato etiam, quod anima esset ex materia et forma com-
posita,ut quidam dicunt, adhuc oporteret ponere eam incorruptibilem.
Non enim invenitur corruptio nisi ubi invenitur contrarietas ; genera-
tiones enim et corruptiones ex contrariis et in contraria sunt' «&c.,
Aquinas, Sum?na I. Quaest. Ixxv, Art. 6. The body, bfeing com-
posed of contrary elements, has not this essential immortality :
' In Heaven we doe not say, that our bodies shall devest their
mortality, so, as that naturally they could not dye ; for they shall
have a composition still ; and every compounded thing may perish ;
but they shall be so assured, and with such a preservation, as they
shall alwaies know they shall never dye.' Sermons 80. 19. 189.

Page 8. Song.

The first two stanzas of this song are printed in the 1653 edition
of the Poems of Francis Beaumont, with the title A Raritie. It is set
to music in Eg. MS. 2013, f. 58. Mr. Chambers points out that
Habington's poem. Against them 7vho lay Unchastity to the Sex of
Wo77ien {Castara, ed. Elton, p. 231), evidently refers to this poem :

They meet but with unwholesome springs

And summers which infectious are :
They hear but when the meremaid sings.

And only .see the falling starre :
Who ever dare
Affirme no woman chaste and faire.

Goe cure your feavers ; and you'le say

The Dog-dayes scorch not all the yeare :
In copper mines no longer stay.

But travel to the west, and there
The right ones see.
And grant all gold's not alchimie.

)

;

12

Commentary,

A poem modelled on Donne's appears in Harleian MS. 6057, and
in The Treasury of Music. By Mr. Latves and others. (1669)

Goe catch a star that's falling from the sky,
Cause an immortal creature for to die ;
Stop with thy hand the current of the seas,
Post ore the earth to the Antipodes ;
Cause times return and call back yesterday,
Cloake January with the month of May ;

Weigh out an ounce of flame, blow back the winde :

And then find faith within a womans minde.

John Dunne.

1. 2. Get with child a mandrake root. ' Many Mola's and false
conceptions there are of Mandrakes, the first from great Antiquity,
conceiveth the Root thereof resembleth the shape of Man . . . Now
whatever encourageth the first invention, there have not been wanting
many ways of its promotion. The first a Catachrestical and far derived
similitude it holds with Man ; that is, in a bifurcation or division of
the Root into two parts, which some are content to call Thighs.'
Sir Thomas Browne's Vulgar Errors (1686), ii. 6, p. 72. Compare
also The Progresse of the Soule, st. xv, p. 300.

Page 10. The Undertaking.

1. 2. the Worthies. The nine worthies usually named are Joshua,
David, Judas Maccabaeus, Hector, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Arthur,
Charlemagne, and Godfrey of Bouillon, but they varied. Guy of
Warwick is mentioned by Gerard Legh, Accedens of Armory e. Nash
mentions Solomon and Gideon ; and Shakespeare introduces Hercules
and Pompey in Love's Labour's Lost. All the Worthies therefore
covers a wide field. The Worthies figured largely in decorative
designs and pageants. On a target taken at the siege of Ostend * was
enammeled in gold the seven [sic] Worthies, worth seven or eight
hundred guilders '. Vere's Commentaries {16^"]), p. 174.

1. 6. The skill of specular sione. Compare To the Countesse of
Bedford, p. 219, 11. 28-30:

You teach (though wee learne not) a thing unknowne
To our late times, the use of specular stone.
Through which all things within without were shown.

Grosart (ii. 48-9) and Professor Norton (Grolier, i. 217) take
'specular' as meaning simply 'translucent', and the latter quotes
Holinshed's Chronicle, ii. ch. 10; 'I find obscure mention of the
specular stone also to have been found and applied to this use ' (i. e.
glazing windows) ' in England, but in such doubtful sort as I dare not
aflfirm for certain.' This is the ' pierre speculaire ' or ' pierre a miroir '
which Cotgrave describes as ' A light, white, and transparent stone,
easily cleft into thinne flakes, and used by th' Arabians (among whom
it growes) instead of glasse ; anight it represents the Moon, and even

Songs a7id So?tets. i 3

increases or decreases, as the Moon doth '. But surely Donne refers
to crystal-gazing. Paracelsus has a paragraph in the Coelum Philoso-
thorum :

' How to conjure the Crystal so that all Things may
be seen in it.

'To conjure is nothing else than to observe anything rightly, to
know and to understand what it is. The crystal is a figure of the air.
Whatever appears in the air, movable or immovable, the same appears
also in the speculum or crystal as a wave. P'or the air, the water, and
the crystal, so far as vision is concerned, are one, like a mirror in
which an inverted copy of an object is seen.' The old name for
crystal-gazers was ' specularii '. Mr. Chambers suggests very probably
that there is a reference to Dr. Dee's magic mirrors or ' show stone ',
but one would like to explain the reference to the cutting of the
stone on the one hand, and its being no longer to be found on the
other.

1. 16. Loves but their oldest clothes. The ' her ' of -ff is a tempting
reading in view of the ' woman ' which follows, but ' their ' is the
common version and the poet's mind passes rapidly to and fro
between the abstract and its concrete embodiments. The proleptic
use of the pronoun is striking in either case.

Compare To Mrs. M. H., p. 217, 11. 31-2.

1. 18. Vertue attird in woman see. The reading of the 1633
edition, which is that of the best manuscripts, has more of Donne's
characteristic hyperbole than the metrically more regular ' Vertue in
woman see '. ' If you can see the Idea of Vertue attired in the visible
form of woman and love that.'

Page ii. The Sunne Rising.
Compare Ovid, Amores, I. 13.

lam super oceanum venit a seniore marito,

Flava pruinoso quae vehit axe diem.
Quo properas, Aurora ?

Quo properas, ingrata viris, ingrata puellis ?

Tu pueros somno fraudas, tradisque magistris,
Ut subeant tenerae verbera saeva manus.

A comparison of Ovid's simple and natural images and reflections ,
with Ponne's passionate but ingenious hyperboles jvill show exactly
what Testi meant by his contrast of the homely imagery of classical
and the metaphysical manner of Italian love poetry. '

1. 17. both th' India's 0/ spice and Myne. A distinction that Donne*
is never tired of. ' The use of the word mine specifically for mines
of gold, silver, or precious stone is, I believe, peculiar to Donne.'
Coleridge, quoted by Norton. The O.E.D. does not contradict this,

1 4 Commentary,

for the word had a wider connotation. Compare Loves exchange,
p. 35, 11. 34-35 :

and make more
Mynes in the earth, then Quarries were before.

And The Progresse of the Soule, p. 295, 1. 17 :

thy Western land of Myne.

And for the two Indias : * As hee that hath a plentifull fortune in
Europe, cares not much though there be no land of perfumes in the
East, nor of gold, in the West-Indies.' Sermons 50. 15. 123. And
' Sir. Your way into Spain was eastward, and that is the way to the
land of perfumes and spices ; their way hither is westward, and that
is the way to the land of gold and of mines,' &c. To Sir Robert Ker.
Gosse's Life, &^c\, ii. igi.

1. 24. A/i ivealth alchimie : i. e. imposture or ' glittering dross '
(O.E.I).). ' Though the show of it were glorious, the substance of it
was dross, and nothing but alchymy and cozenage.' Harrington,
Orlando Furioso (1591). See also poem cited II. p. 11.

Page 12. The Indifferent.
1. 7. dry corke. Cork was a favourite metaphor for what was
dry and withered. To our taste it is hardly congruous with love or utf-
tragic poetry, perhaps because of its associations. ' Bind fast his f
corky arms,' says Cornwall, speaking of Gloucester {King Lear, in.
vii. 31), but Shakespeare seems to have taken the epithet from
Harsnett's Declaration of Egregious Fopishe Lmpostures, dr^c. (1603) :
' It would pose all the cunning exorcists ... to teach an old corkie
woman to writhe, tumble, curvet,' c. 5, p. 23.

Page 13. Loves Usury.
1. 5. My body raigne. Grosart and Chambers substitute ' range ',
from 16)^-6^. Perhaps they, are right; but I feel doubtful. All
the best MSS. read ' raigne.' Donne contrasts the reign of love and
the reign of lust on the body, and frankly declares for the latter. A
lover might range, ' I can love both fair and brown,' but no lover
could

mistake by the way
The maid, and tell the lady of that delay.

Adonis, with graver rhetoric, states the other side of Donne's^^parg-
■if doxical thesis :

Love comforteth like sunshine after rain.
But Lust's effect is tempest after sun ;
Love's gentle spring doth always fresh remain,
Lust's winter comes ere summer half be done ;

Love surfeits not. Lust like a glutton dies ;

Love is all truth, Lust full of forged lies.

Shakespeare, i'''enus and Adonis, v. cxxxiv.

r

Songs and Sonets. i 5

11. 13-16. Chambers and Grosart have adopted, with some
modification of punctuation, the reading of the 1633-54 editions, and
the lines are frequently quoted as printed by Chambers :
Only let me love none ; no, not the sport
From country-grass to confitures of court.
Or city's quelquechoses ; let not report
My mind transport.

I confess I find it difficult to attach any exact meaning to them.
Are there any instances of ' sport ' thus used apparently for ' sportive
lady ' ? The difficulty seems to me to have arisen from the accidental
dropping in the 1633 edition of the semicolon after 'sport', which
the 1669 editor rightly restored. What Donne means by 'the sport'
is clear enough from other passages, e. g. ' the short scorn of a bride-
groom's play ' {Loves Alchimie), ' as she would man should despise
the sport ' {Fareivell to Love). The prayer that report ?nay (' let ', not
' let not ') carry his roving fancy from one to another, is in keeping
with the whole tenor of the poem. The Grolier Club edition has
the punctuation I have given, which I had adopted before I saw
that edition. I find it difficult to attach any meaning to 'let not
report '.

Page 14. The Canonization.
1. 7. Or the Kings reall, or his stamped face Contemplate. Donne's
conceits reappear in his sermons in a different setting. 'Beloved in
Christ Jesus, the heart of your gracious God is set upon you ; and we
his servants have told you so, and brought you thus neare him, into
his Court, into his house, into the Church, but yet we cannot get you
to see his face, to come to that tendernesse of conscience as to
remember and consider that all your most secret actions are done in
his sight and his presence ; Caesars face, and Caesars inscription you
can see : The face of the Prince in his coyne you can rise before the
Sun to see, and sit up till mid-night to see ; but if you do not see the
face of God upon every piece of that mony too, all that mony is
counterfeit ; If Christ have not brought that fish to the hook, that
brings the mony in the mouth (as he did to Feter) that mony is ill
fished for.' Sermons 80. 12. 122.

I. 15. 'Man' is the reading of every MS. except Lee, which here
as in several other little details appears to resemble 16^^ more
closely than either of the other MSS., D, H4g. It is quite possible
that ' man ' is correct — a vivid and concrete touch, but in view of
the ' men ' which follows ' more ' is preferable. The two words are
frequently interchanged in the MSS.

II. 24-5. The punctuation of these lines is that of D, IL49, Lee,
though I adopted it independently as required by the sense. The
editions put a full stop after each line. Chambers alters the first (1. 24)
to a semicolon and connects

So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit.

1 6 Commentary,

with the two preceding lines. To me it seems the line must go with
what follows, and that ' so ' (which should have no comma) is not an
illative conjunction but a subordinate conjunction of effect . * Both
sexes fit so entirely into one neutral thing that we die and rise the
same,' &c. The Grolier Club editor, like Chambers, connects the
line with what has gone before, but drops the comma after 'so',
making it an adverb of degree.

11. 37-45. And thus invoke us, of^c. Grosart and Chambers have
disguised and altered the sense of this stanza. Grosart, indeed, by
printing * Who did the whole world's extract ', has made it completely
unintelligible. Chambers's version gives a meaning, but a wrong one.
He prints the last six lines thus :

Who did the whole worlds soul contract, and drove
Into the glasses of your eyes ;
So made such mirrors, and such spies.
That they did all to you epitomize —
Countries, towns, courts beg from above
A pattern of your love.

These harsh constructions are not Donne's. The object of ' drove '
is not the ' world's soul ', but ' Countries, towns, courts '; and ' beg '
is not in the indicative but the imperative mood. For clearness' sake
I have bracketed 11. 42-3 and printed * love ! ' otherwise leaving the
punctuation unchanged.

[Donne as usual is pedantically accurate in the details of his
metaphor .j The canonized lovers are invoked as saints, i.e. their
prayers are requested. They are asked to beg from above a pattern
of their love for those below. Of prayers to saints Donne speaks in
one of his Letters, p. 181 : 'I see not how I can admit that circuit of
sending them ' (i. e. letters) ' to you to be sent hither ; that seems a kinde
of praying to Saints, to whom God must tell first, that such a man
prays to them, to pray to him.'

1. 40. The ' contract ' of the printed editions is doubtless correct, de-
spite the preference of theMSS.for 'extract'. This goes in several MSS.
with other errors which show confusion. D,H4^, Lee rend 'anddrawe',
a bad rhyme ; and A18, N, TCC (the verse is lost in TCD) drop
'soule', reading 'the world extract'. The reading 'extract' is due to what
Dr. Moore calls ' the extraordinary short-sightedness of the copyists
in respect of a construction. Their vision seems often to be bounded
by a single line.' To ' extract the soul ' of things is a not uncommon
phrase with Donne. Here it does not suit the thought which is
coming so well as ' contract ' : ' As the spirit and soule of the whole
booke of Psalmes is contracted into this psalme, so is the spirit and
soule of this whole psalme contracted into this verse.' Sermons 80.
66. 663. (Psal. Ixiii. 7. Because thou hast beene fny he/pe, Therefore
in the shadoiv of thy wings will / rejoice^

1. 45. A patterne of your love. The 'of our love' of 1633 might

Songs and Sonets, 17

mean * for our love ', but it is clear from the manner in which this
stanza is given in D that the copyist has misunderstood the con-
struction— 'our love' follows from the assumption that 'Countries,
Townes, Courts ' is the subject to ' Beg '. The colon and the capital
letter would not make such a view impossible, as they might be given
a merely emphasizing value ; or if regarded as imperative the ' Beg '
might be taken as in the third person : ' Countries, Townes, Courts —
let them beg,' &c. Compare :

The God of Souldiers :
With the consent of supreame Jove, informe
Thy thoughts with Noblenesse.

Shakespeare, Cor. v. iii. 70-2 (Simpson, Shake speariaji

Punctuation, p. 98).

But clearly here ' Beg ' is in the second person plural, predicate to
* You whom reverend love ', and ' your love ' is the right reading.

Page 16. The Triple Foole.

He is trebly a fool because (i) he loves, (2) he expresses his love
in verse, (3) he thereby enables some one to set the verse to music
and by singing it to re-awaken the passion which composition had
lulled to sleep.

Page 17. Lovers Infiniteness.

This song, which is one of the obviously authentic lyrics which is
not included in the Ai8^ N, TC collection, would seem to have
undergone some revision after its first issue. The version given in A2^,
from which Cy is copied, would seem to be the original, at least the
readings of 11. 25-6 and 11. 29-30 do not look like corruptions. The
reading ' beget ' at 1. 25 gives a better rhyme to ' yet ' than ' admit '.
In 1. 29 A2^ has obviously interchanged ' thine ' and ' mine '. The
slightly different version oi JC gives the correct order. The generally
careful Z>, H4(), Lee group has an unusually faulty text of this
poem. Among other mistakes it reads (with 696) * Thee ' for ' them '
in 1, 32.

* Lovers Infiniteness ' is a strange title. It is not found in any of
the MSS., and possibly should be ' Loves Infiniteness '. Yet the
' Lovers ' suits the closing thought :

so we shall
Be one, and one anothers All.

For a poem in obvious imitation of this, see Appendix C, p. 439.

11. i-ii. The rhetoric and rhythm of Donne's elaborate stanzas
depends a good deal on their right punctuation. Mine is an attempt
to correct that of 16)^ without modernizing. The full stop after ' fall '
is obviously an error, and so is, I think, the comma after ' spent '.
The first six lines state in a rapid succession of clauses all that the

II 917.8 r"

1 8 Commentary.

poet has done to gain his lady's love. A new thought begins with
' Yet no more ', <S:c.

I. 9. genera// \s the reading of two MSS. which are practically one.
I have recorded it because (i) 11. 29-30 (see textual note) would
seem to suggest that their version of the poem is an early one (revised
by Donne), and this may be an early reading ; (2) because in 1. 20
this epithet is used as though repeated, 'thy gift being generall.' It
would be not unlike Donne to quibble with the word, making it mean
first a gift made generally to all, and secondly a gift general in its
content, not limited or defined in any way. The whole poem is a
piece of legal quibbling not unlike Shakespeare's 87th Sonnet :

Farewell ! thou art too dear for my possessing,
And like enough thou know'st thy estimate :
The charter of thy worth gives thee releasing ;
My bonds in thee are all determinate, &c.

Page 18. Song.

Sweetest /o7)e, c^^r. Of the music to this and ' Send home my long
stray'd eyes ' I can discover no trace. T/ie Baite was doubtless sung
to the same air as Marlowe's 'Come live with me'. See II. p. 57.

II. 6-8. I have retained the text of /<5y, which has the support of
all the MSS. That of 16)^-^4 is an attempt to accommodate the
lines, by a little padding, to the rhythm of the corresponding lines in
the other stanzas.

Page 20. '^he Legacie.
11. 9-16. I Jieard me say, &^c. The construction of this verse has
proved rather a difficulty to editors. ; I give it as printed by Chambers
and by the Grolier Club editor. ^Chambers's modernized version
runs :

I heard me say, ' Tell her anon,

That myself', that is you not I,

' Did kill me ', and when I felt me die,
I bid me send my heart, when I was gone ;
But I alas ! could there find none ;

When I had ripp'd and search'd where hearts should lie,
It killed me again, that I who still was true
In life, in my last will should cozen you.
The Grolier Club version has no inverted commas, and runs :

I heard me say, Tell her anon,

That myself, that's you not I,

Did kill me ; and when I felt me die,
I bid me send my heart, when I was gone ;
But I alas ! could there find none.

^\'hen I had ripped me and searched where hearts did lie,
It killed me again that I, who still was true
In life, in my last will should cozen you.

So?2gs and Sonets. 19

( In my own version tlie only departure which I have made from
the punctuation of the 1633 version is the substitution of a semi-
colon for a comma after 'lye' (1. 14). If inverted commas arc to be
used at all it seems to me they would need to be extended to ' j^one '
(1. 12) or to 'lie' (1. 14). As Donne is addressing the lady throughout ;/
it is difficult to distinguish what he says to her now from what he ■
said on the occasion imagined.

But the point in which both Chambers and the Grolier Club
editor seem to me in error is in connecting 1. 14, When I had ripfd,
<s-\:, with what follows instead of with the immediately preceding
line. There is no justification for changing the comma after ' none '
either to a semicolon era full stop. The meaning of 11. 13-14 is,
'But alas ! when I had ripp'd me and search'd where hearts did
(i.e. used to) lie, I could there find none.' It is so that the Dutch
translator understands the lines :

Maer, oh, ick vond er geen, al scheurd ick mijn geraemt,
En socht door d'oude plaets die 't Hert is toegeraemt.

The last two lines are a conmient on the whole incident, the making
of the will and the poet's inability to implement it,

I. 20. // 7e'as intire to none : i. e. ' It was tied to no one lover.' The '
word ' entire ' in this sense is still found on public-house signs, and
misled the American Pinkerton in Stevenson's The JVrecker. Com-
pare : ' But this evening I will spie upon the B[ishop] and give you an
account to-morrow morning of his disposition ; when, if he cannot be
intire to you, since you are gone so farre downwards in your favours
to me, be pleased to pursue your humiliation so farre as to chusc
your day, and either to suffer the solitude of this place, or to change
it, by such company, as shall waite upon you.' Letters, p. 315 (To
... Sir Robert Karre). This seems to mean, * if the Bishop cannot
fulfill, be faithful to, his engagement to you, come and dine here.'

II. 21-24. These lines are also printed or punctuated in a mis-
leading fashion by Chambers and the Grolier Club editor. The
former, following 166^, but altering the punctuation, prints :

As good as could be made by art
It seemed, and therefore for our loss be sad.
I meant to send that heart instead of mine.
But O ! no man could hold it, for 'twas thine.

The ' for our loss be sad ' comes in very strangely before the end,
nor is the force of 'and therefore' very clear.

The Grolier Club editor, following the words of id)-], but altering
the punctuation, reads :

As good as could be made by art

It seemed, and therefore for our losses sad ;
I meant to send this heart instead of mine
But oh I no man could hold it, for twas thine.

c 2

2 o Commentary.

\

Apparently the heart was sad for our losses because it was no
better than might be made by art. The confusion arises fron-
deserting the punctuation of /dy. ' For our losses sad ' is an ad-
jectival qualification of ' I '. 'I, sad to have lost my heart, which by
|l legacy was yours, resolved as 2i pis aller io send this, which seemed
as good as could be made by art. But to send it was impossible,
for no man could hold it. It was thine.'
Huyghens translates :

Soo meenden ick 't verlies dat ick vergelden most
Te boeten met dit Hert, en doen 't u toebehooren :
Maer, oh, 't en kost niet zijn, 't was uw al lang te, voren.
But this does not appear to be quite accurate. Huyghens appears
to think that Donn^^ould not give his heart to the lady, because it
was hers already. What he really says is, that no one could kee^'
this heart of hers, which had taken the place of his own in his
bosom, because, being hers, it was too volatile. j

Page 21. A Feaver.
11. 13-14. O wrangling schooles, that search what fire
Shall burne this ivorld.

' I cannot but marvel from what Sibyl or Oracle they ' (the Ancients)
' stole the prophecy of the world's destruction by fire, or whence Lucan |
learned to say.

Communis mundo superest rogus, ossibus astra
Misturus.

There yet remaines to th'World one common fire
Wherein our Bones with Stars shall make one pyre.

I believe the World grows near its end, yet is neither old nor
decayed, nor will ever perish upon the ruines of its own Principles.
As the work of Creation was above nature, so is its adversary annihi-
lation ; without which the World hath not its end, but its mutation.
Now what force should be able to consume it thus far, without the
breath of God, which is the truest consuming flame, my Philosophy
cannot inform me.' Browne's Religio Medici, sect. 45.

Page 22. Aire and Angels.

1. 19. Ey'ry thy haire. This, the reading of 1633^)9 and the
MSS., is, I think, preferable to the amended ' Thy every hair', &c., of
the 1650-69 editions (which Chambers adopts, ascribing it to i66g
alone), though the difference is slight. 'Every thy hair' has the
force of ' Thy every hair ' with the additional suggestion of * even thy
least hair ' derived from the construction with a superlative adjective.
* Every the least remembrance.' J. King, Serniotis 28. ' Every, the
most complex, web of thought may be reduced to simple syllogisms.'
Sir W. Hamilton. See note to The Funeral/, 1. 3.

Songs and Sonets, 2 i

11. 23-4. Then as an Angel I face and 7vings

Of aire y not pure as /'/, yet pure doth weare.

St. Thomas {Summa Thcol. I. li. 2) "discusses the nature of the
body assumed by Angels when they appear to men, seeing that
naturally they are incorporeal. There being four elements, this body
must consist of one of these, but ' Angeli non assumunt corpora do
terra vel aqua : quia non subito disparerent. Neque iterum de igne :
quia comburerent ea quae contingerent. Neque iterum ex aere : quia
aer infigurabilis est et incolorabilis '. To this Aquinas replies, ' Quod
licet aer in sua raritate manens non retineat figuram neque colorem :
quando tamen condensatur, et figurari et colorari potest : sicut patet
in nubibus. Et sic Angeli assumunt corpora ex aere, condensando
ipsum virtute divina, quantum necesse est ad corporis assumendi
formationem.'

Tasso, familiar like Donne with Catholic doctrine, thus clothes his
angels :

Cos! parl6gli, e Gabriel s' accinse

Veloce ad eseguir 1' imposte cose.

La sua forma tnvisibil d'aria cinse,

Ed al senso mortal la sottopose :

Umane membra, aspetto uman si finse,

Ma di celeste maestk il compose.

Tra giovane e fanciuUo etk confine

Prese, ed ornb di raggi il biondo crine. Gerus. Lib. I. 13.

Fairfax translates the relevant lines :

In form of airy members fair imbared,
His spirits pure were subject to our sight.

Milton's language is vague and inconsistent, but his angels are
indubitably corporeal. When Satan is wounded,

the ethereal substance closed.
Not long divisible ; and from the gash
A stream of nectarous humour issuing flowed
Sanguine, such as celestial Spirits may bleed.

• •••••■• •

Yet soon he healed ; for Spirits that live throughout

Vital in every part, (not as frail man

In entrails, heart or head, liver or reins,)

Cannot but by annihilating die ;

Nor in their liquid texture mortal wound

Receive, no more than can the fluid air.

All heart they live, all head, all eye, all ear,

All intellect, all sense : and as they please,

They limb themselves, and colour, shape, or size

Assume, as likes them best, condense or rare.

2 2 Commentary.

'I'he lines italicized indicate that Milton is familiar with the doctrine
of the schools, and is giving it a turn of his own. Milton's angels,
apparently, do not assume a body of air but, remaining in their own
ethereal substance, assume what form and colour they choose. Raphael,
thus having passed through the air like a bird,

to his proper shape returns
A Seraph winged, &c.

Nash says, speaking of Satan, ' Lucifer (before his fall) an Arch-
angel, was a cleere body, compact of the purest and brightest of the
ayre, but after his fall hee was vayled with a grosser substance, and
tooke a new forme of darke and thicke ayre, which he still reteyneth.'
Pierce Fenniless (Grosart), ii. 102. The popular mind had difificulty
in appreciating the scholastic doctrine of the purely spiritual nature
of angels who do not possess but only assume bodies ; who do not
occupy any point in space but are virtually present as operating at
that point. ' Per applicationem igitur virtutis angelicae ad aliquem
locum qualitercumque dicitur Angelus esse in loco corporeo.' The
popular mind gave them thin bodies and wondered how many could
stand on a needle.

The Scholastic doctrine of Angelic bodies was an inheritance
from the Neo-Platonic doctrine of the bodies of demons, the beings
intermediary between gods and men. According to Plotinus these
could assume a body of air or of fire, but the generally entertained
view of the school was, that their bodies were of air. Apuleius
was the author of a definition of demons which was transmitted
through the Middle Ages : ' Daemones sunt genere animalia, ingenio
rationalia, animo passiva, corpore aeria, tempore aeterna.' See also
Dante, Furgatorio, xv. The aerial or aetherial body is a tenet of
mysticism. It has been defended by such different thinkers as
-Leibnitz and Charles Bonnet. See Bouillet's note to Plotinus's
Enneads, L 454.

Page 23. Breake of day.

This poem is obviously addressed by a woman to her lover, not
vice versa, though the fact has eluded some of the copyists, who have
tried to change the pronouns. It is strange to find the subtle and
erudite Donne in his quest of realism falling into line with the popular
song-writer. Mr. Chambers has pointed out in his learned and
delightful essay on the mediaeval lyric {Early English Lyrics, 1907)
that the popular as opposed to the courtly love-song was frequently
put into the mouth of the woman. One has only to turn to Burns
and the Scotch lyrists to find the same thing true. This song,
indeed, is clearly descended from the popular aube, or lyric dialogue
of lovers parting at daybreak. The dialogue suggestion is height-
ened by the punctuation of 1. 3 in some MSS.

Why should we rise ? Because 'tis light ?

Songs and Sonets, 23

11. 13-18. Must businesse thee from hence remove, c-v. * It is a
good definition of ill-love, that St. Chrysostom gives, that it is Animae
vacantis passio, a passion of an empty soul, of an idle mind. For fill
a man with business, and he hath no room for such love.' Sermons
26. 384.

Page 24. The Anniversarie.

1. 3. The Sun itselfe, which makes times, as they passe : i. e. which
makes times and seasons as they pass.

Before the Sunne, the which fram'd daies, was fram'd.

The Second Anniversary, 1. 23.

The construction is somewhat of an anacduthon, the sun alone
being given the predicate, ' Is elder by a year,' which has to be
supplied with all the other subjects in the first two lines. Chambers,
inadvertently or from some copy of 16)), reads ' time ', and this
makes ' they ' refer back to ' Kings, favourites ', &c. This does not
improve the construction.

1. 22. But wee no more, then all the rest. The ' wee ' of every MS.
which I have consulted seems to me certainly the correct reading.
The ' now ' of all the printed editions is due to the editor of
j6}) imagining that he got thereby the right antithesis to ' then '.
But he was too hasty, for the antithesis is between ' then ' when we
are in heaven, and now while we are ' here upon earth '. In heaven
indeed we shall be ' throughly blest ', but all in heaven are equally
happy, whereas here on earth,

we'are kings and none but we
Can be such kings, nor of such subjects be.

The ' none but we ' is the extreme antithesis to ' But we no more
than all the rest'.

The Scholastic Philosophy held, not indeed that all in heaven are
equally blest, but that all are equally content. Basing themselves
on the verse, * In domo Patris mei mansiones multae sunt,' John
xiv. 2, they argued that the blessed have in varying degree according
to their merit, the essential happiness of Heaven which is the vision
of God :

Only who have enjoy'd

The sight of God, in fulnesse, can think it ;

For it is both the object and the wit.

This is essential joy, where neither hee

Can suffer diminution, nor wee ;

'Tis such a full, and such a filling good ;

Had th'Angells once look'd on him they had stood.

The Second Anniversary, 11. 140-6 (p. 264).

But though not all equally dowered with the virtue and the wisdom to
understand God, all are content, for each is full to his measure, and
each is happy in the happiness of the other : ' Solet etiam quaeri an

24 Commentary,

in gaudio dispares sint, sicut in claritate cognitionis differunt. Dc
hoc August, ait in lib. de Civ. Dei : Multae mansiones in una domo
erunt, scilicet, variae praemiorum dignitates : sed ubi Deus erit omnia
in omnibus, erit etiam in dispari claritate par gaudium ; ut quod
habebunt singuli, commune sit omnibus, quia etiam gloria capitis
omnium erit per vinculum charitatis. Ex his datur intelligi quod
par gaudium omnes habebunt, etsi disparem cognitionis claritatem,
quia per charitatem quae in singulis erit perfecta, tantum quisque
gaudebit de bono alterius, quantum gauderet si in se ipso haberet.
Sed si par erit cunctorum gaudium, videtur quod par sit omnium
beatitudo ; quod constat omnino non esse. Ad quod dici potest
quod beatitudo par esset si ita esset par gaudium, ut etiam par esset
cognitio ; sed quia hoc non erit, non faciet paritas gaudii paritatem
beatitudinis. Potest etiam sic accipi par gaudium, ut non referatur
paritas ad intensionem affectionis gaudentium, sed ad universitatem
rerum de quibus laetabitur : quia de omni re unde gaudebit unus,
gaudebunt omnes.' Petri Lombardi . . . Sententiarum Lib. IV,
Distinct, xlix. 4. Compare Aquinas, Summa, Supplement. Quaest. xciii.

All in heaven are perfectly happy in the place assigned to them,
is Piccardo's answer to Dante {Paradiso, iii. 70-88) : ' So that our
being thus, from threshold unto threshold throughout the realm, is
a joy to all the realm, as to the King, who draweth our wills to what
he willeth : and his will is our peace.'

11. 23-4. The variants in these lines show that i6j} has in this
poem followed not Z>, H4(), Lee but Ai&^ N, TC.

Page 25. A Valediction : of mv name in the window.

I have adopted from the title of this poem in D, H4g, Lee the
correct manner of entitling all these poems. In the printed editions
the titles run straight on, A Valediction of my name, in the window.
This has led in the case of the next of these poems, A Valediction of
the booke, to the mistake expressed in the title of i6^j, Valediction to
his Booke, and repeated by Grosart, that the latter was a dedication,
* formed the concluding poem of the missing edition of his poems.'
This is a complete mistake. Valediction is the general title of a
poem bidding farewell. Of the Booke, Of teares, &c., indicate the
particular themes. This is clearly brought out in O'F, where they
are brought together and numbered. Valediction 2. of Teares, &c.

Page 26, 1. 28. The Rafters of my body, bone. Compare : ' First,
Ossa, bones. We know in the naturall and ordinary acceptation, what
they are ; They are these Beames, and Timbers, and Rafters of these
Tabernacles, these Temples of the Holy Ghost, these bodies of ours.'
Sermons 80. 51. 516.

Page 27, 11. 31-2. Till my returne, repaire

And recompact my scattered body so.

This verse is rightly printed in the 1633 edition. In that of 1635

Songs and Sonets, 25

it went wrong ; and the errors were transmitted through all the sub-
sequent editions, and have been retained by Grosartand Chambers, but
corrected in the Grolier Club edition. The full stop after * so '
was changed to a comma on the natural but mistaken assumption
that * so ' pointed forward to the immediately following ' as '. In fact,
* so ' refers back to the preceding verse. Donne has described how
from his anatomy or skeleton, i. e. his name scratched in the glass,
the lady may repair and recompact his whole frame, and he opens
the new verse by bidding her do so. Compare : ' In this chapter
... we have Job's Anatomy, Jobs Sceleton, the ruins to which he
was reduced. . . . Job felt the hand of destruction upon him, and
he felt the hand of preservation too ; and it was all one hand : This
is God's Method .... even God's demolitions are super-edifications,
his Anatomies, his dissections are so many recompactings, so many
resurrections ; God winds us off the Skein, that he may weave us up
into the whole peece, and he cuts us out of the whole peece into
peeces, that he may make us up into a whole garment.' Sermons
80. 43. 127-9. Again, 'It is a divorce and no super-induction, it
is a separating, and no redintegration.' Sermons 80. 55. 552. With
the third line, * As all the virtuous powers,' Donne begins a new
comparison which is completed in the next stanza. Therefore the
sixth stanza closes rightly in the 1633 text with a colon. The full
stop of the later editions, which Chambers adopts, is obviously
wrong. Grosart has a semicolon, but as he retains the comma at
' so ' and puts a semicolon at the end of the previous stanza, the
sense becomes very obscure.

Page 28. Twicknam Garden.

1. I. surrounded with tears: i.e. overflowed with tears, the root idea
of 'surrounded'. The Dutch poet translates :

Van suchten hytgedort, van tranen overvloeyt.

Compare: 'The traditional doctrines in the Roman Church, which
are so many, as that they overflow even the water of life, the Scrip-
tures themselves, and suppresse and surround them.' Sermons 80.

59- 599-

With this whole poem compare : ' Sir, Because I am m a place and

season where I see every thing bud forth, I must do so too, and vent

some of my meditations to you . . . The pleasantnesse of the season

displeases me. Everything refreshes, and I wither, and I grow older

and not better, my strength diminishes and my load growes, and being

to pass more and more stormes, I finde that I have not onely cast out

all my ballast, which nature and time gives. Reason and discretion, and

so am as empty and light as Vanity can make me, but I have overfraught

myself with vice, and so am ridd(l)ingly subject to two contrary

wracks, Sinking and Oversetting,' &c. Letters (165 1), pp. 78-9 {To

Sir Henry Goodyere).

2 6 Commentary.

1. 15. IndurCy nor ye i leave loving. This is at first sight a strange
reading, and I was disposed to think that i6^j-6g, which has the
support of several MSS. (none of very high textual authority), must be
right. It is strange to hear the Petrarchian lover (Donne is probably
addressing the Countess of Bedford) speak of ' leaving loving ' as
though it were in his power. The reading ' nor leave this garden '
suits what follows : ' Not to be mocked by the garden and yet to
linger here in the vicinity of her I love let me become,' &c.

It is remarkable that D, H4g, Lee, and H40 omit this half line..
If the same omission was in the MS. from which i6j^ printed, the
present reading might be an editor's emendation. But it is older than
that, for it was the reading of the MS. from which the Dutch poet
Huyghens translated, and he has tried by his rhymes to produce
the effect of the alliteration :

Maer, om my noch te decken
Voor sulcken ongeval, en niet te min de Min

Te voeren in mijn zin,
Komt Min, en laet my hier yet ongevoelicks wezen.

Donne means, I suppose, ' Not to be mocked by the garden^ and yet
to be ever the faithful lover.' Compare Loves Deiiie, 1. 24. * Love
might make me leave loving.' The remainder of the verse may have
been suggested by Jonson's

Slow, slow, fresh Fount, keep time with my salt Tears.

Cynthias Revels (1600).

1. 17. I have ventured to adopt 'groane' for 'grow' ('grone' and
' growe ' are almost indistinguishable) from Ai8,N, TC; D, IL4^, Lee;
and H40. It is surely much more in Donne's style than the colour-
less and pointless ' growe '. It is^ too, in closer touch with the next
line. If ' growing ' is all we are to have predicated of the mandrake,
then it should be sufficient for the fountain to ' stand ', or ' flow '.
The chief difificulty in accepting the MS. reading is that the man-
drake is most often said to shriek, sometimes to howl, not to
groan :

I prethee yet remember
Millions are now in graves, which at last day
Like mandrakes shall rise shreeking.

Webster, The While Devil, v. vi. 64.

On the other hand the lover most often groans :

Thy face hath not the power to make love grone.

Shakespeare, Sonnels, 131, 6.

Beshrew that heart that makes my heart to groane.

Shakespeare, Sonnets, 133. i.

Ros. I would be glad to see it. (/. e. his heart)
Bir. I would you heard it groan.

Lovers Labour's Lost.

Songs and Sonets, 27

In a metaphor where two objects are identified such a transference
of attributes is quite permissible. Moreover, although ' shriek ' is the
more common word, ' groan ' is used of the mandrake :

Would curses kill, as doth the mandrake's groan,
I would invent as bitter searching terms, &c.

2 Hen. VI, III. ii. 310.
In the Elegie upon . . . Prince Henry (p. 269, 11, 53-4) Donne writes :

though such a life wee have
As but so many mandrakes on his grave.

i.e. a life of groans.

Page 29. A Valediction : of the Booke.

1. 3. Esloygne. Chambers alters to 'eloign', but Donne's is a good
English form.

From worldly care himself he did esloyne.

Spenser, F, Q. i. iv. 20.

The two forms seem to have run parallel from the outset, but that
with ' s ' disappears after the seventeenth century.

Page 30, 1. 7. Her who from Pindar could allure. Corinna, who five
times defeated Pindar at Thebes. Aelian, Var. Hist. xiii. 25, referred
to by Professor Norton. He quotes also from Pausanias, ix. 22.

1. 8. And her, through tvhose help Lucan is not lame. His wife,
Polla Argentaria, who ' assisted her husband in correcting the three
first books of his Pharsalia '. Lempri^re. The source of this tradition
I cannot discover. The only reference indicated by Schanz is to
Apollinaris Sidonius (Epist. 2, 10, 6, p. 46), who includes her among
a list of women who aided and inspired their husbands : ' saepe
versum . . . complevit . . . Argentaria cum Lucano.'

I. 9. And her, whose booke {they say') Homer did finde, and name.
I owe my understanding of this line to Professor Norton, who refers
to the Myriobiblon or Bibliotheca of Photius, of which the first edition
was published at Augsburg in 1601. There Photius, in an abstract of
a work by Ptolemy Hephaestion of Alexandria, states that Musaeus'
daughter Helena wrote on the war of Troy, and that from her work
Homer took the subject of his poem. But another account refers
to Phantasia of Memphis, the daughter of Nicarchus, whose work
Homer got from a sacred scribe named Pharis at Memphis. This
last source is mentioned by Lempriere, who knows nothing of the
other. Probably, therefore, it is the better known tradition.

II. 21-2. I have interchanged the old semicolon at the end of
1. 21 and the comma at the end of 1. 22. I take the first three lines
of the stanza to form an absolute clause : ' This book once written,
in cipher or new-made idiom, we are thereby (in these letters) the
only instruments for Loves clergy — their Missal and Breviary.' I
presume this is how it is understood by Chambers and the Grolier
Club editor, who place a semicolon at the end of each line. It seems

2 8 Comme?itary.

to me that with so heavy a pause after 1. 21 a full stop would be
better at the end of 1, 22.

1. 25. Vandals and Goths inundate us. This, the reading of (juite
a number of independent MSS., seems to me greatly preferable to
that of the printed texts :

Vandals and the Goths invade us.

The agreement of the printed texts does not carry much weight, for
any examination of the variants in this poem will reveal that they are
errors due to misunderstanding, e. g. 1. 20, ' tome,' ' to me,' * tomb '
show that each edition has been printed from the last, preserving, or
conjecturally amending, its blunders. If therefore the 1633 editor
mistook ' inudate ' for ' invade ', that is sufficient. Besides the
metrical harshness of the line there seems to be no reason why
the epithet 'ravenous' should be applied to the Vandals and not
extended to the Goths. The metaphor of inundation is used by
Donne in the sermons: 'The Torrents, and Inundations, which
invasive Armies pour upon Nations, we are fain to call by the name
of Law, The Law of Armes.' Sermons 26. 3. 36. Milton too
uses it :

A multitude like which the populous North

Poured never from her frozen loins, to pass

Rhene or the Danaw, where her barbarous sons

Came like a deluge on the South, and spread

Beneath Gibraltar to the Libyan sands.

Paradise Lost, i. 35 1-4.

Probably both Donne and Milton had in mind Isaiah's description of
the Assyrian invasion, where in the Vulgate the word is that used here :
' Propter hoc ecce Dominus adducet super eos aquas fluminis fortes
et multas, regem Assyriorum, et omnem gloriam eius ; et ascendet
super omnes rivos eius, et fluet super universas ripas eius ; et ibit per
ludam, inundans, et transiens usque ad coUum veniet.' Isaiah viii. 7-8.

Donne uses the word exactly as here in the Essays in Divinity :
' To which foreign sojourning . . . many have assimilated and com-
pared the Roman Church's straying into France and being impounded
in Avignon seventy years ; and so long also lasted the inundation of
the Goths in Italy.' Ed. Jessop (1855), p. 155.

Page 31, 11. 37-54. These verses are somewhat difficult but very
characteristic. ' In these our letters, wherein is contained the whole
mystery of love, Lawyers will find by what titles we hold our mistresses,
what dues we are bound to pay as to feudal superiors. They will
find also how, claiming prerogative or privilege they devour or
confiscate the estates for which we have paid due service, by
transferring what we owe to love, to womankind. The service which
we pay expecting love in return, they claim as due to their womanhood,
and deserving of no recompense, no return of love. Even when going
beyond the strict fee they demand subsidies they will forsake a lover

Songs and Sonets, 29

who thinks he has thereby secured them, and will plead " honour " or

"conscience" '

'Statesmen will learn here the secret of their art. Love and
statesmanship both alike depend upon what we might call the art of
"bluffing". Neither will bear too curious examination. The states-
man and the lover must impose for the moment, disguising weakness
or inspiring fear in those who descry it.'

I. 53. In this thy booke, such will their nothing see. After some
hesitation I have adopted the 1635-54 reading in preference to that
of 1633 and 1669, 'there something,' I do so because (i) the MSS.
support it. Their uncertainty as to 'their' and 'there' is of no
importance ; (2) ' there ' is a weak repetition of ' in this thy book ', an
emphatic enough indication of place ; (3) * their nothing ' is both
the more difficult reading and the more characteristic of Donne. The
art of a statesman is a * nothing '. He uses the word in the same
way of his own Paradoxes and Problems when sending some of them
to Sir Henry Wotton, and with the same emphatic stress on the first
syllable : ' having this advantage to escape from being called ill things
that they are nothings ' (An unpublished letter, quoted in the
Cambridge History of Literature, vol. iv, p. 218). The word was
pronounced with a fully rounded ' no '. Compare Negative Love, 1. 16.

With the sentiment compare : ' And as our Alchymists can finde
their whole art and worke of Alchymy, not only in Virgil and Ovid,
but in Moses and Solomon ; so these men can find such a transmuta-
tion into golde, such a foundation of profit, in extorting a sense for
Purgatory, or other profitable Doctrines, out of any Scripture.'
Sermons 80. 78. 791.

'Un personnage de grande dignite, me voulant approuver par
authorite cette queste de la pierre philosophale ou il est tout plonge,
m'allegua dernierement cinq ou six passages de la Bible, sur lesquels
il disoit s'estre premierement fondd pour la descharge de sa
conscience (car il est de profession ecclesiastique) ; et, k la verite,
I'invention n'en estoit pas seulement plaisante, mais encore bien
proprement accommodee a la defence de cette belle science.'
Montaigne, Apologie de Rainiond Sebond {Les Essais, ii. 12).

Page 32, 11. 59-61. To take a latitude, dr'c. The latitude of a
spot may always be found by measuring the distance from the zenith
of a star whose altitude, i.e. distance from the equator, is known.
The words ' At their brightest ' are only used to point the antithesis
with the 'dark eclipses' used to measure longitude.

II. 61-3. but to conclude

Of longitudes, tvhat other way have wee.
But to marke when, and where the dark eclipses bee.

This method of estimating longitude was, it is said, first discovered
by noting that an eclipse which took place during the battle of Arbela
was observed at Alexandria an hour later. If the time at which an

3 o Comme72tary,

instantaneous phenomenon such as an ecHpse of the moon begins at
Greenwich (or whatever be the first meridian) is known, and the time
of its beginning at whatever place a ship is be then noted, the
difference gives the longitude. The eclipses of the moons in Saturn
have been used for the purpose. The method is not, however, a
practically useful one. Owing to the penumbra it is difficult to
observe the exact moment at which an eclipse of the moon begins.
In certain positions of Saturn her satellites are not visible. Another
method used was to note the lunar distances of certain stars, but the
most common and practical method is by the use of well adjusted
and carefully corrected chronometers giving Greenwich time.

The comparison in the last five lines rests on a purely verbal basis.
'Longitude ' means literally 'length', ' latitude', ' breadth'. Therefore
longitude is compared with the duration of love, ' how long this love
will be.' There is no real appropriateness.

Page 33. Loves Growth.

11. 7-8. But if this medicine^ qt'c. 'The quintessence then is a
certain matter extracted from all things which Nature has produced,
and from everything which has life corporeally in itself, a matter most
subtly purged of all impurities and mortality, and separated from all
the elements. From this it is evident that the quintessence is, so to
say, a nature, a force, a virtue, and a medicine, once shut up within
things but now free from any domicile and from all outward
incorporation. The same is also the colour, the life, the properties of
things . . . Now the fact that this quintessence cures all diseases does not
arise from temperature, but from an innate property, namely its great
cleanliness and purity, by which, after a wonderful manner, it alters
the body into its own purity, and entirely changes it . . . When
therefore the quintessence is separated from that which is not the
quintessence, as the soul from its body, and itself is taken into the
body, what infirmity is able to withstand this so noble, pure, and
powerful nature, or to take away our life save death, which being
predestined separates our soul and body, as we teach in our treatise
on Life and Death. But by whatsoever method it takes place, the
quintessence should not be extracted by the mixture or the addition
of incongruous matters ; but the element of the quintessence must be
extracted from a separated body, and in like manner by that separated
body which is extracted.' Paracelsus, The Fourth Book of the
Archidoxies. Concerning the Quintessence.

The O.E.D. quotes the first sentence of this passage to illustrate
its first sense of the word — 'the "fifth essence" of ancient and
mediaeval philosophy, supposed to be the substance of which the
heavenly bodies were composed, and to be actually latent in all
things, the extraction of it . . . being one of the great objects of
Alchemy.' But Paracelsus expressly denies 'that the quintessence
exists as a fifth element beyond the other four ' ; and as he goes on

Songs and Sonets. 3 i

to discuss the different quintessences of different things (each thing
having in its constitution the four elements, though one may be
predominant) it would seem that he is using the word rather in the
second sense given in the O.E.D. — 'The most essential part of any
substance, extracted by natural or artificial processes.' Probably the
two meanings ran into each other. There was a real and an ideal
quintessence of things. A specific sense given to the word in older
Chemistry is a definite alcoholic tincture obtained by digestion at
a gentle heat. This is probably the ' soule of simples ' (p. i86, 1. 26),
unless that also is the quintessence in Paracelsus's full sense of the
word.

11. 17-20. As, in the firmament,

Starres by the Sunne are not inlarg'd, but showne.
Gentle love deeds, as blossomes on a bough,
From loves awakened root do bud out now.

P reads here :

As in the firmament
Starres by the sunne are not enlarg'd but showne
Greater ; Loves deeds, &c.

This certainly makes the verse clearer. As it stands 1. 18 is rather
an enigma. The stars are not revealed by the sun, but hidden.
Grosart's note is equally enigmatical : ' a curious phrase meaning that
the stars that show in daylight are not enlarged, but showne to be
brighter than their invisible neighbours, and to be comparatively
brighter than they appear to be when all are seen together in the
darkness of the night.' P is so carelessly written that an occasional
good reading may be an old one because there is no evidence of any
editing. The copyist seems to have written on without paying any
attention to the sense of what he set down. Still, ' Gentle ' is the
reading of all the other MSS. and editions, and I do not think it is
necessary or desirable to change it. But /"s emendation shows what
Donne meant. By ' showne ' he does not mean ' revealed ' — an
adjectival predicate ' larger ' or ' greater ' must be supplied from the
verb ' enlarg'd '. ' The stars at sunrise are not really made larger,
but they are made to seem larger.' It is a characteristically elliptical
and careless wording of a characteristically acute and vivid image.
Mr. Wells has used the same phenomenon with effect :

' He peered upwards. " Look ! " he said.

" What ? " I asked.

" In the sky. Already. On the blackness— a little touch of blue.
See ! The stars seem larger. And the little ones and all those dim
nebulosities we saw in empty space — they are hidden."

Swiftly, steadily the day approached us.' The first Men in the
Moon. (Chap. vii. Sunrise on the Moon.)

A similar phenomenon is noted by Donne : ' A Torch in a misty
night, seemeth greater then in a clear.' Sermons 50. 36. 326.

3 2 Commentary,

W

Page 34. Loves Exchange.

1. n. A nofi obstante: a privilege, a waiving of any law in favour
of an individual : ' Who shall give any other interpretation, any
modification, any Non obstante upon his law in my behalf, when he
comes to judge me according to that law which himself hath made.'
Sermons 50. 12. 97. * A Non obstante and priviledge to doe a sinne
before hand.' Ibid. 50. 35, 313.

I. 14. minion: i.e. 'one specially favoured or beloved ; a dearest
friend ' &c. O.E.D. Not used in a contemptuous sense, \lohn the
Minion of Christ upon earth, and survivor of the Apostles, (whose
books rather seem fallen from Heaven, and writ with the hand which
ingraved the stone Tables, then a mans work)' &c. Sermons 50.

33- 309-

II. 29 f. Dryden borrows :

Great God of Love, why hast thou made
A Face that can all Hearts command.
That all Religions can invade,

And change the Laws of ev'ry Land ?

A Song to a Fair Young Lady Going out of Toivn in
the Spring.

Page 36. Confined Love.

Compare with this the poem Loves Freedome in Beaumont's Poems
(1652), sig. E. 6:

Why should man be only ty'd

To a foolish Female thing.
When all Creatures else beside,

Birds and Beasts, change every Spring ?
Who would then to one be bound.
When so many may be found 1

The third verse runs :

Would you think him wise that now

Still one sort of meat doth eat.
When both Sea and Land allow

Sundry sorts of other meat ?
Who would then, &c.

Poems on such themes were doubtless exercises of wit at which
X more than one author tried his hand in rivalry with his fellows.

1. 16. And not to seeke new lands, or not to deale 7vithall. I have,
after some consideration, adhered to the 16)) reading. Chambers has
adopted that of the later editions, taking the line to mean that a man
builds ships in order to seek new lands and to deal or trade with all
lands. But ships cannot trade with inland countries. The form
* withal ' is the regular one for ' with ' when it follows the noun it
governs. 'We build ships not to let them lie in harbours but to

Songs and Sonets, 3 3

seek new lands with, and to trade with.' The MS. evidence is not
of much assistance, because it is not clear in all cases what ' w"' all '
stands for. The words were sometimes separated even when the
simple preposition was intended. ' People, such as I have dealt
with all in their marchaundyse.' Berners' Froissart, i. cclxvii. 395
(O.E.D.). But Z>, H4g, Lee read ' w"' All ', supporting Chambers.
For the sentiment compare :

A stately builded ship well rig'd and tall

The Ocean maketh more majesticall :

Why vowest thou to live in $estos here,

Who on Loves seas more glorious would appeare.

Marlowe, Hero and Leander: First Sestiad 219-222.

For • deale withall ' compare :

For ye have much adoe to deale withal.

Spenser's Faerie Quee/ie, vi. i. 10.

Page 37. The Dreame.
11. I -10. Deare love, for 7iothing lesse then thee
Would I have broke this happy dreame.

It was a theame
For reason, ?nuch too strong for phantasie.
Therefore thou wak'dst me wisely ; yet
My Dreame thou broKst not, but conti?iued'st it,
Thou art so truth, that thoughts of thee suffice,
To make dreames truths ; and fables histories ;
Enter these armes, c^c.

I have left the punctuation of the first stanza unaltered. The
sense is clear and any modernization alters the rhetoric. Chambers
places a semicolon after ' dreame ' and a full stop after ' phantasie '.
The last is certainly wrong, for the statement ' It was a theme ', &c.
is connected not with what precedes, but with what follows, ' There-
fore thou waked'st me wisely.' In like manner Chambers's full stop
after ' but continued'st it ' breaks the close connexion with the two
following lines, which are really an adverbial clause of explanation or
reason. ' My dream thou brokest not, but continued'st it,' for ' Thou
art so truth ', &c. A full stop might more justifiably be placed after
'histories', but the semicolon is more in Donne's manner.

1. 7. Thou art so truth. The evidence of the MSS. shows that
both ' truth ' and ' true ' were current versions and explains the altera-
tion of i6)^-6g. But ' truth ' is both the more difficult reading and
the more subtle expression of Donne's thought ; ' true ' is the obvious
emendation of less metaphysical copyists and editors. Donne's
' Love ' is not true as opposed to false only ; she is ' truth ' as
opposed to dreams or phantasms or aught that partakes of unreality.
She is essentially truth as God is ; ' Respondeo dicendum quod . .
Veritas invenitur in intellectu, secundum quod apprehendit rem ut

II 917. 3 n

-7

34 Comme?itary.

est ; et in re, secundum quod habet esse conformabile intellectui.
Hoc autem maxime invenitur in Deo. Nam esse eius non solum est
conforme suo intelligere ; et suum intelligere est mensura et causa
omnis alterius esse, et omnis alterius intellectus ; et ipse est suum
esse et intelligere. Unde sequitur quod non solum in ipso sit Veritas,
sed quod ipse sit ipsa summa et prima Veritas. Summa I. vi. 5,

(To deify the object of your love was a common topic of love-
poetry ; Donne does so with all the subtleties of scholastic theology
at his finger-ends. In this single poem he attributes to the lady
addressed two attributes of Deity, ( i ) the identity of being and essence,
(2) the power of reading the thoughts directly.

The Dutch poet keeps this point :

de Waerheyt is so ghy, en
Ghy zijt de Waerheyt so.

11. 11-12. As lightning, or a Tapers light

Thine eyes, and not thy noise waKd mee.

' A sodain light brought into a room doth awaken some men ; but
yet a noise does it better.' Sermons 50. 38. 344.

* A candle wakes some men as well as a noise.' Sermons 80.
6i. 617.

11. 15-16. But when I saw thou sawest my heart,

And knew'st my thoughts, beyond an Angels art.

Modern editors, by removing the comma after ' thoughts ', have
altered the sense of these lines. It is not that she could read his
thoughts better than an angel, but that she could read them at all, a
power which is not granted to Angels.

St. Thomas {Sumfna Theol. Quaest. Ivii. Art. 4) discusses
' Utrum angeli cognoscant cogitationes cordium ', and concludes,
' Cognoscunt Angeli cordium cogitationes in suis effectibus : ut
autem in se ipsis sunt, Deo tantum sunt naturaliter cognitae.*
Angels may read our thoughts by subtler signs than our words and
acts, or even those changes of countenance and pulsation which we
note in each other, 'quanto subtiHus huiusmodi immutationes occultas
coporales perpendunt.' But to know them as they are in the intellect
and will belongs only to God, to whom only the freedom of the
human will is subject, and a man's thoughts are subject to his will.
' Manifestum est autem, quod ex sola voluntate dependet, quod
aliquis actu aliqua consideret ; quia cum aliquis habet habitum
scientiae, vel species intelligibiles in eo existentes, utitur eis cum
vult. Et ideo dicit Apostolus i Corinth, secundo ; quod quae sunt
hominis, nemo novit nisi spiritus hominis qui in ipso est.'

Donne recurs to this theme very frequently : ' Let the Schoole
dispute infinitely (for he that will not content himself with means of
salvation till all Schoole points be reconciled, wjU come too late) ; let
Scotus and his Heard think, That Angels, and separate souls have a

Songs and Sonets. 35

naturall power to understand thoughts . . . And let Aquinas present his
arguments to the contrary, That those spirits have no naturall power
to know thoughts ; we seek no farther, but that Jesus Christ himself
thought it argument enough to convince the Scribes and Pharisees,
and prove himself God, by knowing their thoughts. Eadem Maies-
tate et potentia sayes S. Hierome, Since you see I proceed as God,
in knowing your thoughts, why beleeve you not that I may forgive
his sins as God too?' Sermons 80. 11. in; and compare also
Sermons 80. 9. 92.
This point is also preserved in the Dutch version :

Maer als ick u sagh sien wat om mijn hertje lagh
En weten wat ick docht (dat Engel noyt en sagh).

M. Legouis in a recent French version has left it ambiguous :

Mais quand j'ai vu que tu voyais mon coeur

Et savais mes pens^es au dela du savoir d'un ange.

The MS. reading, 14 'but an Angel', heightens the antithesis.

11. 27-8. Perchance as torches which must ready bee
Men light and put out.

' If it ' (i. e. a torch) ' have never been lighted, it does not easily take
light, but it must be bruised a.n6. beaten first ; if it have been lighted and
put out, though it cannot take fire of it self, yet it does easily conceive
fire, if it be presented within any convenient distance.' Sermons
50. 36. 332.

Page 38. A Valediction : of Weeping.

11. 1-9. I have changed the comma at 1. 6 to a semicolon, as the
first image, that of the coins, closes here. Chambers places a full
stop at 1. 4 * worth ', and apparently connects the next two lines with
what follows — wrongly, I think. Finishing the figure of the coins,
coined, stamped, and given their value by her, Donne passes on to
a couple of new images. ' The tears are fruits of much grief ; but
they are symbols of more to come. For, as your image perishes in
each tear that falls, so shall we perish, be nothing, when between us
rolls the " salt, estranging sea ".'

It is, I suppose, by an inadvertence that Chambers has left ' divers '
unchanged to ' diverse '. I cannot think there is any reference to
'a diver in the pearly seas'. Grolier and the Dutch poet divide as
here :

Laet voor uw aengesicht mijn trouwe tranen vallen,
Want van dat aengensicht ontfangen sy uw' munt.
En rijsen tot de waerd dies' uwe stempel gunt
Bevrucht van uw' gedaent : vrucht van veel' ongevallen,
Maer teekenen van meer, daer ghy -valt met den traen,
Die van u swanger was, en beyde wy ontdaen
Verdwijnen, soo wy op verscheiden oever staen.

D 2

3 6 Comme?jtary,

Page 39. Loves Alchymie.

I. 7. iKElixar: i.e. 'the Elixir Vitae', which heals all disease and
indefinitely prolongs life. It is sometimes identified with the philoso-
pher's stone, which transmutes metals to gold. In speaking of quint-
essences (see note, II. p. 30) Paracelsus declares that there are certain
quintessences superior to those of gold, marchasite, precious stones,
&c., 'of more importance than that they should be called a quintessence.
It should be rather spokenof as a certain secret and mystery . . . Among
these arcana we here put forward four. Of these arcana the first is
the mercury of life, the second is the primal matter, the third is the
Philosopher's Stone, and the fourth the tincture. But although these
arcana are rather angelical than human to speak of we shall not shrink
from them.' From the description he gives they all seem to operate
more or less alike, purging metals and other bodies from disease.

II. 7-10. And as no chymique yet, &■-<:. ' My Lord Chancellor gave
me so noble and so ready a dispatch, accompanied with so fatherly
advice that I am now, like an alchemist, delighted with discoveries
by the way, though I attain not mine end.' To ... Sir H. G.,
Gosse's Lt/e, c^c, ii. 49.

11. 23-4. af their best

Sweetnesse and wit, they' are but Mummy, possest.

The punctuation of these lines in 16)^-^4 is ambiguous, and
Chambers has altered it wrongly to

Sweetness and wit they are, but Mummy possest.

The MSS. generally support the punctuation which I have adopted,
which is that of the Grolier Club edition.

Page 40. The Flea.

I have restored this poem to the place it occupied in 16^^. In 16^^
it was placed first of all the Songs and Sonets. A strange choice to
our mind, but apparently the poem was greatly admired as a master-
piece of wit^ It is the first of the pieces translated by Huyghens :

"" De Vloy.

Slaet acht op deze Vloy, en leert wat overleggen,

Hoe slechten ding het is dat ghy my kont ontzeggen, &c.,

and was selected for special commendation by some of his correspon-
dents. Coleridge comments upon it in verse :

Be proud as Spaniards. Leap for pride, ye Fleas !
In natures jninim realm ye're now grandees.
Skip-jacks no more, nor civiller skip-johns ;
Thrice-honored Fleas ! I greet you all as Dons.
In Phoebus' archives registered are ye,
And this your patent of nobility.
It will be noticed that there are two versions of Donne's poem.

Songs and Sonets, 37

Page 41. The Curse,

1. 3. His only, and only his purse. This, the reading of all the
editions except the last, and of the MSS., is obviously right. What is
to dispose ' some dull heart to love ' is his only purse and his alone,
no one's but his purse. Chambers adopts the i66g conjecture, ' Him
only for his purse,' but in that case there is no subject to 'may
dispose', or if 'some dull heart' be subject then 'itself must be
supplied — a harsh construction. ' Dispose ' is not used intransitively
in this sense.

1. 27. Mynes. I have adopted the plural from the MSS. It brings
it into line with the other objects mentioned.

Page 43. The Message.

I. ir. But if it be taught by thine. It seems incredible that Donne
should have written ' which if it ' &:c. immediately after the ' which ' of
the preceding line. I had thought that the 16)) printer had accident-
ally repeated from the line above, but the evidence of the MSS. points
to the mistake (if it is a mistake) being older than that. ' Which ' was
in the MS. iised by the printer. If ' But ' is not Donne's own reading
or emendation it ought to be, and I am loath to injure a charming
poem by pedantic adherence to authority in so small a point. De
minimis non curat lex ; but art cares very much indeed. JC and P
read ' Yet since it hath learn'd by thine '.

II. 14 f. And crosse both

Word and oath, &'c.

The ' crosse' of all the MSS. is pretty certainly what Donne wrote.
An editor would change to 'break' hardly the other way. To
' crosse ' is, of course, to ' cancel '. Compare Jonson's Poetaster, Act
II, Scene i :

Faith, sir, your mercer's Book
Will tell you with more patience, then I can
(For I am crost, and so's not that I thinke.)

and

Examine well thy beauty with my truth.
And cross my cares, ere greater sums arise.

Daniel, Delia, i.

Page 44. A Nocturnall, &:c.

1. 12. For I am every dead thing. I have not thought it right to
alter the 16)} ' every ' to the ' very ' of i6jy-6^. ' Every ' has some
MS. support, and it is the more difficult reading, though of
course 'a very ' might easily enough be misread. But I rather think
that ' every ' expresses what Donne means. He is ' every dead thing '
because he is the quintessence of all negations — ' absence, darkness,
death ; things which are not ', and more than that, ' the first nothing.'

3 8 Commentary.

11. 14-18. For his art did expresse . . . things which are not. This
is a difficult stanza in a difficult poem. I have after considerable
hesitation adopted the punctuation of /7/0, which is followed by all
the modern editors. This makes ' dull privations ' and 'lean empti-
nesse ' expansions of nothingnesse '. This is the simpler construction.
I am not sure, however, that the punctuation of the earlier editions
and of the MSS. may not be correct. In that case 'From dull
privations' goes with 'he ruined me'. Milton speaks of 'ruining
from Heaven'. 'From me, who was nothing', says Donne, 'Love
extracted the very quintessence of nothingness — made me more
nothing than I already was. My state was already one of " dull
privation " and " lean emptiness ", and Love reduced it still further,
making me once more the non-entity I was before I was created.'
Only Donne could be guilty of such refined and extravagant subtlety.
But probably this is to refine too much. There is no example of
' ruining ' as an active verb used in this fashion. A feature of the
MS. collection from which this poem was probably printed is the
omission of stops at the end of the line. In the next verse Donne
pushes the annihilation further. Made nothing by Love, by the
death of her he loves he is made the elixir (i. e. the quintessence)
not now of ordinary nothing, but of 'the first nothing ', the nothing
which preceded God's first act of creation. The poem turns upon
the thought of degrees in nothingness.

For ' elixir ' as identical with ' quintessence ' see Oxf. Eng. Diet.,
Elixir, t iii- b, and the quotation there, * A distill'd quintessence,
a pure elixar of mischief, pestilent alike to all.' Milton, Chtirch Govt.

Of the 'first Nothing' Donne speaks in the Essays in Divinity
(Jessop, 1855), pp. 80-1, but in a rather different strain: 'To speak
truth freely there was no such Nothing as this' (the nothing which
a man might wish to be) ' before the beginning : for he that hath
refined all the old definitions hath put this ingredient CreabUe (which
cannot be absolutely nothing) into his definition of creation ; and
that Nothing which was, we cannot desire ; for man's will is not
larger than God's power : and siqce Nothing was not a pre-existent
matter, nor mother of this all, but only a limitation when any thing
began to be; how impossible it is to return to that first point of
time, since God (if it imply contradiction) cannot reduce yesterday ?
Of this we will say no more : for this Nothing being no creature ; is
more incomprehensible than all the rest.'

11. 31-2. The Grolier Club edition reads:

I should prefer
If I were any beast ; some end, some means ;

which is to me unintelligible. ' If I were a beast, I should prefe
some end, some means ' refers to the Aristotelian and Schools doctrine
of the soul. The soul of man is rational and self-conscious ; of beasts
perceptive and moving, therefore able to select ends and means ; the

Songs and Sonets. 39

vegetative soul of plants selects what it can feed on and rejects what
it cannot, and so far detests and loves. Even stones, which have no
souls, attract and repel. But even of stones Donne says : ' We are
not sure that stones have not life; stones may have life; neither (to
speak humanely) is it unreasonably thought by them, that thought the
whole world to be inanimated by one soule, and to be one intire living
creature ; and in that respect does S. Augustine prefer a fly before
the Sun, because a fly hath life, and the Sun hath not.' Sermons
80. 7. 69-70.

1. 35. If I an ordinary nothing were. 'A shadow is nothing, yet, if
the rising or falling sun shines out and there be no shadow, I will
pronounce there is no body in that place neither. Ceremonies are
nothing ; but where there are no ceremonies, order, and obedience,
and at last (and quickly) religion itself will vanish.' Sermons
(quoted in Selections from Donne, 1840).

I. 41. Enjoy your summer all ; This is Grosart's punctuation.
The old editions have a comma. Chambers, obviously quite wrongly,
retains the comma, and closes the sentence in the next line. The
clause ' Since she enjoys her long night's festival' explains 43 ' Let me
prepare towards her', &c., not 41 'Enjoy your summer all'.

Page 47. The Apparition.

II. 1-13. The Grolier Club editor places a full stop, Chambers a
colon, after 'shrinke', for the comma ofthe old editions. Chambers's
division is better than the first, which interrupts the steady run of the
thought to the climax,

A verier ghost than I.
The original punctuation preserves the rapid, crowded march of the
clauses.

1. 10. This line throws light on the character of the /6(59 text. The
correct reading of /6y was spoiled in 16)^ by accidentally dropping
'will', and this error continued through 16)^-^4. The 1669 editor,
detecting the metrical fault, made the line decasyllabic by interpolating
' a ' and ' even '.

Page 48. The Broken Heart.
1. 8. Aflaske of powder burne a day. The 'flash ' of later editions
is probably a conjectural emendation, for 'flaske' (/6;j and many
MSS.) makes good sense ; and the metaphor of a burning flask of
powder seems to suit exactly the later lines which describe what
happened to the heart which love inflamed

but Love, alas,
At one first blow did shiver it as glasse.

Shakespeare uses the same simile in a different connexion :

Thy wit, that ornament to shape and love.
Mis-shapen in the conduct of them both :

-7

40 Commentary,

Like powder in a skilless soldiers flaske,

Is set a fire by thine own ignorance,

And thou dismembred with thine owne defence.

Ro7neo and Juliet, in. iii. 130.

I. 14. and never chawes : ' chaw ' is the form Donne generally uses :
' Implicite beleevers, ignorant beleevers, the adversary may swallow ;
but the understanding beleever, he must chaw, and pick bones, before
he come to assimilate him, and make him like himself.' Sermons 80.
18. 178.

Page 49. A Valediction : Forbidding Mourning.

This poem is quoted by Walton after his account of the vision which
Donne had of his wife in France, in 1612 : 'I forbear the readers
farther trouble as to the relation and what concerns it, and will con-
clude mine with commending to his view a copy of verses given by
Mr. Donne to his wife at the time that he then parted from her : and
I beg leave to tell, that I have heard some critics, learned both in
languages and poetry, say, that none of the Greek or Latin poets did
ever equal them.' The critics probably included Wotton, — perhaps
also Hales, whose criticism of Shakespeare shows the same readiness
to iind our own poets as good as the Ancients.

.The song, ' Sweetest love I do not go,' was probably written at the
same time. It is almost identical in tone. They are certainly the
tenderest of Donne's love poems, perhaps the only ones to which the
epithet ' tender ' can be applied. The Valediction : of weeping is
more passionate! ;

An early translation of this poem into Greek verse is found in a
volume in the Bodleian Library.

II. 9-12. Moving of tK earth, c^v. 'The "trepidation" was the
precession of the equinoxes, supposed, according to the Ptolemaic
astronomy, to be caused by the movements of the Ninth or Crystalline
Sphere.' Chambers.

First you see fixt in this huge mirrour blew,
Of trembling lights, a number numberlesse :
F"ixt they are nam'd, but with a name untrue.
For they all moove and in a Daunce expresse
That great long yeare, that doth contain no lesse
* Then threescore hundreds of those yeares in all.

Which the sunne makes with his course naturall.

What if to you those sparks disordered seem
As if by chaunce they had beene scattered there ?
The gods a solemne measure doe it deeme.
And see a iust proportion every where.
And know the points whence first their movings were ;
, To which first points when all returne againe,
The axel-tree of Heav'n shall breake in twain.

Sir John Davies, Orchestra, 35-6.

Songs and Sonets. 41

1. 16. Those things which elemented it. Chambers follows 7669 and
reads 'The thing' — wrongly, I think. ' Elemented ' is just 'composed',
and the things are enumerated later, 20. ' eyes, lips, hands.' Compare :
But neither chance nor compliment
Did element our love.

Katharine Phillips (Orinda), To Mrs. M. A. at parting.

This and the fellow poem Upon Absence may be compared with
Donne's poems on the same theme. See Saintsbury's Caroline Poets,

i, PP- 548, 55°-

I. 20. and hands : 'and' has the support of all the MSS. The
want of it is no great loss, for though without it the line moves a little
irregularly, ' and hands ' is not a pleasant concatenation.

II. 25-36. If they be tzvo, ar'c. Donne's famous simile has a close
parallel in Omar Khayyam. Whether Donne's 'hydroptic immoderate "1
thirst of humane learning and languages ' extended to Persian I do '
not know. Captain Harris has supplied me with translations and
reference :

In these twin compasses, O Love, you see
One body with two heads, like you and me,

Which wander round one centre, circle wise,
But at the last in one same point agree.

Whinfield's edition of Omar Khayyam (Kegan Paul,
Trijbner, 1901, Oriental Series, p. 216).

'Oh my soul, you and I are like a compass. We form but one
body having two points. Truly one point moves from the other
point, and makes the round of the circle ; but the day draws near when
the two points must re-unite.' J. H. M'^Carthy (D. Nutt, 1898).

Page 51. The Extasie. ^i^

Q'his is one of the most important of the lyrics as a statement of
Donne's metaphysic of love, of the interconnexion and mutual
dependence of body and soul."^ It is printed in 16)) from Z>, H4g,
Lee or a MS. resembling it, and from this and the other MSS.
I have introduced some alterations in the text and two rather vital
emendations, 11. 55 and 59. The Extasie is probably the source of
Lord Herbert of Cherbury's best known poem, An Ode Upon a
Question Moved Whether Love Should Continue For Ever. Compare
with the opening lines of Donne's poem :

They stay'd at last and on the grass

Reposed so, as o're his breast

She bowed her gracious head to rest,
Such a weight as no burden was.
While over cithers compass'd waist

Their folded arms were so compos'd

As if in straightest bonds inclos'd
They suffer'd for joys they did taste

.\

42 Commentary.

Long their fixt eyes to Heaven bent,

Unchanged they did never move,

As if so great and pure a love
No glass but it could represent.

In a letter to Sir Thomas Lucy, Donne writes : ' Sir I make account
that this writing of letters, when it is with any seriousness, is a kind of
extasie, and a departing, and secession, and suspension of the soul,
which doth then communicate itself to two bodies.' Ecstasy in
Neo-Platonic philosophy was the state of mind in which the soul,
escaping from the body, attained to the vision of God, the One, the
Absolute. Plotinus thus describes it : * Even the word vision {Oiafxa)
does not seem appropriate here. It is rather an ecstasy (eKo-rao-tsV
a simplification, an abandonment of self, a perfect quietude (o-rdo-is),
a desire of contact, in short a wish to merge oneself in that which
one contemplates in the Sanctuary.' SixiA Ennead, ix. 1 1 (from the
French translation of Bouillet, 1857-8). Readers will observe how
closely Donne's poem agrees with this — the exodus of the souls
(11. 15-16), the perfect quiet (11. 18-20), the new insight (11. 29-33),
the contact and union of the souls (1. 35). Donne had probably read
Ficino's translation of Plotinus (1492), but the doctrine of ecstasy
passed into Christian thought, connecting itself especially with the
experience of St. Paul (2 Cor. xii. 2). St. Paul's word is d/OTraycWa,
and Aquinas distinguishes between 'raptus' and 'ecstasis': 'Extasis
importat simpliciter excessum a seipso . . . raptus super hoc addit
violentiam quandam.' Another word for ' ecstasy ' was ' enthusiasm '.

1.9. So to entergraf tour hands. All the later editions read ' engraft ',
which makes the line smoother. But to me it seems more probable
that Donne wrote ' entergraft ' and later editors changed this to
' engraft ', than that the opposite should have happened. Moreover,
' entergraft ' gives the reciprocal force correctly, which ' engraft ' does
not. Donne's precision is as marked as his subtlety.^; * Entergraft '
has the support of all the best MSS.

Page 5a, 1. 20. And wee said nothing all the day. ' En amour un
silence vaut mieux qu'un langage. II est bon d'etre interdit ; il y a une
eloquence de silence qui penetre plus que la langue ne saurait faire.
Qu'un amant persuade bien sa maitresse quand il est interdit, et que
d'ailleurs il a de I'esprit ! Quelque vivacite que Ton ait, il est bon dans
certaines rencontres qu'elle s'eteigne. Tout cela se passe sans regie
et sans reflexion ; et quand I'esprit le fait, il n'y pensait pas aupara-
vant. C'est par necessite que cela arrive.' Pascal, Discours stir les
passions de Vamour.

1. 32. Wee see., wee saw not what did move. Chambers inserts a
comma after ' we saw not ', perhaps rightly ; but the punctuation of
the old editions gives a distinct enough sense, viz., * We see now, that
we did not see before the true source of our love. What we thought
was due to bodily beauty, we perceive now to have its source in the

Songs and Sonets, 43

soul." Compare, ' But when I wakt, I saw, that I saw not.' The
Storme, 1. 37.

1. 42. Interinanimates two souks. The MSS. give the word which
the metre requires and which I have no doubt Donne used. The
verb inanimates occurs more than once in the sermons. ' One that
quickens and inanimates all, and is the soul of the whole world.'
Sermons 80. 29. 289. ' That universall power which sustaines, and
inanimates the whole world.' Ibid. 80. 31. 305. * In these bowels,
in the womb of this promise we lay foure thousand yeares ; The
blood with which we were fed then, was the blood of the Sacrifices,
and the quickening which we had there, was an inanimation, by the
often refreshing of this promise of that Messias in the Prophets.'
Ibid. 80. 38. 381. ' Hee shews them Heaven, and God in Heaven,
sanctifying all their Crosses in this World, inanimating all their worldly
blessings.' Ibid. 80. 44. 436.

Page53, 1. 51. They'are ours though they are not wee, Wee are The
line as given in all the MSS. is metrically, in the rhetorically
effective position of the stresses, superior to the shortened form of the
editions :

They'are ours, though not wee, wee are

1. 52. the spheare. The MSS. all give the singular, the editions the
plural. Donne is not incapable of making a singular rhyme with a
plural, or at any rate a form with ' s ' with one without :

Then let us at these mimicke antiques jeast,
Whose deepest projects, and egregious gests
Are but dull Moralls of a game of Chests.

To S- Henry Wotton, p. 188, 11. 22-4.

Still, I think 'spheare' is right. The bodies made one are the
Sphere in which the two Intelligences meet and command. This
suits all that followes :

Wee owe them thanks, because they thus, &c.

The Dutch translation runs :

Het Hemel-rond zijn sy,
Wy haren Hetnei-geest.

1. ^C). forces, sense. This reading of all the MSS. is, I think, certainly
right ; the ' senses force ' of the editions being an emendation.
(i) lit is the more difficult reading. It is inconceivable that an
ordinary copyist would alter ' senses force ' to ' forces sense ', which,
unless properly commaed, is apt to be read as ' forces' sense ' and make
nonsense. (2) It is more characteristic of Donne's thought. He is,
with his usual scholastic precision, distinguishing the functions of soul
and body. Perception is the function (the hvvajxis, power or force)
of soul :

thy faire goodly soul, which doth
Give this flesh power to taste joy. Satyre III.

4-4 Commentary,

But tlie body has its function also, without which the soul could not
fulfil its; and that function is 'sense'. It is through this medium
that human souls must operate to obtain knowledge of each other.
The bodies must yield their forces or faculties (' sense ' in all its forms,
especially sight and touch — hands and eyes) to us before our souls
can become one. The collective term ' sense ' recurs :

T'affections, and to faculties,
Which sense may reach and apprehend.

11, 57—8. On man heavens influence workes not so,
Bui that it first imprints the ayre.

' Aucuns ont escrit que I'air a aussi cette vertu de faire decouler
avec le feu elementaire les influences et proprietez secrettes des
estoilles et pianettes : alleguans que Tefficace des corps celestes ne
peut s'estendre aux inferieurs et terrestres, que par les moyens et
elemens qui sont entre deux. Mais cela soit au iugement des lecteurs
que nous renvoyons aux disputes de ceux qui ont escrit sur la philoso-
phie naturelle. Voyez aussi Pline au ^ ch. du 2 liu., Plutarque au ^
e>' 2 liu. des opinions des Philosophes, Platon en son Timee, Aristote en
ses disputes de physique, specialement au i. liu. de la generation et
corruption, et ceux qui ont escrit depuis luy touchant les elemens.'
Du Bartas, La Sepmaine, c^e. (1581), India. Air.

1. 59. Soe sou/e into the souk may flo7v. The 'Soe' of the MSS.
must, I think, be right rather than the 'For' of D, H4g Lee, and
the editions. It corresponds to the 'So' in 1. 65, and it expresses
the simpler and more intelligible thought. In references to the
heavenly bodies and their influence on men one must remember
certain aspects of older thought which have become unfamiliar to us.
They were bodies of great dignity, 'aeterna corpora,' not composed
of any of the four elements, and subject to no change in time but
movement, change of position. If not as the older philosophers and
some of the Fathers had held, ' animata corpora,' having a soul united
to the body, yet each was guided by an Intelligence operating by
contact ; ' Ad hoc autem quod moveat, non opportet quod uniatur ei
ut forma, sed per contactum virtutis, sicut motor unitur mobili.'
Aquinas, Summa I. Ixx. 3. Such bodies, it was claimed, influence
human actions : ' Corpora enim coelestia, cum moveantur a spiritualibus
substantiis . . . agunt in virtute earum quasi instrumenta. Sed
illae substantiae spirituales sunt superiores animabus nostris. Ergo
videtur quod possint imprimere in animas nostras, et sic causare
actus humanos.' Aquinas, however, disputes this, as Plotinus had
before him, and distinguishes: As bodies, the stars affect us only
indirectly, in so far namely as the mind and will of man are subject
to the influence of physical and corporeal disturbances. But man's
will remains free. '^ Sapiens homo dominatur astris in quantum scilicet
dominatur suis passionibus.' As Intelligences, the stars do not oper-
ate on man thus mediately and controllingly : ' sed in intellectum

Songs and Sonets, 45

humanum agunt immediate i/Iumi?iafido : voluntatem autem immutare
non possunt.' Aquinas, Summa I. cxv. 4.

Now if ' Soe ' be the right reading here then Donne is thinking of
the heavenly bodies without distinguishing in them between soul or
intelligence and body. ' As these high bodies or beings operate on
man's soul through the comparatively low intermediary of air, so
lovers ' souls must interact through the medium of body.'

If ' For ' be the right reading, then Donne is giving as an example
of soul operating on soul through the medium of body the influence
of the heavenly intelligences on our souls. But this is not the
orthodox view of their interaction. I feel sure that ' Soe ' is the right
reading. The thought and construction are simpler, and ' Soe ' and
' For ' are easily interchanged. •

Of noblemen Donne says : ' They are Intelligences that move great
Spheares.^ Sermon, Judges xv. 20, p. 20 (1622).

11. 61-4. As our blood labours to beget

Spirits, as like soules as it can,
Because such fingers need to knit

That szibtile knot, which makes us man.

' Spirit is a most subtile vapour, which is expressed from the Bloud,
and the instrument of the soule, to perform all his actions ; a com-
mon tye or medium betwixt the body and the soule, as some will
have it ; or as Paracelsus, a fourth soule of itselfe. Melancthon
holds the fountaine of these spirits to be the Heart, begotten there;
and afterward convayed to the Braine, they take another nature to
^em. Of these spirits there be three kindes, according to the three
Jjrincipall parts, Braine, Heart, Liver ; Naturall, Vitall, Anitnall.
^he Naturall are begotten in the Liver, and thence dispersed through
,the Veines, to performe those naturall actions. The Vitall Spirits
are made in the Heart, of the Naturall, which by the Arteries are
transported to all the other parts : if these Spirits cease, then life
ceaseth, as in a Syncope or Swowning. The Animall spirits formed
of the Vitall, brought up to the Braine, and diffused by the Nerves,
to the subordinate Members, give sense and motion to them all.'
Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy (1638), p. 15. 'The spirits in a man
which are the thin and active part of the blood, and so are of a kind
of middle nature, between soul and body, those spirits are able
to doe, and they doe the ofifice, to unite and apply the faculties of
the soul to the organs of the body, and so there is a man.' Sermons
26. 20. 291.

Page 55. Loves Diet.

11. 19-24. This stanza, carefully and correctly printed in the 1633
edition, which I have followed, was mangled in that of 1635, and has
(remained in this condition, despite conjectural emendations, in sub-
sequent editions, including those of Grosart and Chambers. What
Donne says is obvious : ' Whatever Love dictated I wrote, but burned

46 Commentary,

the letters. When she wrote to me, and when (correctly resumed by
' that ') that favour made him (i.e. Love) fat, I said,' &c. The 1650-
54 ' Whate'er might him distaste,' &c. is obviously an attempt to put
right what has gone wrong. No reading but that of the 1633 edition
gives any sense to ' that favour ' and ' convey'd by this '.

11. 25-7. reclaimed . . . sport. In /<5y ' reclaim'd ' became 're-
deem'd ', probably owing to the frequent misreading of ' cl' as ' d '.
The mistake here increases the probability that ' sports ' is an error
for ' sport ' or ' sporte '. It is doubtful if ' sports ' was used as now.

Page 56. The Will.

11. 19-27. This verse is omitted in most of the MSS.
Probably in James's reign its references to religion were thought too
outspoken and flippant. Charles admired m Donne not only the
preacher but also the poet, as Huyghens testifies.

The first three lines turn on a contrast that Donne is fond of
elaborating between the extreme Protestant doctrine of justification
by faith only and the Catholic, especially Jesuit, doctrine of co-operant
works. It divided the Jesuits and the Jansenists. The Jansenists
had not yet emerged, but their precursors in the quarrel (as readers of
Les Provinciaks will recall) were the Dominicans, to whom Donne
refers : ' So also when in the beginning of S. Augustines time, Grace
had been so much advanced that mans Nature was scarce admitted
to be so much as any means or instrument (not only no kind df
cause) of his own good works : And soon after in S. Augustines timl ^
also mans free will (by fierce opposition and arguing against thfl
former error) was too much overvalued, and admitted into too neal
degrees of fellowship with Grace ; those times admitted a doctrine. /
and form of reconciliation, which though for reverence to the time, \
both the Dominicans and Jesuits at this day in their great quarrell )
about Grace and Free Will would yet seem to maintaine, yet in-
different and dispassioned men of that Church see there is no
possibility in it, and therefore accuse it of absurdity, and almost of
heresie.' Letters {1651), pp. 15-16. As an Anglican preacher Donne
upheld James's point of view, that the doctrine of grace and free-will
was better left undiscussed : * Resistibility, and Irresistibility of
Grace, which is every Artificers wearing now, was a stuff that our
Fathers wore not, a language that pure antiquity spake not. . . . They
knew Gods law, and his Chancery : But for Gods prerogative, what
he could do of his absolute power, they knew Gods pleasure, Nolutnus
disputari: It should scarce be disputed of in Schools, much lessi
serv'd in every popular pulpit to curious and itching ears ; least of all(
made table-talke, and houshold-discourse.' Sermons 26. i. 4.

The ' Schismaticks of Amsterdam ' were the extreme Puritans. See
Jonson's The Alchemist for Tribulation Wholesome and * We of the
separation '.

Songs and Sonets, 47

Page 58. The Funerall,

1, 3. That subtile wreath of haire, which crowns my arme ; ' And
Theagenes presented her with a diamond ring which he used to
wear, entreating her, whensoever she did cast her eyes upon it, to
conceive that it told her in his behalf, that his heart would prove as
hard as that stone in the admittance of any new affection ; and that
his to her should be as void of end as that circular figure was;' (com-
pare A /eat Ring sent, p. 65) ' and she desired him to wear for her
sake a lock of hair which she gave him ; the splendour of which can
be expressed by no earthly thing, but it seemed as though a stream
of the sun's beams had been gathered together and converted into
a solid substance. With this precious relique about his arm,' (com-
pare The Relique, P- 62) ' whose least hair was suflficient ' (compare Aire
and Angels, p. 22, * Ev'ry thy hair' and note) *to bind in bonds of
love the greatest heart that ever was informed with life, Theagenes
took his journey into Attica.' Kenelm Digby's Private Memoirs
(1827), pp. 80-1. When later Theagenes heard that Stelliana
(believing Theagenes to be dead) was to wed Mardonius, ' he tore
from his arm the bracelet of her hair . . , and threw it into the fire
that was in his chamber ; when that glorious relic burning shewed
by the wan and blue colour of the flame that it had sense and took
his words unkindly in her behalf.'

Theagenes was Sir Kenelm Digby himself, Stelliana being Lady
Venetia Stanley, afterwards his wife. Mardonius was probably Edward,
Earl of Dorset, the brother of Donne's friend and patron.

It is probable that this sequence of poems. The Funerall, The
Blossome, The Primrose and The Relique, was addressed to Mrs.
Herbert in the earlier days of Donne's intimacy with her in Oxford
or London.

1. 24. That since you would save none of me, I bury some of you.

L have hesitated a good deal over this line. The reading of the

editions is 'have none of me'; and in the group of MSS. Z>, J/49,

Lee, while ILfg reads ' save *, T> has corrected ' have ' to what may be

save ', and Zee reads ' have '. The reading of the editions is the

ull form of the construction, which is more common without the

have '. ' It's four to one she'll none of me,' Twelfth Night, i. iii.

113; 'She will none of him,' Ibid. 11. ii. 9, are among Schmidt's

examples {^Shakespeare Lexicon), in none of which * have ' occurs.

The reading of the MSS., ' save none of me,' is also quite idiomatic,

esembling the ' fear none of this ' (i. e. * do not fear this ') of Winter's

^ale, IV. iv. 601 ; and I have preferred it because : (i) It seems

ifficult to understand how it could have arisen if ' have none ' was

tne original. (2) It gives a sharper antithesis, 'You would not save

me, keep me alive. Therefore I will bury, not you indeed, but a part

of you.' (3) To be saved is the lover's usual prayer; and the idea

of the poem is that his death is due to the lady's cruelty.

48

Commentary.

Come not, when I am dead,
To drop thy foolish tears upon my grave,
To trample round my fallen head.
And vex the unhappy dust thou wouldst not save.
There let the wind sweep and the plover cry ;
But thou go by.

Compare also the Letter To M''' M. H. (pp. 216-8), where \ the
same idea recurs :

When thou art there, if any, whom we know,
Were sav'd before, and did that heaven partake, &c.

Page 59. The Blossome. i

1. 10. labourist. The form with ' t ' occurs in most of the MSS,,l ^
't' is restored in /6jr/. The 'labours ' of 16)} represents a com/m.
dropping of the 't' for ease of pronunciation. See Franz, S^iaf-
speare-Gramvmtik, § 152. It is colloquial, and I doubt if Y)^n\
would have preserved it if he had printed the poem, supposing.' th
he wrote the word so, and not some copyist. 1

11.

21-4.

You goe to friends, whose love and meanes present

Various content
To your eyes, eares, and tongue, and 'every part :
If then your body goe, tvhat need you a heart?

I have adopted the MS. readings 'tongue' and 'what ^neeo
you a heart ? ' because they seem to me more certainly what Djpnne
wrote. He may have altered them, but so may an editor. ' Torjgue '
is more exactly parallel to eyes and ears, and the whole talk 'is of
organs. ' What need you a heart ? ' is more pointed. ' With these
organs of sense, what need have you of a heart ? ' The idiom wa.
not uncommon, the verb being used impersonally. The O. E. T
gives among others :

What need us so many instances abroad.

Andros Tracts, 1691

' What need your heart go ' is of course also idiomatic. The la
example the O.E.D. gives is from Hall's Satires, 1597 : 'What neeci
me care for any bookish skill ? ' '

Page 61. The Primrose, &c.
It is noteworthy that the addition ' being at Montgomery Ca.'uk
&c. was made in /^/. It is unknown to 16^) and the !\'lS
It may be unwarranted. If it be accurate, then the poem is probUb
addressed to Mrs. Herbert and is a half mystical, half cyijiic
description of Platonic passion. The perfect primrose has appare ;nt
five petals, but more or less may be found. Seeking for one to .'jyi
bolize his love, he fears to find either more or less. What car i b
less than woman ? But if more than woman she becomes |' tK

\

Sofigs and Sonets. 49

unreal thing, the object of Platonic affection and Petrarchian
adoration : but, as he says elsewhere,

Love's not so pure and abstract as they use

To say, which have no Mistresse but their Muse.

Let woman be content to be herself. Since five is half ten, united

with man she will be half of a perfect life ; or (and the cynical

humour breaks out again) if she is not content with that, since five

5 the first number which includes an even number (2) and an odd (3),

'. may claim to be the perfect number, and she to be the whole in

hich we men are included and absorbed. We have no will of our

vn.

' From Sarai's name He took a letter which expressed the number
n, and reposed one which made but five ; so that she contributed
.lat five which man wanted before, to show a mutual indigence and
upport.' Essays in Divinity (Jessop, 1855), p. 118.

* Even for this, he will visite to the third, and fourth generation ;
md three and foure are seven, and seven is infinite. Sermons 50.
47. 440.

1. 30. this, five, I have introduced a comma after 'this' to show
what, I think, must be the relation of the words. The later editions
drop ' this ', and it seems to me probable that an original reading and
. correction have survived side by side. Donne may have written
this ' alone, referring back to ' five ', and then, thinking the reference
too remote, he may have substituted ' five ' in the margin, whence it
crept into the text without completely displacing ' this '. The sup-
port which the MSS. lend to /6y make it dangerous to remove
either word now, but I have thought it well to show that 'this'
is ' five '. In the MSS. when a word is erased a line is drawn under
't and the substituted word placed in the margin.

Page 62. The Relique.

1. 13. Where mis-devotion doth command. The unanimity of the
rlier editions and the MSS. shows clearly that ' Mass-devotion '
, 'hich Chambers adopts) is merely an ingenious conjecture of the
'b6() editor. Donne uses the word frequently, e.g. :

Here in a place, where miss-devotion frames
A thousand Prayers to Saints, whose very names
The ancient Church knew not, &c.

Of the Progresse of the Soule, p. 266, 11. 511-13.

nd : ' This mis-devotion, and left-handed piety, of praying for the
ead.' Serfnofis 80. 77. 780.

1. 17. You shalbe. I have recorded this reading of several MSS.

>ecause the poem is probably addressed to Mrs. Herbert and Donne

may have so written. His discrimination of ' thou ' and * you ' is

ery marked throughout the poems. ' Thou ' is the pronoun of feel-

11 917.3 . E

5 o Commentary,

ing and intimacy, ' you ' of respect. Compare ' To Mrs. M. H. ',
and remember that ISIrs. Herbert's name was Magdalen.

11. 27-8. Camming and going, wee Perchance might kisse, but not
between those meales : i.e. the kiss of salutation and parting. In a
sermon on the text 'Kisse the Son, lest he be angry', Donne
enumerates the uses of kissing sanctioned by the Bible, and this
among them : ' Now by this we are slid into our fourth and last
branch of our first part, The perswasion to come to this holy kisse,
though defamed by treachery, though depraved by licentiousnesse,
since God invites us to it, by so many good uses thereof in his Word.
It is an imputation laid upon Nero, that Neque adveniens neque profi-
ciscens. That whether comming or going he never kissed any : And
Christ himself imputes it to Simon, as a neglect of him. That when he
came into his house he did not kisse him. This then was in use ', &c.
Sermons 80. 41. 407.

The kiss of salutation lasted in some countries till the later eighteenth
century, perhaps still lasts. See Rousseau's Confessions, Bk. 9, and
Byron's Childe Harold, III. Ixxix.

But Erasmus, in 1499, speaks as though it were a specially English
custom : ' Est praeterea mos nunquam satis laudatus. Sive quo
venis, omnium osculis exciperis ; sive discedis aliquo, osculis dimit-
teris ; redis, redduntur suavia ; venitur ad te, propinantur suavia ;
disceditur abs te, dividuntur basia ; occurritur alicubi, basiatur
affatim ; denique quocunque te moves, suaviorum plena sunt omnia.'

Page 64. The Dissolution.

1. 10. earthly sad despaire. Cf. O. E. D. : ' Earthly. 3. Partaking
of the nature of earth, resembling earth as a substance, consisting of
earth as an element ; = Earthy, archaic or obsolete.' The form was
used as late as 1 843, but the change in the later editions of Donne
indicates that it was growing rare in this sense. Compare, ' A young
man of a softly disposition.' Camden's Reign of Elizabeth (English
transl.).

Page 66. Negative Love.

1. 1 5. What Tcie know not, our selves. * All creatures were brought to
Adam, and, because he understood the natures of all those creatures,
he gave them names accordingly. In that he gave no name to
himselfe it may be by some perhaps argued, that he understood him-
selfe lesse then he did other creatures.' Sermons 80. 50. 563.

Pagi. 67. Thf. Prohiuition.
1, 18. So, these extreamcs shall neithers office doe. The 'neithers'of
D, H40,JC, supported by 'neyther' in (9'/^ and 'neyther their' in
Cy, is much more characteristic than ' ne'er their ', and more likely
to have been altered than to have been substituted for ' ne'er their '.
The reading of Cy shows how the phrase puzzled an ordinary

\

Songs and Sonets, 5 i

copyist. ' These extremes shall by counteracting each other prevent
either from fulfilling his function.' Compare, 'As two yoke-devils
sworn to cither's purpose ' (i.e. each to the other's purpose). Shake-
speare, Hen. V, II. ii. 107.

I. 22. So shall /, live, thy stage not triumph bee. I have placed a
comma after I to make quite clear that * live ' is the adjective, not the
verb. The ' stay ' of 16}} is defensible, but the 16}} editor was some-
what at sea about this poem, witness the variations introduced while
the edition was printing in 11. 20 and 24 and the misprinting of 1. 5.
All the MSS. I have consulted support ' stage '; and this gives the best
meaning : ' Alive, I shall continue to be the stage on which your
victories are daily set forth ; dead, I shall be but your triumph, a thing
achieved once, never to be repeated.' Compare :

And cause her leave to triumph in this wise

Upon the prostrate spoil of that poor heart !

That serves a Trophy to her conquering eyes,

And must their glory to the world impart. Daniel, Delia, x.

II. 23, 24. There are obviously two versions of these lines which
the later editions have confounded. The first is that of the text, from
16)). The second is that of the MSS. and runs, properly pointed :

Then lest thy love, hate, and mee thou undoe,
O let me live, O love and hate me too.

The punctuation of the MSS. is very careless, but the lines as
printed are quite intelligible. As given in the editions i6jj-6g they
are nonsensical.

Page 68. The Expiration.

I. 5. JVe asKd. The past tense of the MSS. makes the antithesis and
sense more pointed. ' It was with no one's leave we lov'd to begin
with, and we will owe to no one the death that comes with parting.'

II. 7 f. Goe : and if that word have not quite kil'd thee,

Ease mee with death, by bidding mee goe too.

Compare :

Val. No more : unless the next word that thou speak'st
Have some malignant power upon my life :
If so, I pray thee, breathe it in mine ear,
As ending anthem of my endless dolour.

Two Gentlemen of Verona, iii. i. 236 f.

Page 70. The Paradox.
1. 14. lights life. The MSS. correct the obvious mistake of
the editions, ' lifes light.' The 'lights life' is, of course, the sun.
In the same way at 21 ' lye ' is surely better suited than ' dye ' to
an epitaph. This poem is not in D, H4g, Lee, and 16^^ has printed
it from A18, N, TC.

E 2

5 2 Commentary.

In the latter group of MSS. this poem is followed immediately by
another of the same kind, which is found also in H40, RP^T, and
O'F, as well as several more miscellaneous MSS. I print from TCC :

A Paradox.

Whosoe termes Love a fire, may like a poet

Faine what he will, for certaine cannot showe it.

For Fire nere burnes, but when the fuell's neare

But Love doth at most distance most appeare.

Yet out of fire water did never goe, '

But teares from Love abundantly doe flowe.

Fire still mounts upward ; but Love oft descendeth.

Fire leaves the midst: Love to the Center tendeth.

Fire dryes and hardens : Love doth mollifie.

Fire doth consume, but Love doth fructifie.

The powerful Queene of Love (faire Venus) came

Descended from the Sea, not from the flame,

Whence passions ebbe and flowe, and from the braine

Run to the hart like streames, and back againe.

Yea Love oft fills mens breasts with melting snow

Drowning their Love-sick minds in flouds of woe. 'j

What is Love, water then ? it may be soe ; i

But hee saith trueth, that saith hee doth not knowe. ^

FINIS.

Page 71. Farewell to Love.

I. 12. His highnesse <3^c. 'Presumably his highness was made of
gilt gingerbread.' Chambers. See Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, in. i.

II. 28-30. As these lines stand in the old editions they are
unintelligible :

Because that other curse of being short,

And only for a minute made to be
Eager, desires to raise posterity.

Grosart prints :

Because that other curse of being short
And — only-for-a-minute-made-to-be —
Eager desires to raise posterity.

This and the note which he appends I find more incomprehensible
than the old text. This is his note : ' The whole sense then is :
Unless Nature decreed this in order that man should despise it, (just)
as she made it short, that man might for that reason also despise a
sport that was only for a minute made to be eager desires to raise
posterity.' Surely this is Abracadabra !

What has happened is, I believe, this : Donne here, as elsewhere, used
an obsolescent word, viz. ' eagers ', the verb, meaning ' sharpens '.
The copyist did not recognize the form, took ' desire ' for the verb.

-^

Songs and Sonets. 53

and made ' eager ' the adjectival complement ^o ' be ', changing
' desire ' to ' desires ' as predicate to ' curse '. vAVhat Donne had
in mind was the Aristotelian doctrine that the desire to beget
children is an expression of man's craving for immortality. The
most natural function, according to Aristotle, of every living thing
which is not maimed in any way is to beget another living thing like
itself, that so it may partake of what is eternal and divine. This
participation is the goal of all desire, and of all natural activity. But
perishable individuals cannot partake of the immortal and divine by
continuous existence. Nothing that is perishable can continue
always one and the same individual. Each, therefore, participates
as best he may, some more, some less ; remaining the same in a way,
/ie. in the species, not in the individual.' {De Am'ma,'B. 4. 415 A-B.)
Ct)onne's argument then is this : ' Why of all animals have we alone
this feeling of depression and remorse after the act of love ? Is it a
device of nature to restrain us from an act which shortens the life of ' ''
the individual (he refers here to a prevalent belief as to the deleterious
effect of the act of love), needed because that other curse which Adam
brought upon man, the curse of mortality,

of being short.
And only for a minute made to be,
Eagers [i. e. whets or provokes] desire to raise posterity.'

The latest use of ' eager ' as a verb quoted by the O.E.D. is from
Mulcaster's Positions [i^^i), where the sense is that of imitating physi-
cally : ' They that be gawled . . may neither runne nor wrastle for
eagering the inward '. The Middle English use is closer to Donne's :
' The nature of som men is so . . unconvenable that . . poverte
myhte rather egren hym to don felonies.' Chaucer, Boeth. De ConsoL
Phil. In the Burley MS. (seventeenth century) the following epi-
gram on Bancroft appears :

A learned Bishop of this land

Thinking to make religion stand,

In equall poise on every syde

The mixture of them thus he tryde :

An ounce of protestants he singles

And a dramme of papists mingles.

Then adds a scruple of a puritan

And melts them down in his brayne pan,

But where hee lookes they should digest

The scruple eagers all the rest.

In Harl. MS. 4908 f, 83 the last line reads :

That scruple troubles all the rest.

Page 71. A Lecture upon the Shadow.
The text of this poem in the editions is that of A18, N, TC
among the MSS. A slightly different recension is found in most of

54

Commentary,

the other MSS. The chief difference is that the latter read ' love ' for
'loves' at 11. 9, 14, and 19. They also, however, read Meast ' for
' high'st ' at 1. 12. In 1. 19 they vacillate between 'once' and 'our'.
It would not be difficult to defend either version. The only variation
from the printed text which I have admitted is that on which all the
MSS. are unanimous, viz. ' first ' for ' short ' in 1. 26; 'short' is an
obvious blunder.

Note on the music to which certain of Donne'.s songs

WERE SET.

A song meant for the Elizabethans a poem intended to be sung,
generally to the accompaniment of the lute. Donne had clearly no
thought of his songs being an exception to this rule :
But when I have done so,
Some man his art and voice to show
Doth set and sing my paine.

Yet it is difficult to think of some, perhaps the majority, of Donne's
Songs and Sonets as being written to be sung. Their sonorous and
rhetorical rhythm, the elaborate stanzas which, like the prolonged
periods of the Elegies, seem to give us a foretaste of the Miltonic
verse-paragraph, suggest speech, — impassioned, rhythmical speech
rather than the melody of song. We are not haunted by a sense ot
the tune to which the song should go, as we are in reading the lyrics
of the Elizabethan Anthologies or of Robert Burns. Yet some of
Donne's songs tvere set to music. . A note in one group of MSS.
describes three of them as 'Songs which were made to certain ayres
which were made before '. One of these is The JBaite, which must
have been set to the same air as Marlowe's song. I reproduce here
a lute-accompaniment found in William Corkine's Second Book of
Ayres (1612). The airs of the other two (see p. 18) I have not been
able to find, nor are they known to Mr. Barclay Squire, who has
kindly helped and guided me in this matter of the music. With his
aid I have reproduced here the music of two other songs, and, at
another place, that of one of Donne's great Hymns.

Page 8. Song.
The following air is found in Egerton MS. 2013. As given here
it has been conjecturally corrected by Mr. Barclay Squire :

^=^=^=^^^^^^^^^

Go and catch a fall - ing star Get with child a man-drake roote,

f^'l^^fto^t^r tju

~ — 4 — e-

Tell me where all past times are Or who cleft the De-vil'sfoot,

Songs and Sonets,

55

^ft|[-t f ^,T:t±3p=n:3

Teach me to hear mer-maid's sing-ing Or to keep of En - vy's siiig-ing

P=F[| y ^ LLl^^

And find what wind Serves to ad-vance an hon - est mind.

Page 23. Breake of Day.

This is set to the following air in Corkine's Second Book of Ayres
(161 2). As given here it has been transcribed by Mr. Barclay Squire,
omitting the lute accompaniment :

i

^^

i

^

-^

'Tis true

'tis day, What though it

^f^tfU-izi^d^u T m

i

H^H-T 1 1 Ull^ 0-1-^

be?

And will yon there-fore rise . . from nie ? What,

3:

^^iTTHTST^P

i

^

¥- oiJ ? I

^

will you rise.

What, will you rise

i

^irrri ' ' Lis

be - cause 'tis

'h=^\ ?-

56

Commentary.

light ? Did we lye downe . .be - cause 'twas

• • •

^.

^

^

r^-^^^^^^

ni

ight ? Love that in spight of dark - nesse brought us he - ther,

S^

♦=rf

E

jl: f

^ff-f-f^ '

^

P^T^^^^IrVMtJ^-l

a^Luuij

In spight of light should keepe us still to - ge - ther,

33:

m

m

f*-

Ptl^ l|^-#FM^4^1J

In spight of light should keepe us still to - ge - ther, In spight of

s f r [==fflJ jjj J

^

^S

imi ^) — ^

5^^

*^^3z*

t:

^-^- •-

light should keepe us still

to - ge

ther.

5~J- / J. ;hr^

3

Songs and Sonets.

57

Page 46. The Baite.
From Corkine's Second Book of Ayres (161 2).

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5 8 Commentary.

EPIGRAMS.

Paces 75-8. Of the epigrams sixteen are given in all the editions,
J6JJ-69. Of these, thirteen are in A 18, JV, TC, none in Z>, H4<), Lee.
Of the remaining three, two are in W, one in HN, both good author-
ities. I have added three of interest from W, of which one is in HN,
and all three are in OF. IV includes among the Epigrams the
short poem On a Jeat Ring Sent, printed generally with the Songs
and Sonets. In HN there is one and in the Burley MS. are three
more. Of these the one in HNdSid. two of those in Bur are merely
coarse, and there is no use burdening Donne with more of this kind
than he is already responsible for. The last in Bur runs :

Why are maydes wits than boyes of lower strayne ?
Eve was a daughter of the ribb not brayne.

Donne's epigrams were much admired, and some of his elegies
were classed with them as satirical ' evaporations of wit '. Drummond
says : 'I think if he would he might easily be the best epigrammatist
we have found in English ; of which I have not yet seen any come
near the Ancients. Compare his Marry and Love with Tasso's stanzas
against beauty ; one shall hardly know who hath best.' The stanzas
referred to are entitled Sopra la bellezza, and begin:

Questo che tanto il cieco volgo apprezza.
Page 75. Pyramus and Thisbe. The Grolier Club edition
prints the first line of this epigram,

Two by themselves each other love and fear,

which suggests that ' love ' and ' fear ' are verbs. As punctuated in
/6y the epigram is condensed but precise : ' These two, slain by
themselves, by each other, by fear, and by love, are joined here in
one tomb, by the friends whose cruel action in parting them brought
them together here.' Every point in the epigram corresponds to the
incidents of the story as narrated in 0\\di!% Metamorphoses, iv. 55-165.
The closing line runs :

Quodque rogis superest, una requiescit in urna.

A Burnt Ship. In W the title is given in Italian, in CF in
Latin. Compare James's letter to Salisbury on the Dutch demands
for assistance against Spain ; — ' Should I ruin myself for maintaming
them. ... I look that by a peace they should enrich themselves to
pay me my debts, and if they be so weak as they cannot subsist, either
in peace or war, without I ruin myself for upholding them, in that
case surely the nearest harm is to be first eschewed : a man will leap
out of a burning ship and drown himself in the sea ; and it is doubtless
a farther off harm from me to suffer them to fall again into the hands
of Spain, and let God provide for the danger that may with time fall
upon me or my posterity, than presently to starve myself and mine

Epigrams. 5 9

with putting the meat in their mouth.' The King to Salisbury, 1607,
Hatfield MSS., quoted in Gardiner's History of England, ii. 25.
Page 76. A Lame Begger. Compare :

Dull says he is so weake, he cannot rise,
Nor stand, nor goe ; if that be true, he lyes.
Finis quoth R.

Thomas Deloney, Strange Histories of Songes &" Sonets of
Kings, Princes, Dukes, Lords, Ladyes, Knights atid
Gentlemen. Very pleasant either to be read or songe, 6^r.,
1607.

Page 76. Sir John Wingefield. In that late Is/and. Mr. Gosse
has inadvertently printed 'base' for 'late'. The 'Lady' island of
(JF is due probably to ignorance of what island was intended. It
is, of course, Cadiz itself, which is situated on an island at the extreme
point of the headland which closes the bay of Cadiz to the west.
' Then we entered into the island of Cales wiih our footmen,' says
Captain Pryce in his letter to Cecil. Strype's Annals, iv. 398.
Another account relates how ' on the 21st they took the town of
Cadiz and at the bridge in the island were encountered by 400 horses '.
Here the severest fighting took place at ' the bridge from Mayne to
Cadiz '. What does Donne mean by ' late island ' ? Is it the island
we lately visited so gloriously, or the island on which the sun sets
late, that western island, now become a new Pillar of Hercules ? It
would not be unlike Donne to give a word a startlingly condensed
force. Compare (if the reading be right) ' far faith ' (p. 189, 1. 4) and
the note.

Pages 75-6. The series of Epigrams A burnt ship. Fall of a wall,
A lame begger, Cales and Guyana, Sir John Wingefield seem to me all
to have been composed during the Cadiz expedition. The first
suggests, and was probably suggested by, the fight in the harbour
when so many of the Spanish ships were burned. The Fall of a ivall
may mark an incident in the attack of the landing party which forced
its way into the city. A lame begger records a common spectacle in
a Spanish and Catholic town. Cales and Guyana must clearly have
been written when, after Cadiz had been taken and sacked, the
leaders were debating their next step. Essex (and Donne is on
Essex's side) urged that the fleet should sail west and intercept the
silver fleet, but Howard, the Lord Admiral, insisted on an immediate
return to England. The last of the series chronicles the one death
to which every account of the expedition refers.

Page 77. Antiquary. Who is the Hamon or Hammond that is
evidently the subject of this epigram and is referred to in Satyre V,\. 87,
I cannot say. I am disposed to think that it may be John Hammond,
LL.D., the civilist, the father of James I's physician and of Charles I's
chaplain. I have no proof that he was an antiquarian, but a civilist
and authority on tithes may well have been so, and he belonged to

6o Commentary.

the class which Donne satirizes with most of anger and feeHng, the
examiners and torturers of Catholic prisoners. We find him in
Strype's Annals collaborating with the notorious Topcliffe.

Phryne. An epigram often quoted by Ben Jonson. Drummond,
Conversations, ed. Laihg, 842.

Page 78. Raderus. 'Matthew Rader (1561-1634), a German
Jesuit, published an edition of and commentary upon Martial in
1602.' Chambers. Compare : ' He added, moreover, that though
Raderus and others of his order did use to geld Poets and other
authors (and here I could not choose but wonder why they have not
gelded their Vulgar Edition which in some places hath such obscene
words, as the Hebrew tongue which is therefore called holy, doth so
much abhorre that no obscene thing can be uttered in it) . . .' The
reason which Donne gives is that ' They reserve to themselves the
divers forms, and the secrets, and mysteries in this latter which they
find in the authors whom they gelde.' Ignatius his Conclave (16 10),
pp. 94-6. The epigram is therefore a coarse hit at the Jesuits.

Mercurius Gallo-Belgicus. a journal or register of news started
at Cologne in 1598. The first volume consisted of 659 pages and
was entitled : Mercurius Gallo-Belgicus \ sive rerum in Gallia et Belgia
potissimum: Hispania quoque, Italia, Anglia, Germania, Polonia,
vicinisque locis ab anno 1^88 usque ad Martium anni praesentis ij^4
gestarufn, nuncius. In the seventeenth century it was published half-
yearly and ornamented with maps. Its Latin was not unimpeachable
(Jonson speaks of a ' Gallo-Belgic phrase ', Poetaster, v. i), nor its news
always trustworthy.

The Lier. This was first printed in Sir John Simeon's Unpublished
Poems of Don fie (1856-7), whence it is included by Chambers in his
Appendix A. It is given the tide Supping Hours. Its inclusion in
HN (whence the present title) and W strengthens its claim to be
genuine. Probably it was written after the Cadiz expedition, and
contains a reminiscence (Mr. Gosse has suggested this) of Spanish
fare.

1. 3. Like Nebuchadnezar. Compare : ' I am no great Nebuchad-
nezzar,sir; I havenotmuchskillingrass.' Shakespeare, ^4//'.? Well,\\,v.

THE ELEGIES.

Of the Elegies two groups seem to have been pretty widely circu-
lated before the larger collections were made or publication took place.
Each contained either twelve or thirteen, the twelve or thirteen being
made up sometimes by the inclusion of the Funeral Elegy, ' Sorrow
who to this house,' afterwards called Elegie on the L. C. The order in
the one group, as we find it in e.g. D, II49, Lee, is The Bracelet^ Going

^ I take the titles given in the editions for ease of reference to the reader of this
edition. The only title which D, H49, Lee have is On Loves Frogiessei A2j,JC,
and IV have none. Other MSS. give one or other occasionally.

The Elegies, 6i

to Bed, Jealousie, The Anagram, Change, The Perfume, His Picture,
' Sorrow who to this house,' ' Oh, let mee not serve,' Loves Warr,
On his Mistris, ' Natures lay Ideott, I taught,' Zoves Progress. The
second group, as we find itmA2j,j'C,and ^.contains The Bracelet,
The Comparison, The Perfume, Jealousie, ' Oh, let not me {sic W)
serve,' ' Natures lay Ideott, I taught,' Loves Warr, Goitig to Bed,
Change, The Anagram, On his Mistris, His Picture, ' Sorrow, who to
this house.' The last is not given in A2^. It will be noticed that
D, H4g, Lee drops The Comparison ; A2^, JC, JV, Loves Progress;
and that there were thirteen elegies, taking the two groups together,
apart from the Funeral Elegy.

These are the most widely circulated and probably the earliest of
Donne's Elegies, taken as such. Of the rest The Dreame is given
in D, H4g, Lee, but among the songs, and The Autumnall is placed
by itself. The rest are either somewhat doubtful or were not allowed
to get into general circulation.

Can we to any extent date the Elegies} There are some hints
which help to indicate the years to which the earlier of them probably
belong. In The Bracelet Donne speaks of Spanish 'Stamps ' as having

slily made

Gorgeous France, ruin'd, ragged and decay'd ;

Scotland which knew no State, proud in one day :

And mangled seventeen-headed Belgia.
The last of these references is too indefinite to be of use. I mean that
it covers too wide a period. Nor, indeed, do the others bring us very
far. The first indicates the period from the alliance between the
League and the King of Spain, 1585, when Philip promised a monthly
subsidy of 50,000 crowns, to the conversion and victory of Henry IV
in 1593; the second, the short time during which Spanish influence
gained the upper hand in Scotland, between 1582 and 1586. After
1593 is the only determinable date. In Loves Warrewe are brought
nearer to a definite date.

France in her lunatique giddiness did hate

Ever our men, yea and our God of late ;

Yet shee relies upon our Angels well

Which nere retorne
points to the period between Henry's conversion (* yea and our God
of late ') and the conclusion of peace between France and Spain in
1598. The line,

And Midas joyes our Spanish journeyes give
(taken with a similar allusion in one of his letters :

Guyanaes harvest is nip'd in the spring

I feare, &c., p. 210),
refers most probably to Raleigh's expedition in 1595 to discover the
fabulous wealth of Manoa. Had the Elegy been written after the Cadiz

6 2 Commentary.

expedition there would certainly have been a more definite reference
to that war. The poem was probably written in the earlier part of
1596, when the expedition was in preparation and Donne contemplated
joining it.

To date one of the poems is not of course to date them all, but their
paradoxical, witty, daring tone is so uniform that one may fairly con-
jecture that these thirteen Elegies were written between 1593 and
Donne's first entry upon responsible office as secretary to Egerton in
1598.

The twelfth {His parting from her) and fifteenth ( The Expostulation)
Elegies it is impossible to date, but it is not likely that they were
written after his marriage. Julia is quite undatable, a witty sally
Donne might have written any time before 16 15. But the fourteenth
{A Tale of a Citizen and his Wife) was certainly written after 1609,
probably in 16 10.

The Autumnall raises rather an interesting question, Mr. Gosse has
argued that it was most probably composed as late as 1625. Walton's
dating of it is hopelessly confused. He states {Life of Mr. George
Herbert^ 1670, pp. 14-19) that Donne made the acquaintance
of Mrs, Herbert and wrote this poem when she was residing at
Oxford with her son Edward, Donne being then near to (about
First Ed.)\hQ. Fortieth year of his Age'; 'both he and she were
then past the Meridian of man's life,' But according to Lord
Herbert his mother left Oxford and brought him to town about 1600,
shortly before the insurrection of Essex, i, e. when Donne was twenty-
seven years old, and secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, and Lady
Herbert was about thirty-five or thirty-six. It is, of course, not im-
possible that Donne visited Oxford between 1596 and 1600, but he
was not then the grave person Walton portrays. The period which
the latter has in view is that in which Donne was at Mitcham and Mrs.
Herbert living in London. ' This day ', he writes in a letter to her,
dated July 23, 1607, ' I came to town and to the best part of it your
house.' In 1609 Mrs. Herbert married Sir John Danvers. We know
that in 1607-9 Donne was in correspondence with Mrs. Herbert and
was sending her copies of his religious verses. Walton's evidence
points to its being about the same time that he wrote this poem.

Mr. Gosse's argument for a later date is, regarded a priori, very
persuasive. ' Unless it is taken as describing the venerable and
beautiful old age of a distinguished woman, the piece is an absurdity ;
to address such lines to a youthful widow, who was about to become
the bride of a boy of twenty, would have been a monstrous breach
of taste and good manners' {Life, or'c., ii. 228). It is, however,
somewhat hazardous to fix a standard of taste for the age of
James I, and above all others for John Donne. To the taste of the
time and the temper of Donne such a poem might more becomingly
be addressed to a widow of forty, the mother of ten children, one
already an accomplished courtier, than it might be written by a

The Elegies, 63

priest in orders. Donne would have been startled to hear that in
1625 he had spent any time in such a vain amusement as composing
a secular elegy. The poem he wrote to Mrs. Herbert before 1609
was probably thought by her and him an exquisite compliment. He
expressly disclaims speaking of the old age which disfigures. He
writes of one whose youthful beauty has flown. Forty seemed old for
a woman, even to Jane Austen, and in Montaigne's opinion it is old
for a man : ' J'estois tel, car je ne me considbre pas a cette heure,
que je suis engage dans les avenues de la vieillesse, ayant pie^a
franchy les quarante ans :

Minutatim vires et robur adultum
Frangit, et in partem pejorem liquitur aetas.

Ce que je seray doresnevant ce ne sera plus qu'un demy estre, ce ne
sera plus moy ; je m'eschappe les jours et me desrobe a moy mesme :

Singula de nobis anni praedantur euntes.' Essais, ii. 17.

Mrs. Herbert's marriage was due to no ' heyday of the blood '.
It was the gravity of Danvers' temper which attracted her, and he
became the steady friend and adviser of her children.

There are, moreover, some items of evidence which go to support
Walton's testimony. The poem is found in one MS., S, dated
1620, which gives us a downward date; and in 1610 occurs what
looks very like an allusion to Donne's poem in Ben Jonson's Silent
Woman. Clerimont and True-wit are speaking of the Collegiate
ladies, and the former asks,

Who is the president ?

True. The grave and youthful matron, the Lady Haughty.

Cler. A pox of her autumnal face, her pieced beauty ! there's no
man can be admitted till she be ready now-a-days, till she has
painted and perfumed ... I have made a song (I pray thee
hear it) on the subject

Still to be neat, still to be drest . . .

The resemblance may be accidental, yet the frequency with which
the poem is dubbed An Autumnal Face or The Autumnall shows that
the phrase had struck home. Jonson's comedies seethe with such
allusions, and I rather suspect that he is poking fun at his friend's
paradoxes, perhaps in a sly way at that ' grave and youthful matron '
Lady Danvers. We cdXix\o\. prove that the poem was written so early,
but the evidence on the whole is in favour of Walton's statement.

Page 79. Elegie L

1. 4. That Donne must have written * sere-barke ' or ' seare-barke '
is clear, both from the evidence of the editions and MSS. and
from the vacillation of the latter. ' Cere-cloth ' is a word which
Donne uses more than once in the sermons : ' A good Cere-cloth to
bruises,' Sermons 80. 10. loi ; ' A Searcloth that souples all bruises,'

64 Commentary.

Ibid. 80. 66. 663. But to substitute 'sere-cloth' for 'sere-barke'

would be to miss the force of Donne's vivid description. The ' sere- I

cloth ' with which the sick man is covered is his own eruptive skin. '

Both Chambers and Norton have noted the resemblance to Hamlet's I

poisoned father : :

a most instant tetter barked about, '?

Most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust, i

All my smooth body. \

11. 19-20. Nor, at his board together being sat l

With tiwrds, nor touchy scarce looks adulterate. j

Quum premit ille torum, vultu comes ipsa modesto

Ibis, ut adcumbas ; clam mihi tange pedem, ;:•

Me specta, nutusque meos, vultumque loquacem : ;'

Excipe furtivas, et refer ipsa, notas. \

Verba superciliis sine voce loquentia dicam ; j

Verba leges digitis, verba notata mero. j

Quum tibi succurrit Veneris lascivia nostrae, '

Purpureas tenero poUice tange genas. '

Si quid erit, de me tacita quod mente queraris, \

Pendeat extrema mollis ab aure manus :
Quum tibi, quae faciam, mea lux, dicamve placebunt, ^

Versetur digitis annulus usque tuis, \

Tange manu mensam, quo tangunt more precantes, ]

Optabis merito quum mala multa viro.
Quod tibi miscuerit sapias, bibat ipse iubeto ;

Tu puerum leviter posce, quod ipsa velis. \

Quae tu reddideris, ego primus pocula sumam, \

Et qua tu biberis, hac ego parte bibam. !

Ovid, Amores, I. iv. 15-32. ;

Thenceforth to her he sought to intimate \

His inward grief, by meanes to him well knowne :
Now Bacchus fruit out of the silver plate ,■

He on the table dasht as overthrowne,
Or of the fruitfuU liquor overflowne.
And by the dancing bubbles did divine,
Or therein write to let his love be showne ;
Which well she red out of the learned line ;
(A sacrament profane in mysterie of wine.)

Spenser, Faerie Queene, in. ix.

11. 21 f. Nor when he, swoln and pampet^ d with great fare
Sits down and snorts, cag'd in his basket chair, &'c.

Vir bibat usque roga : precibus tamen oscula desint ;

Dumque bibit, furtim, si potes, adde merum.
Si bene compositus somno vinoque iacebit ;

Consilium nobis resque locusque dabunt.

Ovid, Amores, I. iv. 51-4.

The Elegies, 65

Page 80. Elegie II.

1. 4. T/iough they be Ivory, yet her teeth be jeat: i. e. * Though her
eyes be yellow as ivory, her teeth are black as jet.' The edition of
1669 substitutes ' theirs ' for ' they ', referring back to ' others '.
Grosart follows.

1. 6. rough is the reading of i6)), i66g, and all the best MSS.
Chambers and Grosart prefer the ' tough ' of i6)j-j4, but * rough '
means probably 'hairy, shaggy, hirsute', O.E.T)., Rough, B.I. 2.
Her hair is in the wrong place. To have hair on her face and none
on her head are alike disadvantageous to a woman's beauty.

Page 81, 11. 17-21. If we f night put the letters, cr'c. Compare :

As six sweet Notes, curiously varied

In skilfuU Musick, make a hundred kindes

Of Heav'nly sounds, that ravish hardest mindes ;

And with Division (of a choice device)

The Hearers soules out at their ears intice :

Or, as of twicetwelve Letters, thus transpos'd,

The World of Words, is variously compos'd ;

And of these Words, in divers orders sow'n

This sacred Volume that you read is grow'n

(Through gracious succour of th'Eternal Deity)

Rich in discourse, with infinite Variety.

Sylvester, Du Bartas, First Week, Second Day.

Sylvester follows the French closely. Du Bartas' source is probably :

Quin etiam passim nostris in versibus ipsis
Multa elementa vides multis communia verbis,
Cum tamen inter se versus ac verba necessest
Confiteare et re et sonitu distare sonanti,
Tantum elementa queunt permutato ordine solo.

Lucretius, De Rermn Natura, I. 824-7.

Compare Aristotle, De Gen. et Corr. I. 2.

I. 22. unfit. I have changed the semicolon after this word to a
full stop. The former suggests that the next two lines are an expan-
sion or explanation of this statement. But the poet is giving a
series of different reasons why Flavia may be loved.

II. 41-2. When Belgias citties, the round countries drowne.

That durty foulenesse guards, and amies the towne :

Chambers, adopting a composite text from editions and MSS.,
reads :

Like Belgia' cities the round country drowns,
That dirty foulness guards and arms the towns.

Here ' the round country drowns ' is an adjectival clause with the
relative suppressed. But if the country actually drowned the cities

II 917.3 IT

66 Commentary,

the protector would be as dangerous as the enemy. The best MSS.
agree with i6))-j4, and the sentence, though a little obscure, is
probably correct : ' When the Belgian cities, to keep at bay their
foes, drown (i. e. flood) the neighbouring countries, the foulness thus
produced is their protection.' The * cities ' I take to be the subject.
The reference is to their opening tl>e sluices. See Motley's Rise of
the Dutch Republic, the account of the sieges of Alkmaar and Leyden.
' The Drowned Land ' (' Het verdronken land ') was the name given
to land overflowed by the bursting of the dykes.

Page 82. Elegie III.

1. 5. forced unto none is a strange expression, and the 'forbid to
none ' of ^ is an attempt to emend it ; but ' forc'd unto none ' probably
means ' not bound by compulsion to be faithful to any '. In woman's
love and in the arts you may always expect to be ousted from a
favoured position by a successful rival. No one has in these a
monopoly :

Is sibi responsum hoc habeat, in medio omnibus
Palmam esse positam, qui artem tractant musicam.

Ter. Phorni. Prol. 16-17.

1. 8. these meanes^ as I, It is difficult to say whether the 'these'
of the editions and of D, H4<), Lee or the ' those ' of the rest of the
MSS. is preferable. The construction with either in the sense of ' the
same as ', ' such as ', was not uncommon :

Under these hard conditions as this time

Is like to lay upon us. Shakespeare, y«/. Caes. i. ii. 174.

1. 1 7. Who hath a ploiv-land, qt'c. This has nothing to do, as
Grosart seems to think, with the name for acertain measurement of land
in the north of England corresponding to a hide in the south. A
' plow-land ' here is an arable or cultivated field. Possibly the ' a ' has
crept in and one should read simply ' plow-land ', or, like P, ' plow-
lands.' Otherwise ' \\'ho hath' is to be slurred in reading the line.
The meaning of the passage seems to be that though a man puts all his
own seed into his land, he is quite willing to reap the corn which has
sprung from others' seed, brought thither, it may be, by wind or birds.

1. 30. Torunne ail cou7itries,a wild rogtiery. The Oxford English
Dictionary quotes this line, giving to ' roguery ' the meaning of ' a
knavish, rascally act '. But Grosart is certainly right in explaining it
as 'vagrancy'. In love, Donne does not wish to be a captive bound
/ to one, but he does not wish on the other hand to be a vagrant with
no settled abode. I The O. E.D. dates the poem c. 1620, which is
much too late. Donne was not writing in this manner after he took
orders. It cannot be later than 1601, and is probably earlier.

1. 32. more putriji'd, or, as in the MSS., 'worse putrifi'd.'
Tlie latter is probably correct, but the difference is trifling. By

The Elegies. 67

' putrifi'd ' Donne means ' made salt ' and so less fit for drinking.
The 'purifi'd' of some editions points to a misunderstanding of Donne's
meaning ; for saltness and putrefaction were not identical : * For
Salt as incorruptible was the Symbol of friendship, and before the
other service was offered unto their guests.' Browne, Vulgar Errors^
V. 22.

Page 84. Elegie IV. ^

I. 2, All thy suppos'd escapes. He is addressing the lady. All her
supposed transgressions (e.g. of chastity) are laid to the poet's charge.
' Escape '=' An inconsiderate transgression ; a peccadillo, venial error.
(In Shaks. with different notion : an outrageous transgression.)
Applied esp. to breaches of chastity.' O.E.D. It is probably in
Shakespeare's sense that Donne uses the word :

Brabantio. For your sake, jewel,
I am glad at soul I have no other child ;
For thy escape would teach me tyranny,
To hang clogs on them. Shakespeare, Othello, i. iii. 195-8.

II. 7-8. Though he had wont to search with glazed eyes,

As though he cafne to kill a Cockatrice,

i.e. 'with staring eyes '. I take 'glazed' to be the past participle of
the verb ' glaze ', ' to stare ':

I met a lion

Who glaz'd upon me, and went surly by,

Without annoying me. Shakespeare, Jul. Caes. i. iii. 20-2.

The past participle is thus used by Shakespeare in : ' With time's
deformed hand' {Com. of Err. v. i. 298), i.e. 'deforming hand';
'deserved children ' (0?r. in. i. 292), i.e. 'deserving'. See Franz,
Shakespeare-Grammatik, § 661.

The Cockatrice or Basilisk killed by a glance of its eye :

Here with a cockatrice dead-killing eye
He rouseth up himself, and makes a pause.

Shakespeare, Lucrece, 540-1,

The eye of the man who comes to kill a cockatrice stares with
terror lest he be stricken himself.

• If ' glazed ' meant ' covered with a film ', an adverbial complement
would be needed :

For sorrow's eye, glazed with blinding tears.

Shakespeare, Rich. II, 11. ii. 16.

11. 9, 15. have . . . take. I have noted the subjunctive forms
found in certain MSS., because this is undoubtedly Donne's
usual construction. In a full analysis that I have made of Donne's
syntax in the poems I have found over ninety examples of the sub-
junctive against seven of the indicative in concessive adverbial clauses.
In these ninety are many where the concession is an admitted fact, e.g.

F 2

6 8 Comme?ttary,

Though her eyes be small, her mouth is great.

Ekgie II, 3 ff.
Though poetry indeed be such a sin. Satire II, 5.

Of the seven, two are these doubtful examples here noted; one, where
the subjunctive would be more appropriate, is due to the rhyme.

11. lo-ii. Thy beauties beau tie, and food of our love,
Hope of his goods.

Grosart is puzzled by this phrase and explains ' beauties beautie ' as
' the beauty of thy various beauties ' (face, arms, shape, &c.). I fear
that Donne means that the beauty which he most loves in his
mistress is her hope or prospect of obtaining her father's goods. i'The
whole poem is in a vein of extravagant and cynical wit. It musrnot
be taken too seriously .1 ""

1. 22. palenesse, bhishing, sighs, and sweats. All the MSS. read
* blushings ', which is very probably correct, but I have left the two
singulars to balance the two plurals. But the use of abstract nouns
as common is a feature of Donne's syntax : ' We would not dwell
upon increpations, and chidings, and bitternesses; we would pierce
but so deepe as might make you search your wounds, when you come
home to your Chamber, to bring you to a tendernesse there, not to a
palenesse or blushing here.' Sermojis 80. 61. 611.

I. 29. ifigled: i.e. fondled, caressed. O. E. D.

II. 33-4. He that to barre the first gate, doth as wide

As the great Rhodian Colossus stride.

Porters seem to have been chosen for their size. Compare :
'Those big fellows that stand like Gyants (at Lords Gates) having
bellies bumbasted with ale in Lambswool and with Sacks.' Dekker.
1. 37. were hir'd to this. All the MSS. read * for this ', but ' to ' is
quite Elizabethan, and gives the meaning more exactly. He was
not taken on as a servant for this purpose, but was specially paid for
this piece of work :

This naughty man
Shall face to face be brought to Margaret,
Who I believe was pack'd in all this wrong,
Hir'd to it by your brother.

Shakespeare, Much Ado, v. i. 307.

1. 44. the pale ivretch shivered. I have (with the support of the
best MSS.) changed the semicolon to a full stop here, not that as the
punctuation of the editions goes it is wrong, but because it is
ambiguous and has misled both Chambers and the Grolier Club
editor. By changing the semicolon to a comma they make 11. 43-4
an adverbial clause of time which, with the conditional clause * Had
it beene some bad smell ' , modifies * he would have thought . . . had
wrought '. This seems to me out of the question. The * when '
links the statement ' the pale wretch shivered ' to what precedes, not

The Elegies. 69

to what follows. As soon as the perfume reached his nose he
shivered, knowing what it meant. A new thought begins with ' Had
it been some bad smell '.

The use of the semicolon, as at one time equivalent to a little less
than a full stop, at another to a little more than a comma, leads
occasionally to these ambiguities. The few changes which I have
made in the punctuation of this poem have been made with a view to
obtaining a little more consistency and clearness without violating the
principles of seventeenth-century punctuation.

I. 49. The precious Vnicornes. See Browne, Vulgar Errors^ iii. 23 :
' Great account and much profit is made of Ufiicornes horn, at least
of that which beareth the name thereof,' &c. He speaks later of the
various objects ' extolled for precious Horns ' ; and Donne's epithet
doubtless has the same application, i. e. to the horns.

Page 86. Elegie V.
1. 8. \Yith cares rash sodaine stor/fies being o'rspread. I have let the
16)) reading stand, though I feel sure that Donne is not responsible
for ' being o'rspread '. Printing from Z>, U49, Lee, in which
probably the word ' cruel ' had been dropped, the editor or printer
supplied ' being ' to adjust the metre. I have not corrected it because
I am not sure which is Donne's version. Clearly the line has under-
gone some remodelling. My own view is that the earliest form is
suggested by B, S, Sp6,

With Cares rash sudden storms o'rpressed,

where 'o'erpress' means 'conquer, overwhelm'. Compare Shakespeare's

but in my sight
Deare heart forbear to glance thine eye aside.
What need'st thou wound with cunning when thy might
Is more than my o'erprest defence can bide.

Sonne fs, 139. 8.

He bestrid an o'erpressed Roman. Coriohinus, 11. ii. 97.

To begin with, Donne described his grey hairs by a bold ?
synecdoche, leaving the greyness to be inferred : ' My head o'er-
whelmed, o'ermastered by Cares storms.' But ' o'erpressed ' was
harshly used and was easily changed to ' o'erspread ', which was
made more appropriate by substituting the effect, ' hoariness,' for the
cause, 'Cares storms.' This is what we find inyCand such a good
MS. as W'.

With cares rash sudden horiness o'erspread.

In B and P ' cruel ' has been inserted to complete the verse when
' o'erpressed ' was contracted to ' o'erprest ' or changed to ' o'erspread '.
In i6}$-6g the somewhat redundant ' rash ' has been altered to
' harsh '.

With cares harsh, sodaine horinesse o'rspread.

7 o Comme7itary,

The image is more easily apprehended, and this may be Donne's
final version, but the original (if my view is correct) was bolder, and
more in the style of Shakespeare's

That time of yeeare thou maist in me behold.
When yellow leaues, or none, or few doe hange
Vpon those boughes which shake against the could,
Bare ruin'd quiers, where late the sweet birds sang.

Sonnets, 72. 1-4,

1. 16. Should now love lesse, what hee did love to see. Here again
there has been some recasting of the original by Donne or an editor.
Most MSS. read :

Should like and love less what hee did love to see.

To ' like and love ' was an Elizabethan combination :

And yet we both make shew we like and love.

Farmer, Chetham MS. (ed. Grosart), i. 90.

Yet every one her likte, and every one her lov'd.

Spenser, Faerie Queene, iii. ix. 24.

Donne or his editor has made the line smoother.

1. 20. To feed on that, which to disused lasts seems tough. I have
made the line an Alexandrine by printing ' disused ', which occurs
in A2J and B, but it is 'disus'd' in the editions and most MSS.
The 'weak' of i6jo-6p adjusts the metre, but for that very reason
one a little suspects an editor. Donne certainly wrote ' disus'd ' or
' disused '. Who changed it to ' weak ' is not so certain. The meaning
of 'disused ' is, of course, ' unaccustomed.' The O.E.D. quotes : ' I
can nat shote nowe but with great payne, I am so disused.' Palsgr.
(1530). ' Many disused persons can mutter out some honest requests
in secret.' Baxter, Reformed Pastor (1656).

It seems to me probable that P preserves an early form of these
lines :

who now is grown tough enough
To feed on that which to disused tastes seems rough.

The epithet ' tough ' is appropriately enough applied to Love's
mature as opposed to his childish constitution, while rough has the
recognized sense of ' sharp, acid, or harsh to the taste '. The O.E.D.
quotes: ' Harshe, rough, stipticke, and hard wine,' Stubbs (1583).
' The roughest berry on the rudest hedge ', Shakespeare, A7itony
and Cleopatra, I. iv. 64 (1608).

Possibly Donne changed ' tough ' to ' strong ' in order to avoid the
monotonous sound of 'tough enough . . . rough', and this ultimately
led to the substitution of ' weak ' for ' disused '. The present close
of the last line I find it difficult to away with. How can a thing seem
tough to the taste ? Even meat does not taste tough : and it is not
of meat that Donne is thinking but of wine. I should be disposed

The Elegies, 7 i

to return to the reading of F, or, if we accept ' strong ' and * weak ' as
improvements, at any rate to alter ' tough ' to * rough '.

Page 87. Elegie VI.

I. 6. Their Princes stiles, with many Realmes fulfill. This is the
reading of all the best MSS. The ' which ' for ' with ' of the editions
is due to an easy confusion of two contractions invariably used in the
MSS. Grosart and Chambers accept 'with' from S and A2^,
but further alter * styles ' to ' style ', following these generally inferior
MSS. The plural is correct. Donne refers to more than one
prince and style. The stock instance is

the poor king Reignier, whose large style
Agrees not with the leanness of his purse.

2 Henry V/, i. i. 1 11-12.

But the English monarchs themselves bore in their ' style ' the
kingdom of France, and for some years (1558-1566) Mary, Queen of
Scots, bore in her ' style ' the arms of England and Ireland.

Page 88, 11. 21-34. These lines evidently suggested Carew's
poem, To my Mistress sitting by a River s Side, An Eddy :

Mark how yon eddy steals away
From the rude stream into the bay ;
There, locked up safe, she doth divorce
Her waters from the channel's course.
And scorns the torrent that did bring
Her headlong from her native spring, &c.

II. 23-4. calmely ride
Her wedded channels bosome, and then chide.

The number of MSS. and editions is in favour of ' there ', but the
quality (e. g. 16}} and W^ of those which read ' then ', and the sense
of the lines, favour ' then '. The stream is at one moment in
'speechless slumber ', and the next chiding. She cannot in the same
place do both at once :

The current that with gentle murmur glides,

Thou know'st, being stopp'd, impatiently doth rage ;

But when his fair course is not hindered,

He makes sweet music with the enamell'd stones.

Giving a gentle kiss to every sedge

He overtaketh in his pilgrimage ;

And so by many winding nooks he strays.

With willing sport to the wild ocean.

Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona, 11. vii. 25-32.

11. 27-8. Yet if her often gnawing kisses winne

The traiterous banke to gape, and let her in.

The • banke ' of the MSS. must, I think, be the right reading rather

7 2 Comme?itary.

than the ' banks ' of the editions, the ' s ' having arisen from the final
' e '. A river which bursts or overflows its banks does not leave its
course, though it ' drowns ' the * round country ', but if it breaks
through a weak part in a bank it may quit its original course for
another. * The traiterous bank ' I take to be equivalent to ' the weak
or treacherous spot in its bank '.

Page 89. Elegie VII. V^

I. I. Natures lay Ideot. Here ' lay ' means, I suppose, ' ignor-
ant', as Grosart says. His other suggestion, that, 'lay' has the
meaning of ' lay ' in ' layman ', a painter's figure, is unlikely. That
word has a different origin from May' (Lat. laicus\ and the earliest
example of it given in O.E.D. is dated 1688.

II. 7-8. Nor by the^eyes water call a maladie

Desperately hot, or changitig feaverously .

The * call ' of j6}} is so strongly supported by the MSS. that it is
dangerous to alter it. Grosart (whom Chambers follows) reads
' cast ', from S ; but a glance at the whole line as it stands there shows
how little can be built upon it. ' To cast ' is generally used in the
phrase ' to cast his water ' and thereby tell his malady ; but the
O.E.D. gives one example which resembles this passage if 'cast' be
the right w-ord here :

Able to cast his disease without his water.

Greene's Menaphon.

I rather fancy, however, that ' call ' is right, and is to be taken in
close connexion with the next line, ' You could not cast the eyes
water, and thereby call the malady desperately hot or changing
feverously.'

If thou couldst, Doctor, cast
The water of my land, find her disease.

Shakespeare, Macbeth, v. iii. 50.

The ' casting ' preceded and led to the finding, naming the disease,
calling it this or that.

11. 9 f . / had not taught thee then, the Alphabet
Offlotvers, o^c.

' Posy, in both its senses, is a contraction of poesy, the flowers of
a nosegay expressing by their arrangement a sentiment like that
engraved on a ring.' Weekly, Romance of Words, London, 191 2,
p. 134. She had not yet learned to sort flowers so as to make a posy.

1. 13. Remember since, dr'c. For the idiom compare :

Beseech you, sir,
Remember since you owed no more to time
Than I do now. Shakespeare, Winter's Tale, v. i. 219.

See Franz, Shakespeare-Grammatik, § 559.

The Elegies. 73

1. 22. Inlaid thee. The O. E.D. cites this line as the only example
of ' inlay ' meaning ' to lay in, or as in, a place of concealment or
preservation.' The sense is much that of ' to lay up ', but the word
has perhaps some of its more usual meaning, ' to set or embed in
another substance.' 'Your husband has given to you, his jewel, such
a setting as conceals instead of setting off your charms. I have refined
and heightened those charms.'

1. 25. Thy graces and good ivords my creahires bee. I was tempted
to adopt with Chambers the 'good works' of i66^ and some MSS.,
the theological connexion of ' grace ' and ' works ' being just the ; ^
kind of conceit Donne loves to play with. But the ' words ' of i6^^-^4
has the support of so good a MS. as W, and ' good words ' is an
Elizabethan idiom for commendation, praise, flattery :

He that will give,
Good words to thee will flatter neath abhorring.

Shakespeare, Coriolanus, i. i. 170-1.

In your bad strokes you give good words.

Shakespeare, y«//'«5 Caesar, v. i. 30.

Moreover, Donne's word is 'graces', not 'grace'. 'Your graces
and commendations are my work ', i.e. either the commendations you
receive, or, more probably, the refined and elegant flatteries with
which you can now cajole a lover, though once your whole stock of
conversation did not extend beyond 'broken proverbs and tome
sentences '. Compare, in Elegie IX: The Auttannail, the description
of Lady Danvers' conversation :

In all her words, unto all hearers fit,

You may at Revels, you at Counsaile, sit.

And again, Elegie X VIII: loves Progresse :

So we her ayres contemplate, words and heart.
And virtues.

1. 28. Frame and enamell Plate. Compare : ' And therefore they
that thinke to gild and enamell deceit, and falsehood, with the additions
of good deceit, good falshood, before they will make deceit good,
will make God bad.' Sermons 80. 73. 742. 'Frame' means, of
course, ' shape, fashion ', and ' plate ' gold or silver service. The
elaborate enamelling of such dishes and cups was, I presume, as
common as in the case of gold watches and clocks. See F. J.
Britten's Old Clocks and Watches and their Makers, 1904.

Page 90. Elegie VIII.

I. 2. Muskats, i.e. 'Musk-cats.' The 'muskets' of j66g is only
a misprint.

II. 5-6. In these lines as they stand in the editions and most of the
MSS. there is clearly something wrong :

74 Commentary,

And on her neck her skin such lustre sets,
They seeme no sweat drops but pearle coronets.

A ' coronet ' is not an ornament of the neck, but of the head. The
obvious emendation is that o{A2j, C,JC, and W^ which Grosartand
Chambers have adopted. A ' carcanet ' is a necklace, and carcanets
of pearl were not unusual : see O.E.D., 5. v. But why then do the
editions and so many MSS. read ' coronets ' ? Consideration of this
has convinced me that the original error is not here but in the word
' neck '. Article by article, as in an inventory, Donne contrasts his
mistress and his enemy's. But in the next line he goes on :

Ranke sweaty froth thy Mistresse's brow defiles,

contrasting her brow with that of his mistress, where the sweat drops
seem ' no sweat drops but pearle coronets '.

The explanation of the error is, probably, that an early copyist
passed in his mind from breast to neck more easily than to brow.
Another explanation is that Donne altered 'brow' to 'neck'
and forgot to alter ' coronets ' to ' carcanets '. I do not think this
likely. The force of the poem lies in its contrasts, and the brow
is proverbially connected with sweat. ' In the sweat of thy brow,' &c.
Possibly Donne himself in the first version, or a copy of it, wrote ' neck ',
meaning to write ' brow ', misled by the proximity and associations of
' breast '. Mr. J. C. Smith has shown that Spenser occasionally
wrote a word which association brought into his mind, but which was
clearly not the word he intended to use, as it is destructive of the
rhyme-scheme. Oddly enough the late Francis Thompson used
'carcanet' in the sense of 'coronet':

Who scarfed her with the morning ? and who set
Upon her brow the day-fall's carcanet ?

Ode to the Setting Sun.

Page 91, 1. 10. Sanserra's starved men. 'When I consider what
God did for Goshen in Egypt . . . How many Sancerraes he hath
delivered from famines, how many Genevas from plots and machina-
tions.' Sermons.

The Protestants in Sancerra were besieged by the Catholics for
nine months in 1573, and suffered extreme privations. Norton quotes
Henri Martin, Histoire de France, ix. 364 : ' On se disputa les debris
les plus immondes de toute substance animale ou vegetale ; on
crea, pour ainsi dire, des aliments monstrueux, impossibles.'

11. 13-14. And like vile lying stones in saffrond tintie,

Or 7varts, or wheales, they hang upon her skinne.

Following the MSS. I have made ' lying ' an epithet attached to
* stones ' and substituted ' they hang ' for the superficially more
grammatical ' it hangs '. The readings of 16)), ' vile stones lying '
and ' it hangs ', seem to me just the kind of changes a hasty editor

The Elegies. 75

would make, the kind of changes which characterize the Second
Folio of Shakespeare. The stones are not only 'vile'; they are 'lying',
inasmuch as they pretend to be what they are not, as the ' saffron'd
tinne ' pretends to be gold.

1. 19. Thy head: i.e. ' the head of thy mistress.' Donne continues
this construction in 11. 25, 32, 39, and I have restored it from the
later editions and MSS. at 1. 34, ' thy gouty hand.'

I. 34. thy gouty hand : ' thy ' is the reading of all the editions except
16)} and of all the MSS. except JC and S. It is probably right,
corresponding to 1. 19 'Thy head' and 1. 32 'thy tann'd skins'.
Donne uses ' thy ' in a condensed fashion for * the head of thy
mistress ', &c.

Page 92, 1. 51. And such. The 'such' of the MSS. is doubtless
right, the ' nice ' of the editions being repeated from 1. 49.

Page 92. Elegie IX.

For the date, &c., of this poem, see the introductory note on the
Elegies.

The text of 16)^ diverges in some points from that of all the
MSS., in some others it agrees with D, H4g, Lee. In the latter
case I have retained it, but where Z>, H4<), Lee agree with the rest
of the MSS. I have corrected /<5y, e. g. :

Page 93, 1. 6. Affection here takes Reverences name : where * Affec-
tion ' seems more appropriate than ' Affections ' ; and 1, 8. But no^v
shee's gold : where ' They are gold ' of 16)^ involves a very loose use of
' they '. Possibly 16)} here gives a first version afterwards corrected.

II. 29-32. Xerxes strange Lydian love, ct'c. Herodotus (vii. 31)
tells how Xerxes, on his march to Greece, found in Lydia a plane-tree
which for its beauty (/caAXco? dvtKo) he decked with gold ornaments,
and entrusted to a guardian. Aelian, Variae Historiae, ii. 14, De
platano Xerxe amato, attributes his admiration to its size : eV AvSta
yovv, <^ao-tv, t8wv ^irrov cv/xeyc^cs irXaravov, &c. In the Latin translation
m Herder's edition (Firmin Didot, 1858) size is taken as equivalent to
height, ' quum vidisset proceram platanum,' but the reference is more
probably to extent. Pliny, N. H. 12. 1-3, has much to say of the size
of certain planes under which companies of men camped and slept.

The quotation from Aelian confirms the 16)} reading, 'none being
so large as shee,' which indeed is confirmed by the lines that follow.
The question of age is left open. The reference to ' barrennesse ' I do
not understand.

Page 94, 1. 47. naturall lation. This, the reading of the great
majority of the MSS., is obviously correct and explains the vacillation
of the editions. The word was rare but quite good. The O. E. D.
quotes : ' I mean lation or Local-motion from one place to another.'
Fotherby (1619) ;

Make me the straight and oblique lines,

The motions, lations, and the signs. (Herrick, Hesper. 64) ;

7 6 Commentary.

and other examples as late as 1690. The term was specially
astronomical, as here. The ' motion natural ' of 16)) is an unusual
order in Donne ; the ' natural station ' of i6}^-6^ is the opposite of
motion. The first was doubtless an intentional alteration by the
editor, which the printer took in at the wrong place ; the second a
misreading of ' lation '.

Page 95. Elegie X.

The title of this Elegy, The Dream, was given it in 16)^, perhaps
wrongly. Sg6 seems to come nearer with Picture. The ' Image of
her whom I love ', addressed in the first eight lines, seems to be a
picture. When that is gone and reason with it, fantasy and dreams
come to the lover's aid (11. 9-20). But the tenor of the poem is some-
what obscure ; the picture is addressed in terms that could hardly be
strengthened if the lady herself were present.

1. 26. Mad with much heart, ^c. Aristotle made the heart the
source of all ' the actions of life and sense '. Galen transferred these
to the brain. See note to p. 99, 1. 100. /

Page 96. Elegie XL v

fDonne has in this Elegy carried to its farthest extreme, as only a

J metaphysical or scholastic poet like himself could, the favourite

Elizabethan pun on the coin called the AngeD Shakespeare is fond

of the same quibble : ' She has all the rule of her husband's purse ;

she hath a legion of angels ' (Merry Wives, i. iii. 60). But Donne

knows more of the philosophy of angels than Shakespeare and can

pursue the analogy into more surprising subtleties. /Nor is the pun

on angels the only one which he follows up in this poem : crowns,

4' pistolets, and gold are all played with in turn. The poem was a

'^ favourite with Ben Jonson : ' his verses of the Lost Chaine he hath by

heart ' (Drunwiond's Conversations, ed. Laing).

The text of the poem, which was first printed in 16)^ (Marriot
having been prohibited from including it in the edition of 1633), is
based on a MS. closely resembling Cy and F, and differing in
several readings from the text given in the rest of the MSS.,
including D, H4^, Lee, and W. I have endeavoured rather to give
this version correctly, while recording the variants, than either to
substitute another or contaminate the two. When Cy and P go over
to the side of the other MSS. it is a fair inference that the editions
have gone astray. When they diverge, the question is a more open one.

Page 97, 1. 24. their naturall Countreys rot: i.e. 'their native
Countreys rot ', the ' lues Gallica '. Compare ' the naturall people of
that Countrey', Greene, News from Hell (ed. Grosart, p. 57). This
is the reading of Cy, and the order of the words in the other MSS.
points to its being the reading of the MS. from which 16)^ was
printed.

1. 26. So pale, so lame, ^^c. The chipping and debasement of the
French crown is frequently referred to, and Shakespeare is fond of

The Elegies. 77

punning on the word. But two extracts from Stow's Chronicle
{continued . , . by Edmund Howes), 163 1, will throw some light on the
references to coins in this poem : In the year 1559 took place the
last abasement of English money whereby testons and groats were
lowered in value and called in, ' and according to the last valuation of
them, she gave them fine money of cleane silver for them commonly
called Sterling money, and from this time there was no manner of
base money coyned or used in England . . . but all English monies
were made of gold and silver, which is not so in any other nation
whatsoever, but have sundry sorts of copper money.'

' The 9. of November, the French crowne that went currant for six
shillings foure pence, was proclaimed to be sixe shillings.'

In 1561, 'The fifteenth of November, the Queenes Maiestie
published a Proclamation for divers small pieces of silver money to
be currant, as the sixe pence, foure pence, three pence, 2 pence and
a peny, three half-pence, and 3 farthings : and also forbad all
forraigne coynes to be currant within the same Realme, as well gold
as silver, calling them all into her Maiesties Mints, except two sorts
of crownes of gold, the one the French crowne, the other the Flemish
crowne.' The result was the bringing in of large sums in ' silver plates :
and as much or more in pistolets, and other gold of Spanish coynes,
and one weeke in pistolets and other Spanish gold 16000 pounds, all
these to be coyned with the Queenes stamps.'

1. 29. Spanish Stamps still travelling. Grosart regards this as an
allusion to the wide diffusion of Spanish coins. The reference is more
pointed. It is to the prevalence of Spanish bribery, the policy of
securing paid agents in every country. It was by money that Parma
secured his first hold on the revolted provinces. Gardiner has shown
that Lx)rd Cranborne, afterwards Earl of Salisbury, accepted a
pension from the Spanish king {Uist. of England, i, p. 215). The
discovery of the number of his Court who were in Spanish pay came
as a profound shock to James at a later period. The invariable
charge brought by one Dutch statesman against another was of being
in the pay of the Spaniard.

' It is his Indian gold,' says Raleigh, speaking of the King of Spain
in 1596, 'that endangers and disturbs all the nations of Europe; it
creeps into councils, purchases intelligence, and sets bound loyalty at
liberty in the greatest monarchies thereof.'

U. 40-1. Gorgeous Frafice ruined, ragged and decaf d ;

Scotland, which knew no state, proud in one day :

The punctuation of i66g has the support generally of the MSS.,
but in matters of punctuation these are not a very safe guide. As
punctuated in i6jj, ' ragged and decay'd ' are epithets of Scotland,
contrasting her with ' Gorgeous France '. I think, however, that the
antithesis to * gorgeous ' is * ruin'd, ragged and decay'd ', describing
the condition of France after the pistolets of Spain had done their

7 8 Com^nentary,

work. The epithet appHed to Scotland is ' which knew no state ', the
antithesis being ' proud in one day '.

Page 98, 11. 51-4. Much hope which they should nourish^ d^c. Pro-
fessor Norton proposed that the last two of these lines should run :

Will vanish if thou, Love, let them alone.

For thou wilt love me less when they are gone ;

but that 'alone' is a misprint for 'atone.' This is unnecessary,
and there is no authority for ' atone '. What Donne says, in
the cynical vein of Elegie VI, 9-10, is : 'If thou love me let
my crowns alone, for the poorer I grow the less you will love me.
I shall lose the qualities which you admired in me when you saw
them through the glamour of wealth.'

I. 55. And be content. The majority of the MSS. begin a new
paragraph here and read :

Oh, be content, &c.

Donne would almost seem to have read or seen (he was a frequent
theatre-goer) the old play of Soliman afid Perseda (pr. 1599). There
the lover, having lost a carcanet, sends a cryer through the street and
offers one hundred crowns reward. Chambers notes a similar case
in The Puritan (1607). Lost property is still cried by the bellman in
northern Scottish towns. The custom of resorting in such cases to
'some dread Conjurer' is frequently referred to. See ^on%oxC% Alchemist
for the questions with which their customers approached conjurers.

II. 71-2. So in the first falne angels, qj^c. Aquinas discusses the
question: 'Utrum intellectus daemonis sit obtenebratus per privatio-
nem cognitionis omnis veritatis.' After stating the arguments for such
privation he replies : ' Sed contra est quod Dionysius dicit . . . quod
"data sunt daemonibus aliqua dona, quae nequaquam mutata esse
dicimus, sed sunt integra et splendidissima." Inter ista, autem, natura-
lia dona est cognitio veritatis.' Aquinas then explains that knowledge
is twofold, that which comes by nature, and that which comes by
grace : and that the latter again is twofold, that which is purely
speculative, and that which is ' affectiva, producens amorem Dei '.
' Harum autem trium cognitionum prima in daemonibus nee est
ablata nee diminuta : consequitur enim ipsam naturam Angeli, qui
secundum suam naturam est quidam intellectus vel mens. Propter
simplicitatem autem suae substantiae a natura eius aliquid sub-
trahi non potest.' Devils, therefore, have natural knowledge in an
eminent degree {splendidissima) ; they have even the knowledge
which comes by grace in so far as God chooses to bestow it, for His
own purposes, by the mediation of angels or ' per aliqua temporalia
divinae virtutis effecta ' (Augustine). But of the knowledge which
leads to good they have nothing : ' tenendum est firmiter secundum
fidem catholicam, quod et voluntas bonorum Angelorum confirmata
est in bono, et voluntas daemonum obstinata est in male' Summa I.

"The Elegies. 79

Ixiv. 1-2. They have ' wisdom and knowledge ', but it is immovably
set to do ill.

11. 7 7-8. IHity these Angels ; yet their dignities

Passe Vertues, Powers and Principalities.

There is a good deal of vacillation in the MSS. as to the punctua-
tion of ' Angels yet ', some placing the semicolon before, others after
' yet '. The difference is not great, but that which I have adopted,
though it has least authority, brings out best what I take to be the
meaning of these somewhat difficult lines. ' Pity these Angels, for
yet (i. e. until they are melted down and lose their form) they, as
good angels, are superior in dignity to Vertues, Powers, and Princi-
palities among the bad angels,' The order of the Angelic beings,
which the Middle Ages took from Pseudo-Dionysius, consisted of
nine Orders in three Hierarchies. The first and highest Hierarchy
included (beginning with the highest Order) Seraphim, Cherubim, and
Thrones ; the second. Dominions, Virtues, and Powers ; the third.
Principalities, Archangels, Angels. Thus the three Orders mentioned
by Donne are all in rank superior to mere Angels ; but the lowest
Order of Good Angels is superior to the highest Order of Evil Spirits,
although before their fall these belonged to the highest Orders.
Probably, however, there is a second and satiric reference in Donne's
words which explains his choice of Vertues, Powers, and Principalities.
In the other sense of the words Angels are coins, money ; and the
power of money surpasses that of earthly Vertues, Powers, and
Principalities. This may explain, further, why Donne singles out
' Vertues, Powers, and Principalities '. One would expect that, to
make the antithesis between good and bad angels as complete as
possible, he would have named the three highest orders. Seraphim,
Cherubim, and Thrones. But the three orders which he does mention
are the highest Orders which travel, as money does. The angels are
divided into Assistentes and Administrantes. To the former class
belong all the Orders of the first Hierarchy, and the Dominions of
the second. The Vertues are thus the highest Order of Adminis-
trantes. Aquinas, Sutnma, cxii. 3, 4. The Assistentes are those who
' only stand and wait '.

Page 99, 1. 100, rot thy moist braine : So Sylvester's Dii Bartas,
I. ii. 18 :

the Brain

Doth highest place of all our Frame retain.

And tempers with its moistful coldness so

Th'excessive heat of other parts below.

This was Aristotle's opinion {De Part. Anim. H. 7), refuted by
Galen, who, like Plato, made the brain the seat of the soul .xnd the
generator of the animal spirits. See H. p. 45.

Page 100, 11. 112, 114. Gold is Restorative . . . 'tis cordia//. ' Most
men say as much of gold, and some other minerals, as these have

8 o Commentary.

done of precious stones. Erastus still maintaineth the opposite part,
Disput. in Paracelsum, cap. 4, fol. 196, he confesseth of gold, that it
makes the heart merry, but in no other sense but as it is in a raiser's
chest :

at mihi plaudo

simulac nummos contemplor in arc^

as he said in the poet : it so revives the spirits, and is an excellent
receipt against melancholy,

for gold in phisik is a cordial.
Therefore he lovede gold in special.'

Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy^ Pt. 2, Sub. 4.

Elegie XII.

Page ioi, 1. 37. And mad'st us sigh and glow, 'sigh and blow'
has been the somewhat inelegant reading of all editions hitherto.

1. 42. And over all thy husbands towring eyes. The epithet
' towring ' is strange and the MSS. show some vacillation. Most of
them read ' towred ', probably the past participle of the same verb,
though Grosart alters to ' two red ' — not a very poetical description.
RP^i here diverges from H40 and reads ' loured ', perhaps for
' lurid ', but both these MSS. alter the order of the words and attach
the epithet to ' husbands ', which is manifestly wrong, and the Grolier
Club edition prints ' lowering ' without comment, regarding, I suppose,
' t ' as a mistake for ' 1 '.

The ' towring ' of i66g and TCD is probably correct, being a bold
metaphor from hawking, and having the force practically of ' threat-
ening '. The hawk towers threateningly above its prey before it
' sousing kills with a grace '. If ' towring ' is not right, ' lowring ' is
the most probable emendation.

Page 102, 1. 43. That flanCd with oylie sweat of jealousie. This
is the reading of all the MSS., and as on the whole their text is superior
I have followed it. If * oylie ' is, as I think, the right epithet, it
means * moist ', as in ' an oily palm ', v/ith perhaps a reference to the
inflammability of oil. If * ouglie ' (i.e. ugly) be preferred it is a forcible
transferred epithet.

I. 49. most respects ? This is the reading of all the MSS., and
' best ' in 166^ is probably an emendation. The use of ' most ' as an
adjective, superlative of ' great ', is not uncommon :

God's wrong is most of all.

Shakespeare, Mich. Ill, iv. iv. 377.

Though in this place most master wear no breeches.

Ibid., 2 Hen. VI, i. iii. 144.

1. 54. I can make no exact sense of this line either as it stands
in i66g or in the MSS. One is tempted to combine the versions
and read :

Yea thy pale colours, and thy panting heart,

The Elegies. 8 i

the ' secrets of our Art ' being all the signs by which they communi-
cated to one another their mutual affection. But it is necessary to
explain the presence of ' inwards ' or ' inward ' in both the versions.

Page 103, 1. 79. The Summer Junv it ripefied in the eare ; This fine
passage has been rather spoiled in all editions hitherto by printing in
this line 'yeare' for 'eare', even in modernized texts. The MSS.
and the sense both show that ' eare ' is the right word, and indeed
I have no doubt that 'year' in 16}^ was simply due to a compositor's
or copyist's pronunciation. It occurs again in the 1669 edition in
the song Twicknam Garden (p. 28, 1. 3) :

And at mine eyes, and at mine years,

These forms in ' y ' are common in SyWester's Du Bartas, e. g.
'yerst'. The O.E.D. gives the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries
as those in which ' yere ' was a recognized pronunciation of ' ear ', but
it is found sporadically later and has misled editors. Thus in Sir
George Etherege's letter to tbe Earl of Middleton from Ratisbon,
printed in Dryden's Works (Scott and Saintsbury), xi, pp. 38-40, some
lines run :

These formed the jewel erst did grace
The cap of the first Grave o' the race,
Preferred by Graffin Marian
To adorn the handle of her fan ;
And, as by old record appears,
Worn since in Kunigunda's years ;
Now sparkling in the Froein's hair,
No rocket breaking in the air
Can with her starry head compare.

In a modernized text, as this is, surely ' Kunigunda's years ' should be
' Kunigunda's ears '.

11. 93-4. That I may grow enamoured on your mind,
When my 07i>n thoughts I there reflected find.

' I there neglected find ' has been the reading of all editions
hitherto — a strange reason for being enamoured.

Page 104, 1. 96. My deeds shall still be what my words are now :
' words ' suits the context better than either the ' deeds ' of i6}^-6()
or ' thoughts ' of A2^.

Page 104. Elegie XIII.
Page 105, 11. 13-14. Liv'd Mantuan now againe,
That foemall Masiix, to limme 7vith his penne

Chambers, following the editions from i6)<) onwards, drops ihe
comma after ' Mastix ', which suggests that Julia is the 'foemall
Mastix ', not Mantuan. By Mantuan he understands Viruil, and
supposes there is a reference to the ' flam mis armataque Chimacra'
of y/r//. vi. 289. The Mantuan of the text is the 'Old Mantuan' of

11 917.3 Q

8 2 Commentary.

Love's Labour's Lost, iv. 2. 92. Donne calls Mantuan the scourge
of women because of his fourth eclogue De natura mulieruin. Norton
quotes from it :

Feniineum servile genus, crudele, superbum.
The O. E. D. quotes from S. Holland, Zara (1656): 'It would
have puzzell'd that Female Mastix Mantuan to have limn'd this she
Chymera' — obviously borrowed from this poem. The dictionary
gives examples of ' mastix ' in other compounds.

The reference to Mantuan as a woman-hater is a favourite one
with the prose-pamphleteers : ' To this might be added Mantiians
invective against them, but that pittie makes me refraine from
renewing his worne out complaints, the wounds whereof the former
forepast feminine sexe hath felt. I, but here the Homer of Women
hath forestalled an objection, saying that Mantuans house holding
of our Ladie, he was enforced by melancholie into such vehemencie
of speech ', &:c. Nash, The Anatomy of Absurdity (ed. McKerrow,
i. 12).

' Where I leave you to consider, Gentlemen, how far unmeete
women are to have such reproches laid upon them, as sundrye large
lipt fellows have done : who when they take a peece of work in hand,
and either for want of matter, or lack of wit, are half gravelled, then
they must fill up the page with slaundering of women, who scarsly
know what a woman is : but if I were able either by wit or arte to
be their defender, or had the law in my hand to dispose as I list,
which would be as unseemely, as an Asse to treade the measures :
yet, if it were so, I would corx^ci Mantuans Egloge, intituled Alphus :
or els if the Authour were alive, I would not doubt to persuade him
in recompence of his errour, to frame a new one,' &c. Greene,
Mamillia (ed. Grosart), 106-7. Greene is probably the '■ Bomer of
Women ' referred to in the first extract.

1. 19. Tenarus. In the Anatomy of the World 'Tenarif'is thus
spelt in the editions of 1633 to 1669, and Grosart declared that the
reference here is to that island. It is of course to ' Taenarus ' in
Laconia. There was in that headland a sulphurous cavern believed
to be a passage to Hades. Through it Orpheus descended to recover
Eurydice. Ovid, Met. x. 13; Paus. iii. 14, 25.

1. 28. self-accusing oaths : * oaths ' is the reading of the MSS.,
' loaths ' of the editions. The word ' loaths ' in the sense of ' dislike,
hatred, ill-will' is found as late as 1728 (O.E.D.), 'If your Horse
. . . grow to a loath of his meat.' Topsell {1607). A self-accusing
loath may mean a hatred, e. g. of good, which condemns yourself.
In the context, however, 'cavils, untroths,' I am inclined to think
that 'oaths' is right. Among the malevolent evils with which her
breast swarms are oaths accusing others of crimes, which accuse her-
self, either because she is willing to implicate herself so long as she
secures her enemy's ruin, or because the information is of a kind
that could be got only by complicity in crime.

The Elegies, 83

Page 105. Elegie XIV.

Page 106, 1. 6. I touch no fat soives grease. Probably ' I say nothing
libellous as to the way in which this or that rich man has acquired
his wealth '. I cannot find the proverb accurately explained, or given
in quite this form, in any collection.

1. 10. tvill redd or pale. The reading oi i66() and the two MSS.
is doubtless correct, ' looke ' being an editorial insertion as the use of
' red ' as a verb was growing rare. If ' looke ' had belonged to the
original text ' counsellor ' would probably have had the second syllable
elided. Compare :

Roses out-red their [i.e. women's] lips and cheeks,
Lillies their whiteness stain.

Brome, The Resolve.

1. 2 1 . the number of the Plaguy Bill : i. e. the weekly bill of deaths y
by the plague. By a Privy Council order of April 9, 1604, the ^
theatres were permitted to be open 'except ther shall happen
weeklie to die of the Plague above the number of thirtie'. The
number was later raised to forty. The theatres were repeatedly
closed for this reason between July 10, 1606, and 1610. In 1609
especially the fear of infection made it difficult for the companies,
driven from London, to gain permission to act anywhere. There
were no performances at Court during the winter 1609-10. Murray,
English Dramatic Companies.

1. 22. the Custome Farmers. The Privy Council registers abound
in references to the farmers of the (Customs and their conflicts with
the merchants. As they had to pay dearly for their farm, they were
tempted to press the law against the merchants in exacting dues.

1. 23. Of the Virginian plot. Two expeditions were sent to Vir-
ginia in 1609, in May under Sir Thomas Gates, Sir George Somers,
and Captain Newport, and at the end of the year under Lord de la
Warr, ' who by free election of the Treasurer and counsell of Virginia,
and with the full consent of the generality of that company was con-
stituted and authorized, during his natural life to be Lord Governor
and Captaine Generall of all the English CoUonies planted, or to be
planted in Virginia, according to the tenor of his Majesties letters
patents granted that yeare 1609.' Stow. Speculation in Virginia
stock was encouraged : ' Besides many noblemen, knights, gentlfemen,
merchants, and wealthy tradesmen, most of the incorporated trades
of London were induced to take shares in the stock.' Hildreth,
History of the United States, i. 108, quoted by Norton. •

The meaning of ' plot ' here is ' device, design, scheme '
(O.E.D.), as 'There have beene divers good plottes devised, and
wise counsells cast allready about reformation of that realme ' :
Spenser, State of Ireland. Donne uses the word also in the more
original sense of 'a piece of ground, a spot'. See p. 132, 1. 34.

G 2

84 Comme?itary,

1. 23-4. whether IVard ... the J{?i)laTtd Seas. I have taken
' Hand ' j6^j-J4 as intended for ' Inland ', perhaps written ' Iland ',
not for ' Island '. The edition of 1669 reads ' midland ', and there is
no doubt that the Mediterranean was the scene of the career and
exploits of the notorious Ward, whose head-quarters were at Tunis.
The Mediterranean is called the Inland sea in Holland's translation
of Pliny {///>/. o/the World, III. The Proetne) ; and Donne uses the
phrase (with a different application but one borrowed from this
meaning) in the Frogresse of the Souk, p. 308, 11. 27-8 :

as if his vast wombe were
Some Inland sea.

Previous editors read ' Island seas ' but do not explain the reference,
except Grosart, who declares that the ' Iland seas are those around the
West Indian and other islands. The Midland seas (as in i66g) were
probably the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Seas'. He cites no
authority ; nor have we proof that Ward was ever in these seas.
Writing to Salisbury on the 7th of March, 1607-8, Wotton says :
'The voice is here newly arrived that Warde hath taken another
Venetian vessel of good value, so as the hatred of him increaseth
among them and fully as fast as the fear of him. These are his
effects. Now to give your Lordship some taste of his language. One
Moore, captain of an English ship that tradeth this way . . was hailed
by him not long since a litde without the Gulf, and answering that he
was bound for Venice, "Tell those flat caps" (said he) "who have
been the occasion that I am banished out of my country that before
I have done with them I will make them sue for pardon." In this
style he speaketh.' Pearsall Smith, Life atid Letters of . . Wotton, ii.
415. Mr. Pearsall Smith adds in a note that Ward hoped to ' buy or
threaten the English Government into pardoning him ', and that some
attempt was also made by the Venetian Government to procure his
assassination.

If ' Island ' be the right reading the sea referred to must be the
Adriatic. The Islands of the Illyrian coast were at various times the
haunt of pirates. But I have found no instance of the phrase in this
sense.

1. 25. the Brittaine Burse. This was built by the Earl of Salisbury
on the site of an ' olde long stable ' in the Strand on the north side of
Durham House : ' And upon Tuesday the tenth of Aprill this yeere,
one thousand sixe hundred and nine, many of the upper shoppes were
richly furnished with wares, and the next day after that, the King,
Queene, and Prince, the Lady Elizabeth and the Duke of Yorke,
with many great Lords, and chiefe Ladies, came thither, and were
there entertained with pleasant speeches, giftes, and ingenious
devices, and then the king gave it a name, and called it Brittaines
Burse.' Stow, Chronicle, p. 894.

1.27, Of neiv built Algate, and the More field crosses. Aldgate, one

The Elegies, 85

of the four principal gates in the City wall, was taken down in 1606
and rebuilt by 1609 : Stow, Survey. Norton refers to Jonson's
Silent Woman, i. i : ' How long did the canvas hang afore Aldgate ?
Were the people suffered to see the city's Love and Charity while
they were rude stone, before they were painted and burnished ? '

' The More-field crosses ' are apparently the walks at Moor-field.
Speaking of the embellishment of London which ensued from the
long duration of peace. Stow says, ' And lastly, whereof there is a
more generall, and particular notice taken by all persons resorting and
residing in London, the new and pleasant walks on the north side of
the city, anciently called More fields, which field (untill the third
yeare of King James) was a most noysome and offensive place, being
a generall laystall, a rotten morish ground, whereof it tooke first the
name.' Stow, Chronicle, For the ditches which crossed the field
were substituted ' most faire and royall walkes '.

Page 107, 1. 4r. The ' {quoth Heey of the 1669 edition isobviously
correct. ' Hee ' is required both by rhyme and reason. Mr. Chambers
has ingeniously put ' " True " quoth I ' into a parenthesis, as a remark
interjected by the poet. But apart from the rhyme the ' quoth Hee '
is needed to explain the transition to direct speech. Without it the
long speech of the citizen begins very awkwardly.

11. 42-44. These lines seem to echo the Royal Proclamation
of 1609, though the reference is different: *in this speciall Procla-
mation his Majestie declared how grievously, the people of this
latter age and times are fallen into verball profession, as well of
religion, as of all commendable morall vertues, but wanting the actions
and deeds of so specious a professiori, and the insatiable and
immeasurable itching boldnesse of the spirits, tongues and pens of
most men.' Stow, Chronicle.

\. 46. Bawd, Taverti-keeper, Whore and Scrivener; The singular
number of the MS. gives as good a sense as the plural and a better
rhyme.

1. 47. The much of Frivileg'd kingsmen, and the store
Of fresh protections, ar'c.

' We have many bankrupts daily, and as many protections, which
doth marvellously hinder all manner of commerce.' Chamberlain to
Carleton, Dec. 31, 1612. By 'kingsmen' I understand noblemen
holding monopolies from the King. I do not understand the
'kinsmen' of the editions. By 'protections' is meant 'exemptions
from suits in law ', especially suits for debt. The London tradesmen
were much cheated by the protections granted to the servants and
followers of members of Parliament.

1. 65. found nothing but a Rope. I cannot identify this Rope.
In the Aulularia of Plautus, when Euclio finds his treasure gone he
laments in the usual manner. At 1. 721 he says, ' Heu me miserum,
misere perii, male perditu', pesstime ornatus eo.^ The last words may
have been taken as meaning ' I have the rope round my neck '.

8 6 Comme?2tary.

Page io8. Elegie XV.

I. 1 2. Following JiPp and also Jonson's Undertvoods I have taken
' at once ' as going with ' Both hot and cold ', not with ' make life, and
death ' as in i6)y6g. This is one of the poems which i6}) derived
from some other source than Z>, H4^, Lee.

II. 1 6- 1 8 {all sweeter . . . the rest) Chambers has overlooked
altogether the iSjj reading ' sweeter '. He prints ' sweeten'd ' from
j6jj-6p. It is clear from the MSS. that this is an editor's amendment
due to Donne's ' all sweeter ' suggesting, perhaps intentionally, ' all
the sweeter '. By dropping the bracket Chambers has left at least
ambiguous the construction of 17-18: And the divine impression of
stolne kisses That sealed the rest. Does this, as in /6jj, belong to the
parenthesis, or is ' the divine impression ' to be taken with ' so many
accents sweet, so many sighes ' and * so many oathes and teares ' as
part subject to ' should now prove empty blisses '. I prefer the 16}^
arrangement, which has the support of the MSS., though the punctu-
ation of these is apt to be careless. The accents, sighs, oaths, and tears
were all made sweeter by having been stolen with fear and trembling.
This is how the Grolier Club editor takes it ; Grosart and Chambers
prefer to follow i6^j-6g.

Page 109, 1. 34. I do not know whence Chambers derived his
reading * drift ' for ' trust ' — perhaps from an imperfect copy of 16)).
He attributes it to all the editions prior to 1669. This is an
oversight.

Page iio, 11. 59 f. / could renew, dr'e. Compare Ovid, Amores,
III. ii. 1-7.

Non ego nobilium sedeo studiosus equorum ;

Cui tamen ipsa faves, vincat ut ille precor.
Ut loquerer tecum veni tecumque sederemj

Ne tibi non notus, quem facis, esset amor.
Tu cursum spectas, ego te ; spectemus uterque

Quod iuvat, atque oculos pascat uterque suos.
O, cuicumque faves, felix agitator equorum !

Page hi. Elegie XVI.
A careful study of the textual notes to this poem will show that
there is a considerable difference between the text of this poem as
given for the first time in i6jj, and that of the majority of the MSS.
It is very difficult, however, to decide between them as the differences
are not generally such as to suggest that one reading is necessarily
right, the other wrong. The chief variants are these : 7 'parents' and
'fathers'. Here I fancy the 'parents' of the MSS. is right, and that
' fathers ' in the editions and in a late MS. like O'F is due to the identi-
fication of Donne's mistress with his wife. Only the father of Anne More
was alive at the time of their first acquaintance. It is not at all certain,
however, that this poem is addressed to Anne More, and in any case

The Elegies. 87

Donne would probably have disguised the details. The change of
'parents' to 'fathers 'is more likely than the opposite. In 1. 12 'wayes'
(edd.) and ' meanes ' (MSS.) are practically indistinguishable ; nor
is there much to choose between the two versions of 1. 18 : ' My soule
from other lands to thee shall soare ' (edd.) and ' From other lands
my soule towards thee shall soare ' (MSS.). In each case the version of
the editions is slightly the better. In 1. 28, on the other hand, I have
adopted ' mindes ' without hesitation although here the MSS. vary.
There is no question of changing the mind, but there is of changing
the mind's habit, of adopting a boy's cast of thought and manner :
as Rosalind says,

and in my heart

Lie there what hidden woman's fear there will.

We'll have a swashing and a martial outside,

As many other mannish cowards have

That do outface it with their semblances.

As You Like It, i. iii. 1 14-18.

In 1. 35 the reading 'Lives fuellers', i.e. 'Life's fuellers', which
is found in such early and good MSS. as D, H4<), Lee and W, is
very remarkable. If I were convinced that it is correct I should
regard it as decisive and prefer the MS. readings throughout. But
' Loves fuellers ', though also a strange phrase, seems more easy of
interpretation, and applicable.

In 1. 37 there can, I think, be no doubt that the original reading is
preserved by A18, N, S, TCD, and W.

Will quickly knowe thee, and knowe thee, and, alas !

The sudden, brutal change in the sense of the word 'knowe' is
quite in Donne's manner. The reasons for omitting or softening it
are obvious, and may excuse my not restoring it. The whole of these
central lines reveal that strange bad taste, some radical want of
delicacy, which mars not only Donne's poems and lighter prose but
even at times the sermons. In 1. 49 the reading of the MSS. A18,
Ny TC ; D, H4<), Lee, and ^is also probably original:

Nor praise, nor dispraise me ; Blesse nor curse.

It is not uncommon in Donne's poetry to find a syllable dropped
with the effect of increasing the stress on a rhetorically emphatic word,
here ' Blesse '. An editor would be sure to supply ' nor '.

Lamb has quoted from this Elegy in his note to Beaumont and
Fletcher's Philaster {^Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, 1 808). It is
clear that he used a copy of the 1669 edition, for he reads 35 ' Lives
fuellers ', and also 42 ' Aydroptique ' for ' Hydroptique '. Both these
mistakes were corrected in 77/9. Donne speaks in his sermons of
' fuelling and advancing his tentations '. Sermons 80. 10. 99.

Page 112, 1. 44. England is onely a worthy Gallerie : i. e. entrance
hall or corridor : ' Here then is the use of our hope before death, that

8 8 Commentary.

this life shall be a gallery into a better roome and deliver us over to a
better Country : for, if in this life 07ily,' &c. Sermons 50. 30. 270. 'He
made but one world ; for, this, and the next, are not two Worlds ,' . . .
They are not tivo Houses ; This is the Gallery, and that the Bed-
chamber of one, and the same Palace, which shall feel no ruine.'
Sermons 50. 43. 399.

In connexion with the general theme of this poem it may be noted
that in 1605 Sir Robert Dudley, the illegitimate son of the Earl of
Leicester, who like Donne served in the Cadiz and Islands expeditions,
left England accompanied by the beautiful Elizabeth Southwell dis-
guised as a page. At this period the most fantastic poetry was never
more fantastic than life itself.

Page 113. Elegie XVII.

1. 12. wide andfarr. The MSS. here correct an obvious error of
the editions.

Page 114, 1. 24. This line is found only in Aw, which omits the
next eleven lines. It may belong to a shorter version of the poem, but
it fits quite well into the context.

Page 115, 1. 58. daring eyes. The epithet looks as though it had
been repeated from the line above, and perhaps ' darling ' or ' darting '
may have been the original reading. However, both the MSS. agree
with the editions, and the word is probably used in two distinct senses,
•bold, adventurous' with 'armes' and 'dazzling' with 'eyes'. Compare:

O now no more
Shall his perfections, like the sunbeams, dare
The purblind world ; in heaven those glories are.
Campion, Elegie upon the Untimely Death of Prince Henry.

Let his Grace go forward
And dare us with his cap like larks.

Shakespeare, Henry VIII, iii. ii. 282.

This refers to the custom of ' daring ' or dazzling larks with a mirror.

Page 116. Elegie XVIII.

Page 117, 11. 31-2. Men to such Gods, or^c. Donne has in view
here the different kinds of sacrifice described by Porphyry :

How to devote things living in due form
My verse shall tell, thou in thy tablets write.
For gods of earth and gods of heaven each three ]
For heavenly pure white ; for gods of earth
Cattle of kindred hue divide in three.

And on the altar lay thy sacrifice.

For gods infernal bury deep, and cast

The blood into a trench. For gentle Nymphs

Honey and gifts of Dionysus pour.

Eusebius : Praeparatio Evangelica, iv. 9
(trans. E. H. Gifford, 1903).

The Elegies. 89

1. 47. The Nose {like to the Jirst Meridia?i) ' In the state of nature
we consider the light, as the sunne, to be risen at the Moluccae,
in the farthest East ; In the state of the law we consider it as
the sunne come to Ormus, the first Quadrant ; but in the Gospel to
be come to the Canaries, the fortunate Hands, the first Meridian.
Now whatsoever is beyond this, is Westward, towards a DecUnation.'
Sermons 80, 68. 688.

' Longitude is length, and in the heavens it is understood the distance
of any starre or Planet, from the begining of Aries to the place of
the said Planet or Starre . . . Otherwise, longitude in the earth, is the
distance of the Meridian of any place, from the Meridian which passeth
over the Isles of Azores, where the beginning of longitude is said to
be.' The Sea-mans Kalender, 1632. But ancient Cosmographers
placed the first meridian at the Canaries. See note to p. 187, 1. 2.

Page 118, 1. 52. Notfaynte Canaries but Ambrosia II. The 'Canary'
of several MSS. is probably right — an adjective, like ' Ambrosiall '.
By ' faynte ' is meant 'faintly odorous' as opposed to 'Ambrosial', i.e.
'divinely fragrant; perfumed as with Ambrosia' (O.E.D.). 'Fruit
that ambrosial smell diffus'd ' : Milton, Par. Lost, ix. 852. The text
gives an earlier use of both these words in this meaning than any
indicated by the O.E.D. William Morris uses the same adjective in
a somewhat ambiguous way but meaning, I suppose, ' weak, ready
to die ' :

Where still mid thoughts of August's quivering gold
Folk hoed the wheat, and clipped the vine in trust
Of faint October's purple-foaming must.

Earthly Paradise, Atalanta's Race.

Page 119. Elegie XIX.

Page 120, 1. 17. then safely tread. The ' safely 'of so many MSS.,
including W, seems to me a more likely reading than * softly '.
The latter was probably suggested by the ' soft ' of the following line.
The ' safely ' means of course that even without her shoes she will
not be hurt.

1. 22. /// spirits. It is not easy to decide between the ' 111 ' of
1669 and some MSS. and the ' AH' of some other MSS. Besides those
enumerated, two lesser MSS., viz. the Sloane MSS. 542 and 1792,
read ' all '.

In Elegie IV, 1, 68, ' all ' is written for ' ill ' in ^. ,

Page 121, 1. 30. Ifotv blest am I in this discovering thee ! The
'this' of almost all the MSS. is supported by the change of 'dis-
covering ' into ' discovery ' of B, CF, one way of evading the rather
unusual construction, 'this' with a verbal noun followed by an object.
The alteration of ' this ' to ' thus ' in i66g is another. But the con-
struction, though bold, is not inexcusable, and Donne wishes to lay the
stress not on the manner of the discovery, but on the discovery itself,
comparing it (in a very characteristic manner) to the discovery of

90 Commentary,

America. This figure alone is sufficient to establish Donne's author-
ship, for he is peculiarly fond of these allusions to voyages, using them
again and again in his sermons. For the use of 'this' with the gerund
compare : 'Sir, — I humbly thank you for this continuing me in your
memory, and enlarging me so far, as to the memory of my Sovereign,
and (I hope) my Master.' Letters, p. 306.

I. 32. Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be. Chambers
reads ' my soul ' — I do not know from what source. The metaphor
is from signing and sealing.

II. 35-8. Gems which you wo?nen use, ^^c. I have adopted several
emendations from the MSS. In the edition of 1669 the lines are
printed thus :

Jems which you women use
Are like Atlantas ball : cast in men's views,
That when a fools eye lighteth on a Jem
His earthly soul may court that, not them :

I have adopted ' balls ' from several MSS. as agreeing with the story
and with the plural ' Gems '. I have taken ' are ' with ' cast in mens
views ', regarding ' like Atlantas balls ' as parenthetic. Both the metre
and the sense of 1. 38 are improved by reading ' covet ' for ' court ',
though the latter has considerable support. The two words are easily
confused in writing. I have adopted ' theirs ' too in preference to
' that ' because it is more in Donne's manner as well as strongly sup-
ported. ' A man who loves dress and ornaments on a woman loves
not her but what belongs to her ; what is accessory, not what is
essential.' Compare :

For he who colour loves, and skm,
Loves but their oldest clothes.

The antithesis ' theirs not them ' is much more pointed than ' that
not them '.

1. 46. There is no pe?inance due to imiocence. I suspect that the
original cast of this line was that pointed to by the MSS.,

Here is no penance, much less innocence :

Penance and innocence alike are clothed in white. The version in
the text is a softening of the original to make it compatible with the
suggestion that the poem could be read as an epithalamium. ' Why ',
says a note in the margin of the Bridgewater MS., * may not a man
write his own epithalamium if he can do it so modestly ? '

Page 122. Elegie XX.

Though not printed till 1802 there can be no doubt that this poem
is by Donne. The MS. which Waldron used is the Dyce fellow of
JC. Compare Ovid, Amor. i. 9 : ' Militat omnis amans, et habet sua
castra Cupido.'

The Elegies, 91

Page 124. Heroicall Epistle. Sapho to Philaenis.

I have transferred this poem hither from its place in i6)^-6<)
among the sober Letters to Severall Personages. It has obviously
a closer relation to the Elegies, and must have been composed
about the same time. Its genus is the Heroical Epistle modelled on
Ovid, of which Drayton produced the most popular English imitations
in 1597. Donne's was possibly evoked by these and written in
1597-8, but there is no means of dating it exactly. ' Passionating '
and ' conceited ' eloquence is the quality of these poems modelled on
Ovid, and whatever one may think of the poem on moral grounds it
is impossible to deny that Donne has caught the tone of the kind,
and written a poem passionate and eloquent in its own not altogether
admirable way. The reader is more than once reminded of Mr.
Swinburne's far less conceited but more diffuse Anadoria.

\. 22. As Down, as Stars, &'c. 'Down' is probably correct, but
the * Dowves ' (i.e. doves) of Ogives the plural as in the other nouns,
and a closer parallel in poetic vividness. We get a series of pictures
— doves, stars, cedars, lilies. The meaning conveyed would be the
same :

this hand
As soft as doves-downe, and as white as it.

Wint. Tale, iv. iv. 374.

But of course swan's down is also celebrated :

Heaven with sweet repose doth crowne
Each vertue softer than the swan's fam'd downe.

Habington, Castara.

Page 125, 1. 33. Modern editors separate ' thorny' and 'hairy' by
a comma. They should rather be connected by a hyphen as in TCD.

1. 40. And are, as theeves traced, which rob when it snows. This
is doubtless the source of Dryden's figurative description of Jonson's
thefts from the Ancients : * You track him everywhere in their snow.'
Essay of Dramatic Poesy.

EPITHALAMIONS.

Page 127. The dates of the two chief Marriage Songs are : the
Princess Elizabeth, Feb. 14, 1613; the Earl of Somerset, Dec. 26, 1613.
The third is an earlier piece of work, dating from the years when
Donne was a student at Lincoln's Inn. It is found in W, following
the Satyres and Elegies and preceding the Letters, being probably
the only one written when the collection in the first part of that
MS. was made.

While quite himself in his treatment of the theme of this kind of
poem, Donne comes in it nearer to Spenser than in any other

92 Co7n men tar y .

kind. In glow and colour nothing he has written surpasses the
Somerset Epithalamion :

First her eyes kindle other Ladies eyes,

Then from their beams their jewels lusters rise,

And from their jewels torches do take fire,
And all is warmth and light and good desire.

An Epithalainion^ or Marriage Song, ^'c. ' In February following,
the Prince Palatine and that lovely Princess, the Lady Elizabeth,
were married on Bishop Valentine's Day, in all the Pomp and Glory
that so much grandeur could express. Her vestments were white,
the Emblem of Innocency ; her Hair dishevel'd hanging down her
Back at length, an Ornament of Virginity ; a Crown of pure Gold
upon her Head, the Cognizance of Majesty, being all over beset with
precious Gems, shining like a Constellation ; her Train supported by
Twelve young Ladies in White Garments, so adorned with Jewels,
that her passage looked like a Milky-way. She was led to Church by
her Brother Prince Charles, and the Earl of Northampton ; the
young Batchelor on the Right Hand, and the old on the left.'
Camden, Afmales.

A full description of the festivities will be found in Nichol's
Progresses of King /ames, in Stow's Chrofiicle, and other works. In
a letter to Mrs. Carleton, Chamberlain gives an account of what he
saw : ' It were long and tedious to tell you all the particulars of the
excessive bravery, both of men and women, but you may conceive
the rest by one or two. The Lady Wotton had a gown that cost
fifty pounds a yard the embroidery . . . The Viscount Rochester, the
Lord Hay, and the Lord Dingwall were exceeding rich and costly ;
but above all, they speak of the Earl of Dorset, But this extreme
cost and riches makes us all poor.' Court and Times of James I, i. 226.
The princess had been educated by Lord and Lady Harington, the
parents of Donne's patroness, the Countess of Bedford. They
accompanied her to Heidelberg, but Lord Harington died on his
way home, Lady Harington shortly after her return. Donne had
thus links with the Princess, and these were renewed and strengthened
later when with Lord Doncaster he visited Heidelberg in 16 19, and
preached before her and her husband. He sent her his first printed
sermon and his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, d^^c. (1624), and
to the latter she, then in exile and trouble, replied in a courteous strain.

Page 128. Compare with the opening stanzas Chaucer's Parlia-
ment of Foules and Skeat's note {Works of Chaucer, i. 516). Birds
were supposed to choose their mates on St. Valentine's Day (Feb. 14).

1. 42. this, thy Valentine. This is the reading of all the editions
except i66() and of all the MSS. except two of no indepen-
dent value. I think it is better than ' this day, Valentine ', which
Chambers adopts from i6(x). The bride is addressed throughout the

Ep it ha la m ions . 9 3

stanza, and it would be a very abrupt change to refer ' thou ' in 1. 41
to Valentine. I take ' this, thy Valentine ' to mean ' this which is
thy day, J>ar excellence \ ' thy Saint Valentine's day ', ' the day which
saw you paired '. But ' a Valentine ' is a ' true-love ' : * to be your Valen-
tine ' {Hamlet, iv. v. 50), and the reference may be to Frederick, —
Frederick's Day is to become an era.

11. 43-50. The punctuation of these lines requires attention. That
of the editions, which Chambers follows, arranges them thus :

Come forth, come forth, and as one glorious flame
Meeting Another growes the same,
So meet thy Fredericke, and so
To an unseparable union goe,

Since separation
Falls not on such things as are infinite,
Nor things which are but one, can disunite.
You'are twice inseparable, great, and one.

In this it will be seen that the clause ' Since separation . . . can
disunite ' is attached to the previous verb. It gives the reason why
they should ' go to an unseparable union '. In that which I have
adopted, which is that of several good MSS., the clause ' Since separ-
ation . . . can disunite ' goes with what follows, explains ' You are
twice inseparable, great, and one.' This is obviously right. My
attention was first called to this emendation by the punctuation of the
Grolier Club editor, who changes the comma after 'goe' (1. 46) to
a semicolon.

1. 46. To an unseparable union groove. I have adopted 'growe'
from the MSS. in place of ' goe ' from the editions. The former are
unanimous with the strange exception of Lee. This MS., which in
several respects seems to be most like that from which 16}} was
printed, varies here from its fellows D and H4g, probably for the same
reason that the editor of 16)} did, because he did not quite under-
stand the phrase ' growe to ' as used here, and ' goe ' follows later. But
it is unlikely that * goe ' would have been changed to ' growe ', and

To an unseparable union growe

is, I think, preferable, because (i) both the words used in 1. 44 are
thus echoed.

Meeting Another, growes the same.
So meet thy Fredericke, and so
To an unseparable union growe.

(2) 'To an unseparable union growe ', meaning 'Become inseparably
incorporated with one another ', is a slightly violent but not unnatural
application of the phrase ' grow to ' so common in Elizabethan
English :

' I grow to you, and our parting is a tortured body.' AlFs Well that
Ends Well, 11. i. 36,

94 Commentary,

First let our eyes be rivited quite through
Our turning brains, and both our lips grow to.

Donne, Elegie XII, 5 7 -"8.

1. 56. The 'or 'of the MSS. must, I think, be right. *0 Bishop
Valentine ' does not make good sense. Chambers's ingenious emenda-
tion of i66g, by which he connects ' of Bishop Valentine ' with
'one way left', lacks support. Bishop Valentine has paired them ;
the Bishop in church has united them ; the consummation is their
own act.

Page 131. Ecclogue. 16 13. December 26, &c.

It is unnecessary to detail all the ugly history of this notorious
marriage. See Gardiner, History of England, ii. 16 and 20. Frances
Howard, daughter of Thomas Howard, the first Earl of Suffolk, was
married in 1606 to the youthful Earl of Essex, the later Parliamentary
general. In 161 3, after a prolonged suit she was granted a divorce,
or a decree of nullity, and was at once married to King James's ruling
favourite, Robert Carr, created Viscount Rochester in 161 1, and Earl of
Somerset in 161 3. Donne, like every one else, had sought assiduously
to win the favour of the all-powerful favourite. Mr. Gosse was in
error in attributing to him a report on 'the proceedings in the nullity
of the marriage of Essex and Lady Frances Howard ' (Harl. MS. 39,
f. 4 1 6), which was the work of his namesake. Sir Daniell Dunn. None
the less, Donne's own letters show that he was quite willing to lend a
hand in promoting the divorce ; and that before the decree was granted
he was already busy polishing his epithalamium. One of these letters
is addressed to Sir Robert Ker, afterwards Earl of Ancrum, a friend of
Donne's and a protege of Somerset's. It seems to me probable that
Sir Robert Ker is the ' AUophanes ' of the Induction. Donne is of
course ' Idios ', the private man, who holds no place at Court. ' AUo-
phanes ' is one who seems like another, who bears the same name as
another, i.e. the bridegroom. The name of both Sir Robert and the
Earl of Somerset was Robert Ker or Carr.

Page 132, 1. 34. in darke plotts. Here the reading of 16)^,
' plotts,' has the support of all the MSS., and the ' places ' of
i6j^, to which i66g returns, is probably an emendation accidental or
intentional of the editor or printer. It disturbs the metre. The
word ' plot ' of a piece of ground was, and is, not infrequent, and here
its meaning is only a little extended. In the Progresse of the Souk,
1. 129, Donne speaks of ' a darke and foggie plot'.

fire without light. Compare : ' Fool, saies Christ, this night they
will fetch away thy soul ; but he neither tells him, who they be that
shall fetch it, nor whither they shall carry it ; he hath no light but
lightnings ; a sodain flash of horror first, and then he goes into fire
without light.' Sermons 26. 19. 273. 'This dark fire, which was not
prepared for us.' Ibid.

Epithalamions, 9 5

1. 57. In the East-Indian fleet. The MSS. here give us back
a word which /<5y had dropped, the other editions following
suit. It was the East-Indian fleet which brought spices, the West-
Indian brought 'plate ', i.e. gold or (more properly) silver, to which
there is no reference here.

1. 58. or Amber in thy taste? ' Amber' is here of course * Amber-
gris ', which was much used in old cookery, in which considerable
importance was attached to scent as well as flavour. Compare :

beasts of chase, or foul of game.
In pastry built, or from the spit, or boil'd,
Gris-amber steam'd ;

Milton, Paradise Regained, ii. 344.
and

Be sure
The wines be lusty, high, and full of spirit,
And amber'd all.

Beaumont and Fletcher, The Custom of the Country, iii. 2.

This was the original meaning of the word * amber ', which was ex-
tended to the yellow fossil resin through some mistaken identifica-
tion of the two substances. Mr. Gosse has called my attention to
some passages which seem to indicate that the other amber was also
eaten. Tallemant des Reaux says of the Marquise de Rambouillet,
' EUe bransle un peu la teste, et cela lui vient d'avoir trop mang^
d'ambre autrefois.' This may be ambergris ; but Olivier de Serres, m
his Theatre d' Agriadture (1600), speaks of persons who had formed
a taste for drinking ' de I'ambre jaune subtilement pulvdrisd '.

Page 134, 11. 85-6. Thou hast no such ; yet here was this, and more.

An earnest lover, wise then, and before.

This is the reading of /6jj and gives, I think, Donne's meaning.
Missing this, later editions placed a full stop after ' more ', so that each
line concludes a sentence. Mr. Chambers emends by changing the
full stop after ' before ' into a comma, and reading :

Thou hast no such ; yet here was this and more.
An earnest lover, wise then, and before.
Our little Cupid hath sued livery.

This looks ingenious, but I confess I do not know what it means.
When was Cupid wise ? When had he been so before ? And
with what special propriety is Cupid here called ' an earnest lover ' ?
What Donne says is : ' Here was all this, — a court such as I have
described, and more — an earnest lover (viz. the Earl of Somerset),
wise in love (when most men are foolish), and wise before, as is
approved by the King's confidence. In being admitted to that breast
Cupid has ceased to be a child, has attained his majority, and the
right to administer his own affairs.' Compare : ' / love them that love
me, c^c. . . . The Person that professes love in this place is Wisdom

96 Commentary,

herself ... so that sapere ct amare, to be wise and to love, which
perchance never met before nor since, are met in this text.' Sermons
26. 18, Dec. 14, 1617.

Then, sweetest Silvia, let's no longer stay ;
True love we know, precipitates delay.
Away with doubts, all scruples hence remove ;
No man at one time can be wise and love.

Herrick, To Si/via to Wed.

Page 135. I have inserted the title Epitkalamiofi after the Ecciogue
from Z>, H4g, Lee, O'F, S^6, as otherwise the latter title is extended
to the whole poem. This poem is headed in two different ways in
the MSS. In AiS, N, TC, the title at the beginning is : Eclogue
Inducing an Epithalamioti at the marriage of the E. of S. The proper
titles of the two parts are thus given at once, and no second title is
needed later. In the other MSS. the title at the beginning is Eclogue.
161). Decemb. 26. Later follows the title Epithalamion. As 16)]
follows this fashion at the beginning, it should have done so
throughout.

Page 136, 1. 126. Sifice both have both tKenflaming eyes. This is the
reading of all the MSS. and it explains the fact that ' th'enflaming ' is
so printed in 16)^. Without the 'both ' this destroys the metre and,
accordingly, the later editions read * the enflaming '. It was natural
to bring * eye ' into the singular and make ' th'enflaming eye ' balance
' the loving heart '. Moreover ' both th'enflaming eyes ' may have
puzzled a printer. It is a Donnean device for emphasis. He has
spoken of her flaming eyes, and now that he identifies the lovers, that
identity must be complete. Both the eyes of both are lit with the
same flame, both their hearts kindled at the same fire. Compare
later : 225. ' One fire of foure inflaming eyes,' &c.

1. 129. Yet let A2}, OF. The first of these MSS. is an early
copy of the poem. ' Yet ' improves both the sense and the metre.
It would be easily dropped from its likeness to ' let ' suggesting a
duplication of that word.

Page 137, 1. 150. Who can the Sun in tvatersee. The Grolier Club
edition alters the full stop here to a semicolon ; and Chambers quotes
the reading of A18, N, TC, 'winter' for 'water', as worth noting.
Both the change and the suggestion imply some misapprehension of
the reference of these lines, which is to the preceding verse :

For our ease, give thine eyes th'unusual part
Of joy, a Teare.

The opening of a stanza with two lines which in thought belong
to the previous one is not unprecedented in Donne's poems. Com-
pare the sixth stanza of ^4 Valediction : of my name in the windo'iv, and
note.

Dryden has borrowed this image — like many another of Donne's :

Epithaiamions, 9 7

Muse down again precipitate thy flight ;

I""or how can mortal eyes sustain immortal light ?

But as the sun in water we can bear,

Yet not the sun, but his reflection there,

So let us view her here in what she was,

And take her image in this watery glass.

Eleofiora, 11, 134—9.

I. 156. as their spheares are. The crystalline sphere in which
each planet is fixed.

Page 138, 11. 1 71-81. The Benediction. The accurate punctuation
of Donne's poetry is not an easy matter. In the 1633 edition the last
five lines of this stanza have no stronger stop than a comma. This
may be quite right, but it leaves ambiguous what is the exact force and
what the connexion of the line —

Nature and grace doe all, and nothing Art.

The editions of 1635-69, by placing a full stop after 'give' (1. 178),
connect ' Nature and grace ' with what follows, and Chambers and
the Grolier Club editor have accepted this, though they place a semi-
colon after ' Art '. It seems to me that the line must go with what pre-
cedes. The force of ' may ' is carried on to ' doe all ' :

may here, to the worlds end, live
Heires from this King, to take thanks, you, to give.
Nature and grace doe all and nothing Art.

' May there always be heirs of James to receive thanks, of you two to
give ; and may this mutual relation owe everything to nature and
grace, the goodness of your descendants, the grace of the king, nothing
to art, to policy and flattery.' That is the only meaning I can give to
the line. The only change in 16)} is that of a comma to a full stop,
a big change in value, a small one typographically;

Page 139, 1. 200. they doe not set so too ; I have changed the full
stop after ' too ' to a semicolon, as the ' Therefore thou maist ' which
follows is an immediate inference from these two lines. ' You rose at
the same hour this morning, but you (the bride) must go first to bed.'

II. 204-5. -^^ ^^ ^^'^^ ^^^^■> ^^- ' I have sometimes wondered in
the reading what was become of those glaring colours which amazed
me in Bussy D'Ambois upon the theatre ; but when I had taken up
what I supposed a fallen star, I found I had been cozened with a
jelly ; nothing but a cold, dull mass, which glittered no longer than
it was a-shooting.' Dryden, The Spanish Friar. In another place
Dryden uses the figure in a more poetic or at least ambitious fashion :

The tapers of the gods.
The sun and moon, run down like waxen globes ;
The shooting stars end all in purple jellies,
And chaos is at hand. Oedipus, 11. i.

The idea was a common one, but I have no doubt that Dryden

II 917.3 H

9 8 Commentary,

owed his use of it as an image to Donne. There is no poet from
whom he pilfers ' wit ' more freely.

Page 140, 11. 215-16. Now^asin 7?////aj/(?/;/(^^, i.e. Cicero'sdaughter.
' According to a ridiculous story, which some of the moderns report, in
the age of Pope Paul III a monument was discovered on the Appian
road with the superscription Tulliolae filiae meae ; the body of a
woman was found in it, which was reduced to ashes as soon as touched ;
there was also a lamp burning, which was extinguished as soon as the air
gained admission there, and which was supposed to have been lighted
above 1500 years.' Lempriere. See Browne, Vulgar Errors, \\\. 21.

Page 141, 1. 17. Help with your presence and devise to praise.
I have dropped the comma after ' presence ' because it suggests to us,
though it did not necessarily do so to seventeenth-century readers, that
' devise ' here is a verb — both Dr. Grosart and Mr. Chambers have
taken it as such — whereas it is the noun ' device ' = fancy, invention.
Their fancy and invention is to be shown in the attiring of the bride :

Conceitedly dresse her, and be assign'd
By you, fit place for every flower and Jewell,

Make her for love fit fewell

As gay as Flora, and as rich as Inde.

' Devise to praise ' would be a very awkward construction.

Page 142, 1. 26. Sonns of these Senators wealths deep oceajis.
The corruption of the text here has arisen in the first place from the
readily explicable confusion of ' sonnes ' or ' sonns ' as written and
' Sonne ', the final ' s ' being the merest flourish and repeatedly over-
looked in copying and printing, while ' sonne '. easily becomes ' some ',
and secondly from a misapprehension of Donne's characteristic pun.
The punctuation of the 1633 edition is supported by almost every MS.

The ' frolique Patricians ' are of course not the sons of ' these
Senators ' by birth. ' I speak not this to yourselves, you Senators
of London,' says Donne in the Sermon Preached at Pauls Cross . . .
26 Mart. i6j6, * but as God hath blessed you in your ways, and in
your callings, so put your children into ways and courses too, in
which God may bless them. . . . The Fathers' former labours shall
not excuse their Sons future idleness.' The sons of wealthy citizens
might grow idle and extravagant ; they could not be styled ' Pat-
ricians '. It is not of them that Donne is thinking, but of the young
noblemen who are accompanying their friend on his wedding-day.
They are, or are willing to be, the sons, by marriage not by blood,
of ' these Senators ', or rather of their money-bags. In a word, they
marry their daughters for money, as the hero of the Epithalamion is
doing. It is fortunate for the Senators if the young courtiers do not
find in their wives as well as their daughters, like Fastidious Brisk in
Jonson's comedy, ' Golden Mines and furnish'd Treasurie.' But they
are ' Sunnes ' as well as ' Sonnes ' — suns which drink up the deep
oceans of these Senators' wealth :

Rpithalamions. 9 9

it rain'd more
Then if the Sunne had drunk the sea before. Siorme, 43-4.

Hence the metaphor ' deep oceans ', and hence the appropriateness
of the predicate ' Here shine '. This pun on ' sunne ' and ' sonne ' is
a favourite with Donne :

Mad paper stay, and grudge not here to burne
With all those sonnes [sunnes B, Sg6\ whom my braine did create.

To Mrs. M. H. H., p. 216.

I am thy sonne, made with thyself to shine.

Holy Sontteis, II. 5.

Sweare by thyself, that at my death thy sonne
Shall shine as hee shines now, and heretofore.

A Hymn to God the Father.

' This day both Gods Sons arose : The Sun of his Firmament, and
the Son of his bosome.' Sermons 80. 26. 255. 'And when thy Sun,
thy soule comes to set in thy death-bed, the Son of Grace shall suck
it up into glory.' Ibid. 80. 45. 450.

Correctly read the line has a satiric quality which Donne's lines
rarely want, and in which this stanza abounds. I have chosen the
spelling ' Sonns ' as that which is most commonly used in the MSS.
for ' sonnes ' and ' sunnes '.

Page 143, 1. 57. His steeds nill be restrained. I had adopted
the reading 'nill' for 'will' conjecturally before I found it in W.
There can be no doubt it is right. As printed, the two clauses
(57-8) simply contradict each other. The use of 'nill' for 'will'
was one of Spenser's Chaucerisms, and Donne comes closer to Spenser
in the Epithalamia than anywhere else. Sylvester uses it in his trans-
lation of Du Bartas :

For I nill stiffly argue to and fro
In nice opinions, whether so or so.

And it occurs in Davison's Poetical Rhapsody :

And therefore nill I boast of war.

In Shakespeare, setting aside the phrase 'nill he, will he', we
have :

in scorn or friendship, nill I construe whether.

11. 81-2. Till now thou wast but able
To be what now thou art ;

She has realized her potentiality ; she is now actually what hitherto
she has been only tv 8uva/Lui, therefore she ' puts on perfection '.
' Praeterea secundum Philosophum . . . qualibet potentia tnelior est
eius actus; nam forma est melior quam materia, et actio quam
potentia activa: est enim finis eius.' Aquinas, Summa, xxv. i.
See also Aristotle, Met. 1050 a 2-16. This metaphysical doctrine

H 2

lOO Comme?2tary.

is not contradicted by the religious exaltation of virginity, for it
is not virginity as such which is preferred to marriage by the
Church, but the virgin's dedication of herself to God : ' Virginitas
inde honorata, quia Deo dicata. . . . Virgines ideo laudatae, quia
Deo dicatae. Nee nos hoc in virginibus praedicamus, quod
virgines sunt ; sed quod Deo dicatae pia continentia virgines.
Nam, quod non temere dixerim, felicior mihi videtur nupta mulier
quam virgo nuptura : habet enim iam ilia quod ista adhuc cupit. . . .
Ilia uni studet placere cui data est : haec multis, incerta cui danda
est,' &c. ; August. De Sand. Virg. I. x, xi. Compare Aquinas,
Summa II. 2, Quaest. clii. 3. Wedded to Christ the virgin puts on
a higher perfection.

SATYRES.

The earliest date assignable to any of the Satyres is 1593, or more
probably 1594—5. On the back of the Harleian MS. 5110 {Hji),
in the British Museum, is inscribed : '

Jhon Dunne his Satires
Anno Domini 1593

The handwriting is not identical with that in which the poems are
transcribed, and it is impossible to say either when the poems were
copied or when the title and date were afifixed. One may not build
too absolutely on its accuracy ; but there are in the three first Satires
(which alone the MS. contains) some indications that point to 1593-5
as the probable date. Mr. Chambers notes the reference in 1. 80, ' the
wise politic horse,' to Banks' performing horse, and says: 'A large
collection of them ' (i. e. allusions to the horse) ' will be found in
Mr. Halliwell-Phillips's Memoranda on Love's Labour's Lost. Only
one of these allusions is, however, earlier than 1593. It is in 1591,
and refers not to an exhibition in London, but in the provinces,
and not to Morocco, which was a bay, but to a white horse. It is
probable, therefore, that by 1591 Banks had not yet come to London,
and if so the date 1593 on the Harl. MS. 5 no of Donne's Satires
cannot be far from that of their composition,' But this is not the
only allusion. The same lines run on :

Or thou O Elephant or Ape wilt doe.

This has been passed by commentators as a quite general reference ;

1 Attention was first called to this inscription by J. Payne Collier in his Poetical
Decameron (1820). He uses the date to vindicate the claim for Donne's priority
as a satirist to Hall. 'Dunne' is of course one of the many ways in which the
poet's name is spelt, and ' Jhon' is a spelling of * John'. The poet's own signature
is generally 'Jo. Donne'. 'Jhon Don' is Drummond's spelling on the title-page
of HN. In Q the first page is headed ' M"" John Dunnes Satires '.

Satyr

es. I o I

but the Ape and Elephant seem to have been animals actually
performing, or exhibited, in London about 1594. Thus in Every
Man out of his Humour^ acted in 1599, Carlo Buffone says (iv. 6) :
* 'S heart he keeps more ado with this monster ' (i. e. Sogliardo's dog)
'than ever Banks did with his horse, or the fellow with the elephant.'
Further, all three are mentioned in the Epigrams of Sir John Davies,
e.g.:

In Dacum.

Amongst the poets Dacus numbered is
Yet could he never make an English rime ;
But some prose speeches I have heard of his,
Which have been spoken many an hundred time ;
The man that keepes the Elephant hath one,
Wherein he tells the wonders of the beast :
Another Bankes pronounced long agon,
When he his curtailes qualities exprest :
Hee first taught him that keepes the monuments
At Westminster his formall tale to say :
And also him which Puppets represents.
And also him that w"' the Ape doth play :

Though all his poetry be like to this,

Amongst the poets Dacus numbred is.

And again :

In Titum

Titus the brave and valorous young gallant
Three years together in the town hath beene,
Yet my Lo. Chancellors tombe he hath not seene,
Nor the new water-worke, nor the Elephant.
I cannot tell the cause without a smile :
Hee hath been in the Counter all the while.

Colonel Cunningham has pointed out another reference in Basse's
Metamorphosis of the Walnut Tree (1645), where he tells how 'in our
youth we saw the Elephant '. Grosart's suggestion that the Elephant
was an Inn is absurd.

Davies' Epigrams were first published along with Marlowe's version
of Ovid's Elegies, but no date is affixed to any of the three editions
which followed one another. But a MS. in the Bodleian which contains
forty-five of the E{)igrams describes them as English Epigrarnmes
much like Buckminsters Almanacke servinge for all England but
(Specially for the meridian of the honourable cittye of London calculated
by John Davies of Grayes Inne gentleman An" ij^4 in November}

* Of the forty-five which the MS. contains, some thirty-three were published in
the edition referred to above. On the other hand the edition contains some which
are not in the MS. Of these, one, 47, ' Meditations of a gull,' alone refers to events
which are certainly later than 1594. As this is not in the MS. there is nothing to
contradict the assertion that it (and the Epigrams cited above) belong to 1594.

I o 2 Commentary.

This seems much too exact to be a pure invention, and if it be correct
it is very unlikely that the allusions would be to ancient history.
Banks' Horse, the performing Ape, and the Elephant were all among
the sights of the day, like the recently erected tomb of Lord Chan-
cellor Hatton, who died in 1591. The atmosphere of the first Saiyre,
as of Davies' Epigrams, is that of 1593-5. The phrase 'the Infanta
of London, Heire to an India', in which commentators have found
needless difificulty, contains possibly, besides its obvious meaning, an
allusion to the fact that since 1587 the Infanta of Spain had become
in official Catholic circles heir to the English throne. In 1594 Parsons'
tract, A Conference about the next Succession to the Crown of England.
By R. Dole man, defended her claim, and made the Infanta's name a
byword in England.

If H^i is thus approximately right in its dating of the first Satire it
may be the better trusted as regards the other two, and there is at
least nothing in them to make this date impossible. The references
to poetry in the second acquire a more vivid interest when their date
or approximate date is remembered. In 1593 died Marlowe, the
greatest of the brilliant group that reformed the stage, giving

ideot actors means
(Starving ' themselves ') to live by ' their ' labour'd sceanes ;

and Shakespeare was one of the ' ideot actors '. Shakespeare, too,
was one of the many sonneteers who ' would move Love by rithmes ',
and in 1593 and 1594 he appeared among those ' who write to Lords,
rewards to get '.

It would be interesting if we could identify the lawyer-poet,
Coscus, referred to in this Satire. Malone, in a MS. note to
his copy of 16)) (now in the Bodleian Library), suggested John
Hoskins or Sir Richard Martin. Grosart conjectured that Donne
had in view the Gullinge Sonnets preserved in the Farmer-Chetham
MS., and ascribed with probability to Sir John Davies, the poet of
the Epigrams just mentioned. Chambers seems to lean to this
view and says, ' these sonnets are couched in legal terminology.'
Donne is supposed to have mistaken Davies' 'gulling' for serious
poetry. This is very unlikely. Moreover, only the last two of Davies'
sonnets are ' couched in legal terminology ' :

My case is this, I love Zepheria bright.
Of her I hold my harte by fealty :
and

To Love my lord I doe knights service owe
And therefore nowe he hath my wit in ward.

Nor, although Davies' style parodies the style of the sonneteers
(not of the anonymous Zepheria only), is it particularly harsh. It is

Davies' Epigrams are referred to in Sir John Harrington's Metamorphosis of Ajax,
1596.

Satyr es, 103

much more probable that Donne, like Davies, has chiefly in view
this anonymous series of sonnets — Zepheria. Ogni dl viene la sera.
Mysus et HaeiTwnia juvenis qui cuspids vuhius senserat, hacipsa cuspide
sensit opem. At London : Printed by the Widow Orwin^ for N. L.
and John Busby. 1594. The style of z^Z-^^r/a exactly fits Donne's
description :

words, words which would teare
The tender labyrinth of a soft maids eare.

'The verbs " imparadize ", " portionize ", " thesaurize ", are some
of the fruits of his ingenuity. He claims that his Muse is capable of
"hyperbolised trajections " ; he apostrophizes his lady's eyes as
"illuminating lamps" and calls his pen his "heart's solicitor".'
Sidney Lee, Elizabethan Sonnets. The following sonnet from the
series illustrates the use of legal terminology which both Davies and
Donne satirize :

Canzon 20.
How often hath my pen (mine heart's Solicitor)
Instructed thee in Breviat of my case !
While Fancy-pleading eyes (thy beauty's visitor)
Have pattern'd to my quill, an angel's face.
How have my Sonnets (faithful Counsellors)
Thee without ceasing moved for Day of Hearing !
While they, my Plaintive Cause (my faith's Revealers 1),
Thy long delay, my patience, in thine ear ring.
How have I stood at bar of thine own conscience
When in Requesting Court my suit I brought !
How have the long adjournments slowed the sentence
Which I (through much expense of tears) besought !
Through many difficulties have I run,
Ah sooner wert thou lost, I wis, than won.

We do not know who the author of Zepheria was, so cannot tell
how far Donne is portraying an individual in what follows. It can
hardly be Hoskins or Martin, unless Zepheria itself was intended to
be a burlesque, which is possible. Quite possibly Donne has taken
the author of Zepheria simply as a type of the young lawyer who writes
bad poetry ; and in the rest of the poem portrays the same type when
he has abandoned poetry and devoted himself to ' Law practice for
mere gain ', extorting money and lands from Catholics or suspected
Catholics, and drawing cozening conveyances. If Zepheria be the
poems referred to, then 1594-5 would be the date of this Satire.

The third Satyre has no datable references, but its tone reflects the
years in which Donne was loosening himself from the Catholic Church
but had not yet conformed, the years between 1593 and 1599, and
probably the earlier rather than the later of these years. On the
whole 1593 is a little too early a date for these three satires. They
were probably written between 1594 and 1597.

1 04 Cofnmentary,

The long fourth Satyre is in the Hawthornden MS. {UN) headed
Sat. 4. anno IS94- But this is a mistake either of Drummond, who
transcribed the poems probably as late as i6ro, or of Donne himself,
whose tendency was to push these early effusions iix back in his life.
The reference to ' the losse of Amyens ' (1. 1 14) shows that the poem
must have been written after March 1597, probably between that
date and September, when Amiens was re-taken by Henry IV.
These lines 7nny be an insertion, but there is no extant copy of the
Satyre without them. It belongs to the period between the ' Calis-
journey ' and the ' Island-voyage ', when first Donne is likely to have
appeared at court in the train of Essex.

The fifth Satyre is referred by Grosart and Chambers to 1602-3
on the ground that the phrase 'the great Carricks pepper ' is a refer-
ence to the expedition sent out by the East India Company under
Captain James Lancaster to procure pepper, the price of which
commodity was excessively high. Lancaster captured a Portuguese
Carrick and sent home pepper and spice. There is no proof, however,
that this ship was ever known as ' the Carrick ' or ' the great Carrick '.
That phrase was applied to ' that prodigious great carack called the
Madre de Dios or Mother of God, one of the greatest burden belong-
ing to the crown of Portugal ', which was captured by Raleigh's
expedition and 'brought to Dartmouth in 1592. 'This prize was
reckoned the greatest and richest that had ever been brought into
England ' and ' daily drew vast numbers of spectators from all parts
to admire at the hugeness of it' (Oldys, Life of Raleigh, 1829,
pp. 154-7). Strype states that she 'was seven decks high, 165 foot
long, and manned with 600 men' {Annals, iv. 177-82). That
pepper formed a large part of the Carrick's cargo is clear from the
following order issued by the Privy Council : A letter to Sir Francis
Drake, Williani Killigreive, Richard Carmarden and Thomas Midleton
Commissioners appointed for the Carriqiie. ' Wee have received your
letter of the 23"' of this presente of your proceeding in lading of
other convenient barkes with the pepper out of the Carrique, and
your opinion concerning the same, for answere whereunto we do
thinke it meete, and so require you to take order, so soone as the
goods are quite dischardged, that Sir Martin Frobisher be appointed
to have the charge and conduction of those shippes laden with the
pepper and other commodities out of the Carrique to be brought
about to Chatham.' 27 Octobris, 1592. See also under October i.
The reference in ' the great Carricks pepper ' is thus clear. The
words ' 'N'ou Sir, whose righteousness she loves', &c., 11. 31-3, show
that the j)oem was written after Donne had entered Sir Thomas
Egerton's service, i.e. between 1598, if not earlier, and February
160 1- 2 when he was dismissed, which makes the date suggested by
Grosart and Chambers (1602-3) impossible. The poem was
probably written in 1598-9. There is a note of enthusiasm in these
lines as of one who has just entered on a service of which he is

Satyr es. 105

proud, and the occasion of the poem was probably Egcrton's
endeavour to curtail the fees claim'd by the Cleric of the Star
Chamber (see note below). With Essex's return from Ireland in
1599 began a period of trouble and anxiety for Egerton, and probably
for Donne too. The more sombre cast of his thought, and the
modification in his feelings towards Elizabeth, after the fatal February
of 1600-1, are reflected in the satirical fragment The Progresse of
the Souk.

The so-called sixth and seventh Saiyres (added in 1635 and
1669) I have relegated to the Appendix B, and have given else-
where my reasons for assigning them to Sir John Roe. That Donne
wrote only five regular Satyres\?, very definitely stated by Drummond
of Hawthornden in a note prefixed to the copy of the fourth in UN:
' This Satyre (though it heere have the first place because no more
was intended to this booke) was indeed the authors fourth in number
and order he having written five in all to using which this caution
will sufficientlie direct in the rest.'

Page 145. Satyre I.

This Satyre is pretty closely imitated in the Satyra Quinta of
SKIALETHEIA. or, A shadoive of Truth in certaine Epigrams and
Satyres. ijg8. attributed to Edward Guilpin (or Gilpin), to whom
extracts from it are assigned in Englands Parnassus (1600). Who
Guilpin was we do not know. Besides Ihework named he wrote two
sonnets prefixed to Gervase Markham's Devoreux. Vertues tears for the
losse of the most Christian King Henry, third of that name ; arid the
untimely death of the most noble and heroical Gentleman, Walter
Devoreux, who was slain before Roan in France. First written i?i
French by the most excellent and learned Gentlewoman, Madatne
Geneuefe Petan Maulette. And paraphrastically translated into
English by Jervis Markham. 1597. See Grosart's Introduction to his
reprint of Skialetheia in Occasional Issues. 6, (1878). Donne
addresses a letter to Mr. E. G. (p. 208), which Gosse conjectures to
be addressed to Guilpin. That Guilpin knew Donne is probable in
view of this early imitation of a privately circulated MS. poem.
Guilpin's poem begins :

Let me alone I prethee in thys Cell,

Entice me not into the Citties hell ;

Tempt me not forth this Eden of content,

To tast of that which I shall soone repent :

Prethy excuse me, I am hot alone

Accompanied with meditation,

And calme content, whose tast more pleaseth me

Then all the Citties lushious vanity.

I had rather be encoffin'd in this chest

Amongst these bookes and papers I protest,

io6 Commentary.

Then free-booting abroad purchase offence,

And scandale my calme thoughts with discontents.

Heere I converse with those diviner spirits,

Whose knowledge, and admire, the world inherits :

Heere doth the famous profound Stagarite^

With Natures mistick harmony delight

My ravish'd contemplation : I heere see

The now-old worlds youth in an history :
1. I. Away thou fondling, &-'c. The reading of the majority of
editions and MSS. is ' changeling ', but this is a case not of a right and
wrong reading but of two versions, both ascribable to the author.
Which was his emendation it is impossible to say. He may have
changed ' fondling ' (a ' fond ' or foolish person) thinking that the idea
was conveyed by ' motley ', which, like Shakespeare's epithet ' patch ',
is a synecdoche from the dress of the professional fool or jester. On the
other hand the idea of * changeling ' is repeated in * humorist ', which
suggests changeable and fanciful. I have, therefore, let the i6jj text
stand. ' Changeling ' has of course the meaning here of ' a fickle
or inconstant person ', not the common sense of a person or thing or
child substituted for another, as ' fondling ' is not here a ' pet,
favourite ', as in modem usage.

1. 3. Consorted, Grosart, who professes to print from Hp, reads
Consoled, without any authority.

1. 6. Natures Secretary : i.e. Aristotle. He is always 'the Philosopher'
in Aquinas and the other schoolmen. Walton speaks of ' the great
secretary of nature and all learning. Sir Francis Bacon '.

1, 7. jolly Statesmen. All the MSS. except OF agree with 16})
in reading ' jolly ', though ' wily ' is an obvious emendation.
Chambers adopts it. By 'jolly' Donne probably meant 'overween-
ingly self-confident . . . full of presumptuous pride . . . arrogant, over-
bearing' (O.E.D.). ' Evilmerodach, a jolly man, without lustyse
and cruel.' Caxton (1474). ' It concerneth every one of us . . . not
to be too high-minded or jolly for anything that is past.' Sanderson
(1648).

1. 10. Giddie fantastique Poets of each land. In a letter Donne tells
Buckingham, in Spain, how his own library is filled with Spanish
books ' from the mistress of my youth. Poetry, to the wife of mine age,
Divinity'. This line in the Satires points to the fact, which Donne
was probably tempted later to obscure a little, that his first prolonged
visit to the Continent had been made before he settled in London in
1592, and probably without the permission of the Government. The
other than Spanish poets would doubtless be French and Italian. Dcmne
had read Dante. He refers to him in the fourth Satyre (' who
dreamt he saw hell '), and in an unpublished letter in the Burley MS.
he dilates at some length, but in no very creditable fashion, on an
episode in the Divina Commedia. Of French poets he probably knew
at any rate Du Bartas and Regnier.

1

Satyr es, 107

1. 12. And follow headlofig, wild uncertain thee? I have retained
the j6)) punctuation instead of, with Chambers, comma-ing ' wild 'as
well as ' headlong '. The latter is possibly an adverb here, going with
' follow '. The use of ' headlong ' as an adjective with persons was not
common. The earliest example in the O.E.D. is from Hudibras :

The Friendly Rug preserv'd the ground.
And headlong Knight from bruise or wound.

Donne's line is, however, ambiguous ; and the subsequent description
of the humorist would justify the adjective.

1. 18. Bright parcell gilt, zvith forty dead mens pay. Compare:
* Captains some in guilt armour (unbatt'red) some in buffe jerkins,
plated o'r with massy silver lace (raz'd out of the ashes of dead pay).'
Dekker, Newes from Hell, ii. 119 (Grosart). So many 'dead pays'
(i. e. men no longer on the muster roll) were among the perquisites
allowed to every captain of a company, but the number was constantly
exceeded : 'Moreover where' (i. e. whereas) 'there are 15 dead paies
allowed ordinarily in every bande, which is paid allwaies and taken
by the captaines, althogh theire nombers be greatly dyminished in
soche sorte as sometimes there are not fewer score or fewer in a com-
pany, her Majestys pleasure is that from hence the saide 15 dead
paies shall not be allowed unlesse the companies be full and com-
pleate, but after the rate of two dead paies for everie twenty men that
shalbe in the saide bande where the companies are dyminished.'
Letter to Sir John Norreyes, Knighte. Acts of the Privy Council, 1592.
Page 146, 1. 27. Oh monstrous, superstitious puritan. The
' Monster ' of the MSS. is of course not due to the substitution of the
noun for the adjective, but is simply an older form of the adjective.
Compare ' O wonder Vandermast ', Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar
Bungay.

1. 32. raise thy for ma I I: 'raise' is probably right, but 'vaile' is a
common metaphor. ' A Player ? Call him, the lousie slave : what
will he saile by, and not once strike or vaile to a Man of Warre.'
Captain Tucca in Jonson's Poetaster, in. 3.

1. 33. That wilt cofisort none, dr^c. It is unnecessary to alter
' consort none ' to ' consort with none', as some MSS. do. The
construction is quite regular. ' Wilt thou consort me, bear me com-
pany ? ' Heywood. The ' consorted with these few books ' of 1. 3
is classed by the O.E.D. under a slightly different sense of the word —
not ' attended on by ' these books, but ' associated in a common lot
with ' them.

1. 39. The naktdnesse and barenesse, d^c. The reading ' barrennesse '
of all the editions and some MSS. is due probably to similarity of
pronunciation (rather than of spelling) and a superficial suggestion
of appropriateness to the context. A second glance shows that
' bareness ' is the correct reading. The MSS. give frequent evidence
of having been written to dictation.

I o 8 Comme?itary.

1. 46. The ' yet ', which the later editions and Chambers drop, is
quite in Donne's style. It is heavily stressed and ' he was ' is slurred,
' h'was.'

Pack 147, 1. 58. T/ie Infanta of London, Heire to an India.
It is not necessary to suppose a reference to any person in particular.
The allusion is in the first place to the wealth of the city, and the
greed of patricians and courtiers to profit by that wealth. ' No one
can tell who, amid the host of greedy and expectant suitors, will carry
off whoever is at present the wealthiest minor (and probably the
king's ward) in London, i.e. the City.' Compare the Epithalamion
made at Lincohis Inn :

Daughters of London, you which be

Our Golden Mines, and furnish 'd Treasury,

You which are Angels, yet still bring with you
Thousands of Angels on your marriage days

Make her for Love fit fuel.

As gay as Flora, and as rich as Inde.

Compare also : ' I possess as much in your wish, Sir, as if I were
made Lord of the Indies.' Jonson, Evefj Man out of his Humour,
II. iii.

The 'Infanta' of A2^, O'F, Q is pretty certainly right, though
* Infant ' can be applied, like ' Prince ', to a woman. There is
probably a second allusion to the claim of the Infanta of Spain to be
heir to the English throne.

1. 60. heavens Scheme : ' Scheme ' is certainly the right reading.
The common MS. spelling, ' sceame ' or * sceames ', explains the
' sceanes ' which i6^j has derived from yV, TCD. For the Satyres
the editor did not use his best MS. See Text and Canon, 6"<r.,
p. xcv. It is possible that a slurred definite article (' th'heavens ')
has been lost.

In preparing his 'theme' or horoscope the astrologer had five
principal things to consider, (i) the heavenly mansions, (2) the
signs of the zodiac, (3) the planets, (4) the aspects and configura-
tions, (5) the fixed stars. With this end in view the astrologer
divided the heavens into twelve parts, called mansions, to which he
related the positions occupied at the same moment by the stars
in each of them ('drawing the horoscope'). There were several
methods of doing this. That of Ptolemy consisted in dividing the
zodiac into twelve equal parts. This was called the equal manner.
To represent the mansions the astrologers constructed twelve tri-
angles between two squares placed one within the other. Each of
the twelve mansions thus formed had a different name, and deter-
mined different aspects of the life and fortune of the subject of the
horoscope. From the first was foretold the general character of
his life, his health, his habits, morals. The second indicated his

Sa tyres. 109

wealth ; and so on. The different signs of the zodiac and the
planets, in like manner, had each its special influence. But sufficient
has been said to indicate what Donne means by * drawing forth
Heavens scheme '.

1. 62. subtile-witted. There is something to be said for the 'supple-
witted' of /(^/ and some other MSS. ' Subtle-witted' means 'fantastic,
ingenious ' ; ' supple-witted ' means ' variable '. Like Fastidious
Brisk in Every Man out of his Humour, they have a fresh fashion in
suits every day. * When men are willing to prefer their friends, we
heare them often give these testimonies of a man ; He hath good
parts, and you need not be ashamed to speak for him ; he understands
the world, he knowes how things passe, and he hath a discreet,
a supple, and an appliable disposition, and hee may make a fit instru-
ment for all your purposes, and you need not be afraid to speake for
him.' Sermons 80. 74. 750. A 'supple disposition' is one that
changes easily to adapt itself to circumstances.

P.\GE 148, 1. 81. O Elephant or Ape. See Introductory Note
to Satyres.

1. 89. / ivhispered lefus go. I have, following the example of
i6jj in other cases, indicated the slurring of ' let'us ' or ' let's ', which
is necessary metrically if we are to read the full ' whispered '
which 7669 first contracts to ' whisperd '. Q shows that 'let's' is the
right contraction. Donne's use of colloquial slurrings must be con-
stantly kept in view when reading especially his satires. They are
not always indicated in the editions : but note I. 52 :

I shut my chamber doore, and come, lets goe.

Page 149, 11. 100-4. My punctuation of these lines is a slight
modification of that indicated by W and JC, which give the proper
division of the speeches. The use of inverted commas would make
this clearer, but Chambers' division seems to me (if I understand it)
to give the whole speech, from ' But to me ' to ' So is the Pox ', to
Donne's companion, which is to deprive Donne of his closing repartee.
The Grolier Club editor avoids this, but makes ' Why he hath travelled
long ? ' a part of Donne's speech beginning ' Our dull comedians
want him '. I divide the speeches thus : —

Donne. Why stoop'st thou so ?
Companion. \Vhy ? he hath travail'd.
Donne. Long ?

Companion. No : but to me {Donne interpolates ' which under-
stand none ') he doth seem to be
Perfect French and Italian.
Donne. So is the Pox.

The brackets round ' which understand none ' I have taken from
Q. I had thought of inserting them before I came on this MS. Of
course brackets in old editions are often used where commas would

1 1 o Commentary,

be sufificient, and one can build nothing on their insertion here in one
MS. But it seems to me that these words have no point unless
regarded as a sarcastic comment interpolated by Donne, perhaps soito
voce. ' To you, who understand neither French nor Italian, he may
seem perfect French and Italian — but to no one else.' Probably an
eclectic attire was the only evidence of travel observable in the person
in question. 'How oddly is he suited!' says Portia of her English
wooer ; ' I think he bought his doublet in Italy, his round hose in
France, his bonnet in Germany, and his behaviour everywhere.'
Brackets are thus used by Jonson to indicate a remark interjected
sotto voce. See the quotation from the Poetaster in the note on
The Message (II. p. 37). Modern editors substitute for the brackets
the direction 'Aside', which is not in the Folio (i6i6).

Page 149. Satyre II.

11. 1-4. It will be seen that Hp gives two alternative versions of
these lines. The version of the printed text is that of the majority of
the MSS.

Page 150, 11. 15-16. As in some Organ, &^c. Chambers prints
these lines with a comma after ' move ', connecting them with what
follows about love-poetry. Clearly they belong to what has been said
about dramatic poets. It is Marlowe and his fellows who are the
bellows which set the actor-puppets in motion.

11. 19-20. Rammes and slings now, ^c. The ' Rimes and songs' of
/• is a quaint variant due either to an accident of hearing or to an
interpretation of the metaphor : ' As in war money is more effective
than rams and slings, so it is more effective in love than songs.' But
there is a further allusion in the condensed stroke, for 'pistolets' means
also 'fire-arms '. Money is as much more effective than poetry in love as
fire-arms are than rams and slings in war. Donne is Dryden's teacher
in the condensed stroke, which ' cleaves to the waist ', lines such as

They got a villain, and we lost a fool.

Page 151, 1. 33. to out-sweare the Letanie. ' Letanie,' the reading
of all the MSS., is indicated by a dash in 16}} and is omitted without
any indication by i6)j-}^. In 164^-jo the blank was supplied,
probably conjecturally, by ' the gallant '. It was not till j66^ that
' Letanie ' was inserted. In ' versifying ' Donne's Satyres Pope altered
this to ' or Irishmen out-swear ', and Warburton in a note explains
the original : ' Dr. Donne's is a low allusion to a licentious quibble
used at that time by the enemies of the English Liturgy, who, dis-
liking the frequent invocations in the Litanie, called them the taking
God's name in vain, which is the Scripture periphrasis for swearing.'

I. 36. tenements. Drummond in IfN writes ' torments ', probably
a conjectural emendation. Drummond was not so well versed in
Scholastic Philosophy as Donne.

1. 44. But a scarce Poet. This is the reading of the best MSS., and

Satyres. 1 1 1

I have adopted it in preference to ' But scarce a Poet ', which is an
awkward phrase and does not express what the writer means. Donne
does not say that he is barely a poet, but that he is a bad poet,
Donne uses ' scarce ' thus as an adjective again in Satyre IV, 1. 4 (where
see note) and 1. 240. It seems to have puzzled copyists and editors,
who amend it in various ways. By 'jollier of this state' he means
' prouder of this state ', using the word as in ' jolly statesmen ', I. 7.

1. 48. ' ia7iguage of the Fleas and Bench.' See Introductory Note
for legal diction in love-sonnets.

-to"

Page 152, 11. 62-3. l>ut men which chuse

Laiv practise for meere gaine, bold soiile, repute.

The unpunctuated ' for meere gaine bold soule repute ' of 16JJ-69
and most MSS. has caused considerable trouble to the editors and
copyists. One way out of the difficulty, ' bold souls repute,' appears
in Chambers' edition as an emendation, and before that in Tonson's
edition (17 19), whence it was copied by all the editions to Chalmers'
(18 10). Lowell's conjecture, 'hold soules repute,' had been anticipated
in some MSS. There is no real difficulty. I had comma'd the words
'bold soule' before I examined Q, which places them in brackets, a
common means in old books of indicating an apostrophe. The ' bold
soule ' addressed, and invoked to esteem such worthless people aright,
is the 'Sir' (whoever that may be) to whom the whole poem is
addressed. A note in HJV prefixed to this poem says that it is taken
from 'C. B.'s copy', i.e. Christopher Brooke's. It is quite possible
that this Satyre, like The Storme, was addressed to him.

11. 71-4. Like a wedge in a block, wring to the barre.
Bearing-like Asses ; and more shamelesse farre, o-v..

These lines are printed as in 16)}, except that the comma after
'Asses' is raised to a semicolon, and that I have put a hyphen
between ' Bearing ' and ' like '. The lines are difficult and have
greatly puzzled editors. Grosart prints from Hp and reads ' wringd ',
which, though an admissible form of the past-participle, makes no
sense here. The Grolier Club editor prints :

Like a wedge in a block, wring to the bar.
Bearing like asses, and more shameless far
Than carted whores ; lie to the grave judge ; for . . .

Chambers adopts much the same scheme ;

Like a wedge in a block, wring to the bar.
Bearing like asses, and more shameless far
Than carted whores ; lie to the grave judge, for . . .

By retaining the comma after 'bar' in a modernized text with
modern punctuation these editors leave it doubtful whether they do
or do not consider that ' asses ' is the object to ' wring '. Further, they
connect ' and more shameless far than carted whores ' closely with

112 Commentary,

'asses', separating it by a semicolon from 'lie to the grave judge'.
I take it that ' more shameless far ' is regarded by these editors as a
qualifying adjunct to 'asses'. This is surely wrong. The subject of
the long sentence is ' He ' (1. 65), and the infinitives throughout are
complements to ' must ' : ' He must walk ... he must talk . . . [he
must] lie . . . [he must] wring to the bar bearing-like asses ; [he must],
more shameless than carted whores, lie to the grave judge, &c.' This
is the only method in which I can construe the passage, and it carries
with it the assumption that ' bearing like ' should be connected by a
hyphen to form an adjective similar to ' Relique-like ', which is the
MS. form of ' Relique-ly ' at 1. 84. Certainly it is ' he ', Coscus, who
is ' more shameless, tS:c.,' not his victims. These are the ' bearing-like
asses ', the patient Catholics or suspected Catholics whom he wrings
to the bar and forces to disgorge fines. Coscus, a poet in his youth,
has become a Topcliffe in his maturer years. ' Bearing,' ' patient ' is
the regular epithet for asses in Elizabethan literature :

Asses are made to bear and so are you.

Tamittg of the Shretv, 11. i, 200.

In Jonson's Poetaster, v. i, the ass is declared to be the hiero-
glyphic of Patience, frugality, and fortitude.

Possibly, but it is not very likely, Donne refers not only to the
stupid patience of the ass but to her fertility : ' They be very gaine-
fuU and profitable to their maisters, yielding more commodities than
the revenues of good farmers.' Holland's Pliny, 8. 43, Of Asses.

Page 153, 1. 87. In parchments. The plural is the reading of the
better MSS. and seems to me to give the better sense. The
final ' s ' is so easily overlooked or confounded with a final ' e ' that
one must determine the right reading by the sense of the passage.

11. 93-6. When Luther was profest, q:-'c. The 'power and glory
clause ' which is not found in the Vulgate or any of the old Latin
versions of the New Testament (and is therefore not used in Catholic
prayers, public or private), was taken by Erasmus (15 16) from all the
Greek codices, though he does not regard it as genuine. Thence it
passed into Luther's (1521) and most Reformed versions. In his
popular and devotional Auskgung deutsch des Vaterunsers (15 19)
Luther makes no reference to it.

1. 105. Where's tKold , . . In great hals. The line as I have
printed it combines the versions of 16}) and the later editions. It is
found in several MSS. Some of these, on the other hand, like 16^^-6^,
read ' where ' ; but ' where's ' with a plural subject following was quite
idiomatic. Compare: 'Here needs no spies nor eunuchs,' p. 81,
1- 39 j 'With firmer age returns our liberties,' p. 115, 1. 77.

At p. 165, 1. 182, the MSS. point to ' cryes his flatterers' as the
original version. See Franz, Shak.-Gratn. §672; Knecht, Die
Kotigruenz zwischen Subjekt und Prddikat (191 1), p. 28.

Saty

res, 113

Donne has other instances of irregular concord, or of the plural
form in ' s ', and * th ' :

by thy fathers wrath
By all paines which want and divorcement hath. P. 1 1 1, 1. 8.

Had'st thou staid there, and look'd out at her eyes,

All had ador'd thee that now from thee flies. P. 285, 1. 17.

Those unlick't beare-whelps, unfil'd pistolets

That (more than Canon shot) availes or lets. P. 97, 1. 32.

The rhyme makes the form here indisputable. The MSS. point to
a more frequent use of 'hath' with a plural subject than the editions
have preserved. The above three instances seem all plurals. In other
cases the individuals form a whole, or there is ellipsis :

All Kings, and all their favorites,

All glory of honors, beauties, wits.
The Sunne it selfe which makes times, as they passe.
Is elder by a year, now, then it was.

The Anniversaries p. 24, 11. 1-4.

He that but tasts, he that devours,
And he that leaves all, doth as w-ell.

Communiiie, p. 33, 11. 20-1.

Page 154, 1. 107. meanes blesse. The reading of 16}) has the
support of the best MSS. Grosart and Chambers prefer the reading
of the later editions, ' Meane's blest.' Tins, it would seem to me,
needs the definite article. The other reading gives quite the same
sense, ' in all things means (i. e. middle ways, moderate measures) bring
blessings ' :

Rectius vives, Licini, neque altum
Semper urgendo neque, dum procellas
Cautus horrescis, nimium premendo
Litus iniquum.

Aureani quisquis mediocritatem
Diligit, tutus caret obsoleti
Sordibus tecti, caret invidenda

Sobrius aula. Horace, Odes, ii. 10.

The general tenor of the closing lines recalls Horace's treatment of
the same theme in Sat. ii. 2. 88, 125, more than either Juvenal, Sat.
ix, or Persius, Sat. vi.

Grosart states that ' means, then as now, meant riches, possessions,
but never the mean or middle '. But see O.E. 1)., which quotes for
the plural in this sense: 'Tempering goodly well Their contrary dislikes
with loved means.' Spenser, Hymns. In the singular Bacon has,
'But to speake in a Meane.' Of Adversitie.

11 917.3 I

1 1 4- Commentary.

Page 154. Satyre III. '

Page 155, 1. 19. leaders rage. This phrase might tempt one to date
the poem after the Cadiz expedition and Islands voyage, in both of
which ' leaders' rage ', i. e. the quarrels of Howard and Essex, and
of Essex and Raleigh, militated against success ; but it is too little
to build upon. Donne may mean simply the arbitrary exercise ol
arbitrary power on the part of leaders.

11. 30-2. xvho made thee to stand SettttneU, &'c. 'Souldier' is thf
reading of what is perhaps the older version of the Satyres. \\
would do as well : ' Quare et tibi, Publi, et piis omnibus retinendu;
est animus in custodia corporis; nee iniussu eius a quo ille esi
vobis datus ex hominum vita migrandum est, ne munus assignaturr
a Deo defugisse videamini.' Cicero, Somnium Scipionis.

' Veteres quidem philosophiae principes, Pythagoras et Plotinus
prohibitionis huius non tarn creatores sunt quam praecones, omnim
illicitum esse dicentes quempiam militiae servientem a praesidio e
commissa sibi siatione discedere contra ducis vel principis iussum
Plane eleganti exemplo usi sunt eo quod militia est vita homini
super terram.' John of Salisbury, Policrat. ii. 27.

Donne considers the rashness of those whom he refers to a
a degree of, an approach to, suicide. To expose ourselves to thes>
perils we abandon the moral warfare to which we are appointed
In his own work on suicide (BIA®ANAT02, &c.) Donne discusse
the permissible approaches to suicide. An unpublished Problet
shows his knowledge of John of Salisbury.

11. 33-4. Knon^ thy foes, dr'c. I have followed the better MSS
here against 16)) and Zj^, N, TCD. The dropping of ' s ' afte
' foe ' has probably led to the attempt to regularize the constructio;
by interjecting ' h'is '. Donne has three foes in view — the devil, th
world, and the flesh.

1. 35. quit. Whether we read 'quit' or 'rid' the construction i
difficult. The phrase seems to mean ' to be free of his whole Realm
— an unparalleled use of either adjective.

1. 36. The worlds all parts. Here ' all ' means ' every ', bt
Shakespeare would make ' parts ' singular : ' All bond and privileg
of nature break,' Cor. v. iii. 25. Donne blends two constructions.
Page 156, 1. 49. Crantz. I have adopted the spelling of Vi
which emphasizes the Dutch character of the name. The ' Crates ' (
Q is tempting as bringing the name into line with the other classic;
ones, but all the other MSS. have an 'n' in the word. Donne has i
view the ' schismatics of Amsterdam ' ( The Will) and their follower
The change to Grant or Grants shows a tendency in the copyists t
substitute a Scotch for a Dutch name.

Page 157, 11^ 69-71. But unmoved thou, S^c. As punctuated i
the old editions these lines are certainly ambiguous. The semicolc

Satyr es, 115

after ' allow ' has a little less value than that of a full stop ; that after
' right ' a little more than a comma, or contrariwise, Grosart,
Chambers, and the Grolier Club editor all connect ' and the right '
with what precedes :

But unmoved thou
Of force must one, and forced but one allow ;
And the right.

So Chambers,— Grosart and the Grolier Club editor place a comma
after ' allow '. It seems to me that ' And the right ' goes rather with
what follows :

But unmoved thou

Of force must one, and forced but one allow.

And the right, ask thy father which is she.

If the first arrangement be right, then * And ' seems awkward. The
second marks two stages in the argument : a stable judgement compels
us to acknowledge religion, and that there can be only one. This
being so, the next question is. Which is the true one ? As to that,
we cannot do better than consult our fathers :

' In doubtful questions 'tis the safest way
To learn what unsuspected ancients say ;
For 'tis not likely we should higher soar
In search of Heaven than all the Church before ;
Nor can we be deceived unless we see
The Scriptures and the Fathers disagree.

Dryden, Religio Laid.

* Remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations :
ask thy father, and he will shew thee ; thy elders, and they will tell
thee.' Deut. xxxii. 7.

1. 76. To adore, or scorne an image, qt'c. Compare : ' I should
violate my own arm rather than a Church, nor willingly deface the
name of Saint or Martyr. At the sight of a Cross or Crucifix I can
dispense with my hat, but scarce with the thought or memory of my
Saviour : I cannot laugh at, but rather pity the fruitless journeys of
Pilgrims, or contemn the miserable condition of Friars ; for though
misplaced in circumstances, there is something in it of Devotion. I
could never hear the Ave-Mary Bell without an elevation, or think it
a sufiticient warrant, because they erred in one circumstance, for me
to err in all, that is in silence and dumb contempt ... At a solemn
Procession I have wept abundantly, while my consorts blind with
opposition and prejudice, have fallen into an excess of scorn and
laughter.' Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, sect. 3. Compare
also Donne's letter To Sir H. R. (probably to Goodyere), {Letters,
p. 29), ' You know I have never imprisoned the word Religion ; not
straightning it Friarly ad religiones factitias, (as the Romans call
well their orders of Religion), nor immuring it in a Rome, or a

I 2

1 1 6 Commentary.

Geneva ; they are all virtual beams of one Sun. . . . They are not so
contrary as the North and South Poles ; and they are connaturall
pieces of one circle. Religion is Christianity, which being too
spirituall to be seen by us, doth therefore take an apparent body of
good life and works, so salvation requires an honest Christian.'

I. So. Cragged and steep. The three epithets, ' cragged ', 'ragged ',
and ' rugged ', found in the MSS., are all legitimate and appropriate.
The second has the support of the best MSS. and is used by Donne
elsewhere : ' He shall shine upon thee in all dark wayes, and rectifie
thee in all ragged ways.' Serf/ions 80. 52. 526. Shakespeare uses it
repeatedly : ' A ragged, fearful, hanging rock,' Gent, of Ver. i. ii. 121 ;
'My ragged prison v;d\\s,^ Rich. II, v. v. 21; and metaphorically,
' \\'inter's ragged hand,' So>w. vi. i.

II. 85-7. To will itnplyes delay, ^c. I have changed the * to ' of
16)) to ' too '. It is a mere change of spelling and has the support
of both Hp and W. Grosart and Chambers take it as the prepo-
sition following the noun it governs, ' hard knowledge to '—an un-
exampled construction in the case of a monosyllabic preposition.
Franz {Shak.-Gram. § 544) gives cases of inversion for metrical
purposes, but only with ' mehrsilbigen Prapositionen ', e. g. ' For fear
lest day should look their shapes upon.' Mid. JV. Dream, iii. ii. 385.

Grosart, the Grolier Club editor, and Chambers have all, I think,
been misled by the accidental omission in 16)) of the full stop or
colon after ' doe ', 1. 85. Chambers prints :

To will implies delay, therefore now do
Hard deeds, the body's pains ; hard knowledge to
The mind's endeavours reach.
The Grolier Club version is :

To will implies delay, therefore now do

Hard deeds, the body's pains ; hard knowledge too

The mind's endeavours reach.

The latter is the better version, but in each ' the body's pains ' is
a strange apposition to ' deeds ' taken as object to ' do '. We do
not ' do pains '. The second clause also has no obvious relation to
the first which would justify the ' too '. If we close the first sentence at
' doe ', M-e get both better sense and a better balance : ' Act now, for
the night cometh. Hard deeds are achieved by the body's pains (i. e.
toil, effort), and hard knowledge is attained by the mind's efforts.'
The order of the words, and the condensed force given to ' reach '
produce a somewhat harsh effect, but not more so than is usual in
the Satyres, and less so than the alternative versions of the editors.
The following lines continue the thought quite naturally : ' No
endeavours of the mind will enable us to comprehend mysteries, but
all eyes can apprehend them, dazzle as they may.' Compare : ' In all
Philosophy there is not so darke a thing as light ; As the sunne which
is fons lucis natiiralis, the beginning of naturall light, is the most

Satyres. 117

evident thing to be seen, and yet the hardest to be looked upon, so
is naturall light to our reason and understanding. Nothing clearer,
for it is ckarnesse it selfe, nothing darker, it is enwrapped in so many
scruples. Nothing nearer, for it is round about us, nothing more
remote, for wee know neither entrance, nor limits of it. Nothing more
easie, for a child discerns it, nothing more hard for no man under-
stands it. It is apprehensible by sense, and not comprehensible by
reason. If wee winke, wee cannot chuse but see it, if wee stare, wee
know it never the better.' Sermons 50. 36. 324.

Page 158, 11. 96-7. a Philip, or a Gregory, &-'c'. Grosart and
Norton conjecture that by Philip is meant Melanchthon, and for
' Gregory ' Norton conjectures Gregory VII ; Grosart either Gregory
the Great or Gregory of Nazianzus. But surely Philip of Spain is
balanced against Harry of England, one defender of the faith against
another, as Gregory against Luther. What Gregory is meant we can-
not say, but probably Donne had in view Gregory XIII or Gregory
XIV, post-Reformation Popes, rather than either of those mentioned
above. Satire does not deal in Ancient History. The choice is
between Catholic and Protestant Princes and Popes.

Page 158. Satvre IIII.

This satire, like several of the period, is based on Horace's Ibam forte
via Sacra (Sat. i. g), but Donne follows a quite independent line.
Horace's theme is at bottom a contrast between his own friendship
with Maecenas and ' the way in which vulgar and pushing people
sought, and sought in vain, to obtain an introduction '. Donne, like
Horace, describes a bore, but makes this the occasion for a general
picture of the hangers-on at Court. A more veiled thread running
through the poem is an attack on the ways and tricks of informers.
The bore's gossip is probably not without a motive :

I . . . felt my selfe then
Becoming Traytor, and mee thought I saw
One of our Giant Statutes ope his jaw
To sucke me in.

The manner in which the stranger accosts him suggests the
' intelligencer ' : ' Two hungry turns had I scarce fetcht in this wast
gallery when I was encountered by a neat pedantical fellow, in the
forme of a Cittizen, who thrusting himself abruptly into my com-
panie, like an Intelligencer, began very earnestly to question me.'
Nash, Pierce Penniless.

In the Sdtyres Donne is always, though he does not state his posi-
tion too clearly, one with links attaching him to the persecuted
Catholic minority. He hates informers and pursuivants.

11. 1-4. These lines resemble the opening of Regnier's imitation
of Horace's satire :

1 1 8 Commentary,

Charles, de mes peches j'ay bien fait penitence ;
Or, toy qui te cognois aux cas de conscience,
Juge si j'ay raison de penser estre absous.

I can trace no further resemblance.

1. 4. A recreation to, and scarse map of this. I have ventured here
to restore, from Q and its duplicate, among the Uyce MSS., what
I think must have been the original form of this line. The adjective
' scarse ' or ' scarce ' used in this way (' a scarce poet ', ' a scarce
brook ') is characteristic of Donne, and it always puzzled his copyists,
who tried to correct it in one way or another, e. g. * scarce a poet ',
II. 44; *a scant brooke', IV. 240. It is inconceivable that they
would have introduced it. The preposition ' to ' governing ' such as '
regularizes the construction, but would very easily be omitted by
a copyist who wished to smooth the metre or did not at once catch
its reference. Donne's use of ' scarse ', like his use of ' Macaron '
in this poem, is probably an Italianism ; in Italian * scarso ' means
• wanting, scanty, poor ' — ' stretta e scarsa fortuna ', ' E si riduce
talvolta neir Estate con si scarsa acqua ', ' Veniva bellissima tanto
quanto ogni comparazione ci saria scarsa ', * Ma I'ingegno e le rime
erano scarse' (Petrarch).

Page 159, 1. 21. seaven Antiquaries studies. Donne has more
than one hit at Antiquaries. '^^Q.\!t\Q. Epigrams ^r^^ Saty re V. The
reign of Elizabeth witnessed a great revival of antiquarian studies and
the first formation of an Antiquarian society : ' There was a time,
most excellent king,' says a later writer addressing King James, ' when
as well under Queen Elizabeth, as under your majesty, certain choice
gentlemen, men of known proof, were knit together, statis temporibus,
by the love of these studies, upon contribution among themselves :
which company consisted of an elective president and of clarissimi,
of other antiquaries and a register.' Oldys, Life of Raleigh, p. 317.
He goes on to describe how the society was dissolved by death. In
the list of names he gives there are more than seven, but it is just
possible that Donne refers to some such society in its early stages.

1. 22. Africks monsters, Guianaes rarities. Africa was famous as the
land of monsters. The second reference is to the marvels described
in Sir Walter Raleigh's The discoverie of the large, rich and bewtiful
Empire of Guiana, with a relation of the great and golden City of
Manoa which the Spaniards call El Dorado, performed in the year
^595 (pub. 1596). Among the monsters were Amazons, Anthropo-
phagi,

and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders.

1.23. Stranger then strangers, ^c. The ' Stranger then strangest'
of some MSS, would form a natural climax to the preceding list of
marvels. But ' strangers ' is the authoritative reading, and forms the
transition to the next few lines. The reference is to the unpopularity

Satyres. 119

in London of the numerous strangers whom wars and religious perse-
cution had collected in England. Strype {A/ina/s, iv) prints a paper
of 1568 in which the Lord Mayor gives to the Privy Council an
account of the strangers in London. In 1593 there were again
complaints of their presence and threats to attack them. ' While
these inquiries were making, to incense the people against them
there were these lines in one of iheir libels : Doth not the world
see that you, beastly brutes, the Belgians, or rather drunken drones
and faint-hearted Flemings ; and you fraudulent father {sic. Query
' faitor[s] '), Frenchmen, by your cowardly flight from your own
natural countries, have abandoned the same into the hands of your
proud, cowardly enemies, and have by a feigned hypocrisy and
counterfeit show of religion placed yourself here in a most fertile soil,
under a most gracious and merciful prince ; who hath been contented,
to the great prejudice of her own natural subjects, to suffer you to
live here in better case and more freedom then her own people — Be
it known to all Flemings and Frenchmen that it is best for them to
depart out of the realm of England between this and the 9th of July
next. If not then to take that which follows : for that there shall be
many a sore stripe. Apprentices will rise to the number of 2336.
And all the apprentices and journeymen will down with the Flemings
and strangers.'

Another libel was in verse, and after quoting it the ofificial docu-
ment proceeds : 'The court upon these seditious motives took the most
prudent measures to protect the poor strangers, and to prevent any
riot or insurrection.' Among other provisions, ' Orders to be given
to appoint a strong watch of merchants and others, and like-handi-
cra^^d masters, to answer for their apprentices' and servants'
misdoing.' Strype's Anna/s, iv. 234-5.

In the same year a bill was promoted in Parliament against aliens
sellifjg foreign wares among us by retail, which Raleigh supported :
' Whereas it is pretended that for strangers it is against charity, against
honour, against profit to expel them : in my opinion it is no matter
of charity to relieve them. For first, such as fly hither have forsaken
their own king : and religion is no pretext for them ; for we have
no Dutchmen here, but such as come from those princes where
the gospel is preached ; yet here they live disliking our church,' &c.
Birch, Life of Raleigh, p. 163.

I have thought it worth while to note these more recent refer-
ences as Grosart refers to the rising against strangers on May-day,

1517-

1. 29. by your priesthood, <^c. In 1581 a proclamation was issued
imposing the penalty of death on any Jesuits or seminary priests who
entered the Queen's dominions, and in 1585 Parliament again decreed
that all Jesuits and seminary priests were to leave the kingdom
within forty days under the capital penalty of treason. The detection,
imprisonment, torture, and execution of disguised priests form a con-

I 2 o Com me?itary.

siderable chapter in Elizabethan history. Donne's companion looks
so strange that he runs the risk of arrest as a seminary priest from
Rome, or Douay. See Strype's Annals^ passim, and Meyer, Die
Katholische Kirche unter Elisabeth^ 1910.

Pack 160, 1. 35. a7id saiih : ' saith ' is the reading of all the earlier
editions, although Chambers and the Grolier ('lub editor silently alter
it to an exclamatory ' faith ' — turning it into a statement which
Donne immediately contradicts. The ' saith ' is a harshly interpolated
* so he says '. One MS. adds ' he ', and possibly the pronoun in some
form has been dropped, e. g. ' sayth a speakes '.

11. 37-8. Made of the Accents, ^c. It is perhaps rash to accept
the ' no language ' of y^2/, Q, and the Dyce MS. But the last two
represent, I think, an early version of the Satyres, and ' no language '
(like ' nill be delayed ', Epithal. made at Lincolns Inn) is just the
sort of reading that would tend to disappear in repeated trans-
mission. It is too bold for the average copyist or editor. But
its boldness is characteristic of Donne; it gives a much better
sense ; and it is echoed by Jonson in his Discoveries : ' Spenser in
affecting the ancients writ no language.' In like manner Donne's
companion, in affecting the accents and best phrases of all languages,
spoke none. I confess that seems to me a more pointed remark
than that he spoke one made up of these.

1. 48. Joviiis or Siirius : Paolo Giovio, Bishop of Nocera, among
many other works wrote Historianan sui te7nporis Libri XL V. i^S}-
Chambers quotes from the Nouvelle Biographie Gene'rak : ' Ses
ceuvres sont pleines des mensonges dont profita sa cupidite.'

Laurentius Surius (1522-78) was a Carthusian monk who wrote
ecclesiastical history. Among his works are a Conimentarius brevis
rerum in orbe gestarum ab anno ijjo (1568), and a Vitae Sanctorum,
1570 et seq. He was accused of inaccuracy by Protestant writers.
It is worth while noting that Q and (^'T^read 'Sleydan', i.e. Sleidanus.
John Sleidan (1506-56) was a Protestant historian who, like Surius,
wrote both general and ecclesiastical history, e.g. De quatuor Suminis
Imperiis, Babylonico, Persico, Graeco, et Romano, 1556 (an English
translation appeared in 1635), and De Statu Religionis et Reipublicae,
Carole Quinto Caesare Cotnmentarii {it^^z^-^). The latter is a history
of the Reformation written from the Protestant point of view, to
which Surius' work is a reply. Sleidan's history did not give entire
satisfaction to the reformers. It is quite possible that Donne's first
sneer was at the Protestant historian and that he thought it safer
later to substitute the Catholic Surius.

1. 54. Calepines Dictionarie. A well-known polyglot dictionary
edited by Ambrose Calepine (1455-1 511) in 1502. It grew later
to a Dictionarium Octolingue, and ultimately to a Dictionarium XI
Linguarum (Basel, 1590).

1. 56. Some other Jesuites. The 'other' is found only in HN,
which is no very reliable authority. Without it the line wants

Satyr es. 121

a whole foot, not merely a syllable. Donne more than once drops
a syllable, compensating for it by the length and stress which is
given to another. Nothing can make up for the want of a whole
foot, though in dramatic verse an incomplete line may be effective.
To me, too, it seems very like Donne to introduce this condensed and
sudden stroke at Beza and nothing more likely to have been dropped
later, either by way of precaution or because it was not understood.
No one of the reformers was more disliked by Catholics than Beza.
The licence of his early life, his loose Latin verses, the scurrilous wit
of his own controversial method — all exposed him to and provoked
attack. The De Vita et Moribus Theodori Bezae, Omnium Haere-
ticorum ?iostri temporis facile principis, d-^v..' Authore Jacoho Laingaeo
Doctore Sorbonico (1585), is a bitter and calumnious attack.
There was, too, something of the Jesuit, both in the character
of the arguments used and in the claim made on behalf of the
Church to direct the civil arm, in Beza's defence of the execution
of Servetus. Moreover, the Vindiciae contra Tyrannos was some-
times attributed to Beza, and the views of the reformers regarding
the rights of kings put forward there, and those held by the Jesuits,
approximate closely. (See Cambridge Modern History, iii. 22,
Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century, pp. 759-66.) In his
subsequent attacks upon the Jesuits, Donne always singles out the
danger of their doctrines and practice to the authority of kings.
Throughout the Satyres Donne's veiled Catholic prejudices have to
be constantly borne in mind.

Page 161, 1. 59. and so Fanurge was. See Rabelais, Pantagruel
ii. 9. One day that Pantagruel was walking with his friends he met
' un homme beau de stature et elegant en tous lineaments de corps,
mais pitoyablement navre en divers lieux, et tant mal en ordre qu'il
sembloit estre eschappe es chiens '. Pantagruel, convinced from his
appearance that ' il n'est pauvre que par fortune ', demands of him
his name and story. He replies ; but, to the dismay of Pantagruel and
his friends, his answer is couched first in German, then in Arabic (?),
then in Italian, in English (or what passes as such), in Basque, in
Lanternoy (an Esperanto of Rabelais's invention), in Dutch, in Spanish,
in Danish, in Hebrew, in Greek, in the language of Utopia, and
finally in Latin. ' " Dea, mon amy," dist Pantagruel, " ne sgavez-vous
parler fran^oys ? " " Si faict tresbien. Seigneur," respondit le compai-
gnon ; " Dieu mercy ! c'est ma langue naturelle et maternelle, car je
suis ne et ay este nourry jeune au jardin de France : c'est Touraine."
— " Doncques," dist Pantagruel, "racomtez nous quel est votre nom
et dont vous venez." ..." Seigneur," dist le compagnon, " mon vray
et propre nom de baptesmes est Panurge." ' Panurge was not much
behind Calepine's Dictionary, and if Donne's companion spoke in the
' accent and best phrase ' of all these tongues he certainly spoke ' no
language '.

1. 69. doth not last : ' last ' has the support of several good MSS.,

12 2 Commentary,

'taste ' (i. e. savour, go down, be acceptable) of some. It is impos-
sible to decide on intrinsic grounds between them.

1. 70. Aretines pictures. The lascivious pictures of Giulio Romano,
for which Aretino wrote sonnets.

1. 75. the man that keepes the Abbey tombes. See Davies' epigram,
Oti Dacus, quoted in the general note on the Satyres.

I. 80. Kingstreet. From Charing Cross to the King's Palace at West-
minster. It was for long the only way to Westminster from the
north. * The last part of it has now been covered by the new Govern-
ment offices in Parliament Street '. Stow's Survey of London, ed.
Charles Lethbridge Kingsford (1908), ii. 102 and notes.

II. 83-7. I divide the dialogue thus :

Companion. Are not your Frenchmen neat ?

Donne. Mine ? As you see I have but one Frenchman,
look he follows me.

Companion {ignoring this impertinence). Certes they (i. e.
Frenchmen) are neatly cloth'd. I of this mind am, Your only
wearing is your grogaram.

Donne. Not so Sir, I have more.

The joke turns on Donne's pretending to misunderstand the bore's
colloquial, but rather affected, indefinite use of ' your '. Donne
applies it to himself: 'You are mistaken in thinking that I have only
one suit.' Chambers gives the whole speech, from ' He's base ' to
* he follows me ', to the bore. This gives ' Certes . . . grogaram ' to
Donne, and the closing repartee to the bore. Chambers uses inverted
commas, and has, probably by an oversight, omitted to begin a new
speech at ' Mine '.

For 'your' as used by the bore compare Bottom's use of it in
A Midsummer Night's Dream : ' I will discharge it in either your straw-
coloured beard, or your orange-tawny beard ', and ' there is not a more
fearful wild-fowl than your lion '. In most of the instances quoted by
Schmidt there is the suggestion that Shakespeare is making fun of an
affectation of the moment. That Donne had a French servant appears
from one of his letters : * therefore I onely send you this Letter . . .
and my promise to distribute your other Letters, according to your
addresses, as fast as my Monsieur can doe it.' To Sir G. B.,
Letters, p. 201.

Page 162, 1. 97. ten Hollensheads, or Halls, or Stowes. Every reader
of these old chroniclers knows how they mingle with their account of
the greater events of each year mention of trifling events, strange
births, fires, &c. This characteristic of the Chronicles is reflected
in the History-Plays based on them. Nash complains of these ' lay-
chroniclers that write of nothing but of Mayors and Sherifs, and the
deere yere and the great frost '. Pierce Penniless.

11. 98. he knowes ; He knowes. I have followed D, H4^, Lee in
thus punctuating. To place the semicolon after ' trash ' makes ' Of

Satyr

es. 123

triviall household trash ' depend rather awkwardly on ' lye '. Donne
does not accuse the chroniclers of lying, but of reporting trivialities.
Page 163,1, 113-4. since The Spaniards came, c^v.: i.e. from 1588

^° ^597-

1. 117. To heare this Makeron talke. This is the earliest instance of

this Italian word used in English which the O.E.D. quotes, and is a

proof of Donne's Italian travels. The Vocabolario degli Accademici

del/a Cmsca (1747) quotes as an example of the word with this

meaning, homo crassd Minerva, in Italian :

O maccheron, ben hai la vista corta.

Bellina, Sonetti, 29.

Donne's use of the word attracted attention. It is repeated in one
of the Elegies to the Author, and led to the absurd substitution, in
the editions after 16)), of ' maceron ' for ' mucheron ' (mushroom) in
the epistle prefixed to The Progress of the Souk.

1. 124. Perpetuities. ' Perpetuities are so much impugned because
they will be prejudiciall to the Queenes profitt, which is raised daily
from fines and recoveries.' Manninghani' s Diary, April 22, 1602.
Manningham refers probably to real property in which for many
centuries the Judges have ruled there can be no inalienable rights,
i. e. perpetuities. Donne's companion declares that such inalienable
rights are being established in offices. One has but to read Donne's
or Chamberlain's letters (or any contemporaries) to see what a traffic
went on in reversions to offices secular and sacred.

1. 133. To sucke me in ; for I have, with some of the MSS. and
with Chambers and the later editions, connected ' for hearing him '
with what follows. But 16)} and the better MSS. read :

To sucke me in for hearing him. I found . . .

Possibly this is right, but it seems to me better to connect ' for hearing
him ' with what follows. It makes the comparison to the superstition
about communicating infection clearer : * I found that as . . . leachers,
&c., ... so I, hearing him, might grow guilty and he free.' ' I should
be convicted of treason ; he would go free as a spy who had spoken
treason only to draw me out '. See the accounts of trials of suspected
traitors before Walsingham and others. It is on this passage I base
my view that Donne's companion is not merely a bore, but a spy, or
at any rate is ready to turn informer to earn a crown or two.

Page 164, 1. 148. complementall thankes. The word 'complement'
or ' compliment ' had a bad sense : ' We have a word now denizened
and brought into familiar use among us, Complement ; and for the
most part, in an ill sense ; so it is, when the heart of the speaker doth
not answer his tongue ; but God forbid but a true heart, and a faire
tongue might very well consist together : As vertue itself receives an
addition, by being in a faire body, so do good intentions of the heart,
by being expressed in faire language. That man aggravates his con-

124 Commentary.

demnation that gives me good words, and meanes ill ; but he gives me
a rich Jewell and in a faire Cabinet, he gives me precious wine, and
in a clear glasse, that intends well, and expresses his good intentions
well too.' Sermofis So. t8. 176.

1. 164. tK huffing braggart, puft N^obilUy. 1 have followed the MSS.
in inserting ' th' ' and taking ' braggart ' as a noun. It would be more
easy to omit the article than to insert. Moreover ' braggart ' is
commoner as a noun. The O. E. D. gives no example of the
adjectival use earlier than 1613. Compare :

The huft, puft, curld, purld, wanton Pride.

Sylvester, Du Bartas, i. 2.

Page 165, 1. 169. your waxen gardefi or yon waxen garden — it is
impossible to say which Donne wrote. The reference is to the
artificial gardens in wax exhibited apparently by Italian puppet or
' motion ' exhibitors. Compare :

I smile to think how fond the Italians are,

To judge their artificial gardens rare,

When London in thy cheekes can shew them heere

Roses and Lillies growing all the yeere.

Drayton, Heroical Epistles (1597), Edzvard IV to Jane Shore.

1. 176. Baloune. A game played with a large wind-ball or football
struck to and fro with the arm or foot.

1. 179. arid I, {God pardon tnee.) This, the reading of the 16))
edition, is obviously right. Mr. Chambers, misled by the dropping of
the full stop after * me ' in the editions from i6)g onwards, has
adopted a reading of his own :

and aye— God pardon me —
As fresh and sweet their apparels be, as be
The fields they sold to buy them.

But what, in this case, does Donne ask God's pardon for ? It is
not his fault that their apparels are fresh or costly. ' God pardon
them ! ' would be the appropriate exclamation. What Donne asks
God's pardon for is, that he too should be found in the ' Presence '
again, after what he has already seen of Court life and ' the wretched-
ness of suitors ' : as though Dante, who had seen Hell and escaped,
should wilfully return thither.

1. 189. Cutchannel : i. e. Cochineal. The ladies' painted faces suggest
the comparison. In or shortly before 1603 an English ship, the
Margaret and John, made a piratical attack on the Venetian ship, La
Babiana. An indemnity was paid, and among the stolen articles are
mentioned 54 weights of cochineal, valued at £50-7. Our school
Histories tell us of Turkish and Moorish pirates, not so much of
the piracy which was conducted by English merchant ships, not
always confining themselves to the ships of nations at war with their
country.

Satyr es. 125

Page i66, 11. 205-6. trye . . . thighe. I have, with the support of
Ash.)S, printed thus instead of /'r^rj . . . thighes. If we retain ' tryes ',
then we should also, with several MSS., read (1. 204) 'survayes'; and if
'thighes' be correct we should expect ' legges '. The regular construc-
tion keeps the infinitive throughout, ' refine ', ' lift ', ' call ', ' survay ',
' trye'. If we suppose that Donne shifted the construction as he got
away from the governing verb, the change would naturally begin with
' survayes '.

11. 215-6. A Piirsevant would have ravish' d him away. The
reading of three independent MSS., Q, O'F, and /C, of ' Topcliffe '
for ' Pursevant ' is a very interesting clue to the Catholic point of
view from which Donne's Satyres were written. Richard Topcliffe
(1532-1609) was one of the cruellest of the creatures employed to
ferret out and examine by torture Catholics and Jesuits. It was he
who tortured Southwell the poet. In 1593 he was on the commis-
sion against Jesuits, and in 1594-5 was in prison. John Hammond,
the civilist, who is possibly referred to in Satyre F, 1. 87, sat with him
on several inquiries. See D. N. B. and authorities quoted there ; also
Meyer, Die Katholische Kirche unter Elisabeth, igio.

Page 167, 11. 233-4. ynen big enough to throw
Charing Crosse for a barre.

Of one of Harvey's pamphlets Nash writes : ' Credibly it was once
rumoured about the Court, that the Guard meant to try masteries
with it before the Queene, and, instead of throwing the sledge or the
hammer, to hurle it foorth at the armes end for a wager.' Have zvith
you, dr^c. (M^Kerrow, iii, p. 36.)

11. 235-6. Queefies man, and fine

Living, barrells of beefe, fiaggons ofivine.

Compare Cowley's Loves Riddle, in. i ;

Apl. rie shew thee first all the coelestial signs.

And to begin, look on that horned head.
Aln. AVhose is't ? Jupiters ?
Apl. No, tis the Ram !

Next that the spacious Bull fills up the place.
Aln. The Bull ? Tis well the fellows of the Guard

Intend not to come thither ; if they did

The Gods might chance to lose their beef.

The name ' beefeater ' has, I suppose, some responsibility for the
jest. Nash refers to their size : ' The big-bodied Halberdiers that
guard her Majesty,' Nash (Grosart), i. 102 ; and to their capacities
as trenchermen : ' Lies as big as one of the Guardes chynes of beefe,'
Nash (M<=Kerrow), i. 269.

* Ascapart is a giant thirty feet high who figures in the legend of
Sir Bevis of Southampton.' Chambers.

12 6 Commentary,

1. 240. a scarce brooke. Donne uses 'scarce' in this sense, i.e.
' scanty '. It is not common. See note to 1. 4.

Page 168, 1. 242. Macchabees modestie. 'And if I have done well,
and as is fitting the story, it is that which I have desired ; but if
slenderly and meanly, it is that which I could attain unto.' 2 Macca-
bees XV. 38.

P.\GE 168. Satvre V.

I. 9. If all things be in all. ' All things are concealed in all. One
of them all is the concealer of the rest — their corporeal vessel, ex-
ternal, visible and movable.' Paracelsus, Caelum Philosophorum :
The First Cation, Concerning the Nature and Properties of Mercury.

Page 169, 1. 31. You Sir, dr'c: i. e. Sir Thomas Egerton, whose
service Donne entered probably in 1598 and left in 1601-2. Norton
says 1596 to 1600. In 1596 Egerton was made Lord Keeper. In
1597 he was busy with the reform of some of the abuses connected
with the Clerkship of the Star Chamber, and this is probably what
Donne has in view throughout the Satyre. ' For some years the
administration of this ofifice had given rise to complaints. In the
last Parliament a bill had been brought in . . . for the reformation of
it ; but by a little management on the part of the Speaker had been
thrown out on the second reading. Upon this I suppose the com-
plainants addressed themselves to the Queen. For it appears that
the matter was under inquiry in 1595, when Puckering was Lord
Keeper ; and it is certain that at a later period some of the fees
claimed by the Clerk of Council were by authority of the Lord
Keeper Egerton restrained.' Spedding, Letters and Life of Francis
Bacon, ii. 56. In the note Spedding refers to a MS. at Bridgewater
House containing ' The humble petition of the Clerk of the Council
concerning his fees restrained by the Rt. Hon. the Lord Keeper '.
Bacon held the reversion to this Clerkship and in a long letter to
Egerton he discusses in detail the nature of the ' claim'd fees '. The
question was not settled till 1605. It will be noticed that in several
editions and MSS. the reading is ' claim'd fees '.

II, 37-41. These lines are correctly printed in 16)^, though the
old use of the semicolon to indicate at one time a little less than
a full stop, at another just a little more than a comma, has caused
confusion. I have, therefore, ventured to alter the first (after ' farre ')
to a full stop, and the second (after ' duties ') to a comma. ' That ',
says Donne (the italics give emphasis), ' was the iron age when justice
was sold. Now ' (in this ' age of rusty iron ') ' injustice is sold dearer.
Once you have allowed all the demands made on you, you find,
suitors (and suitors are gamblers), that the money you toiled for
has passed into other hands, the lands for which you urged your
rival claims has escaped you, as Angelica escaped while Ferrau and
Rinaldo fought for her.'

To the reading of the editions 16)^-^4, which Chambers has

Satyr es. 127

Ldopted (but by printing in roman letters he makes ' that ' a relative
)ronoun, and ' iron age ' subject to ' did allow '), I can attach no
neaning :

The iron Age that was, when justice was sold (now

Injustice is sold dearer) did allow

All claim'd fees and duties. Gamesters anon.

H;ow did the iron age allow fees and duties? The text of i66()
everts to that of i6)) (keeping the ' claim'd fees ' of i6)^-j4), but
ioes not improve the punctuation by changing the semicolon after
farre ' to a comma.

Mr. Allen {Jiise of Formal Satire, d:'c.) points out that the
illusion to the age of ' rusty iron ', which deserves some worse
lame, is obviously derived from Juvenal XIII. 28 ff. :

Nunc aetas agitur, peioraque saecula ferri
Temporibus : quorum sceleri non invenit ipsa
Nomen, et a nuUo posuit natura metallo.

With Donne's

so controverted lands
Scape, like Angelica, the strivers hands

compare Chaucer's

We strive as did the houndes for the boon
Thei foughte al day and yet hir parte was noon :
Ther cam a kyte, whil that they were so wrothe.
And bar away the boon betwixt hem bothe.
And therfore at the kynges country brother
Eche man for himself, there is noon other.

Knightes Tale, 11. 319 ff.

II. 45-6. powre of the Courts below Flow. Grosart and Chambers
silently alter to ' Flows ', but both the editions and MSS. have the
plural form. Franz notes the construction in Shakespeare :

The venom of such looks, we fairly hope,

Have lost their quality. Hen. V, v. ii. 18.

All the power of his wits have given way to his impatience.

Lear, iii. v. 4.

The last is a very close parallel. The proximity of the plural noun
in the prepositional phrase is the chief determining factor, but in
some cases the combined noun and qualifying phrase has a plural
force — 'such venomous looks', 'his mental powers or faculties.'

Page 170, 1. 61. heavens Courts. There can be no doubt that
the plural is right : ' so the Roman profession seems to exhale, and
refine our wills from earthly Drugs, and Lees, more then the
Reformed, and so seems to bring us nearer heaven, but then that
carries heaven farther from us, by making us pass so many Courts,
and Offices of Saints in this life, in all our petitions,' &c. Letters, 102.

12 8 Commentary.

11. 65-8. Compare : ' If a Pursevant, if a Serjeant come to thee
from the King, in any Court of Justice, though he come to put thee
in trouble, to call thee to an account, yet thou receivest him, thou
entertainest him, thou palest him fees.' Sermons 80. 52. 525.
Gardiner, writing of the treatment of Catholics under Elizabeth,
says: 'Hard as this treatment was, it was made worse by the mis-
conduct of the constables and pursevants whose business it was to
search for the priests who took refuge in the secret chambers which
were always to be found in the mansions of the Catholic gentry.
These wretches, under pretence of discovering the concealed fugitives,
were in the habit of wantonly destroying the furniture or of carrying
off valuable property.' Hist, of England, i. 97.

Page 171, 1. 91. The right reading of this line must be either
{a) that which we have taken from N and TCD, which differs
only by a letter from that of i6))-6() ; or {b) that of ^2/, B, and
other MSS. :

And div'd neare drowning, for what vanished.

The first refers to the suitor. He, like the dog, dives for what
has vanished ; goes to law for what is irrecoverable. The second
reading would refer to the dog and continue the illustration : ' Thou
art the dog whom shadows cozened and who div'd for what vanish'd.'
The ambiguity accounts for the vacillation of the MSS. and editions.
The reading of i66() is a conjectural emendation. The ' div'd'st ' of
some MSS. is an endeavour to get an agreement of tenses after
' what's ' had become ' what '.

Page 172. Vpon Mr. Thomas Coryats Crudities.

These verses were first published in 161 1 with a mass of witty and
scurrilous verses by all the ' wits ' of the day, prefixed to Coryats
Crudities hastily gobbled up in Jive months travells in France, Savoy,
Italy, Rhaetia . . . Newly digested in the hungry aire of Odcombe, in
the County of Somerset, and now dispersed to the nourishment of the
travelling members of this Kingdom. Coryat was an eccentric and
a favourite butt of the wits, but was not without ability as well as
enterprise. In 161 2 he set out on a journey through the East which
took him to Constantinople, Jerusalem, Armenia, Mesopotamia,
Persia, and India. In his letters to the wits at home he sends
greetings to, among others, Christopher Brooke, John Hoskins (as
' Mr. Ecquinoctial Pasticrust of the Middle Temple '), Ben Jonson,
George Garrat, and * M. John Donne, the author of two most elegant
Latine Bookes, Pseudofnartyr and Ignatius Conclave.' He died at
Surat in 161 7.

1. 2. leavened spirit. This is the reading of 1611. It was altered
in 164^ to ' learned ', and modern editors have neglected to correct
the error. A glance at the first line shows that ' leavened ' is right.
It is leaven which raises bread. A 'leavened spirit' is one easily

Saty?^^

es. 129

puffed up by the ' love of greatness '. There is much more of satire
in such an epithet than in ' learned '.

I. 17. great Lunatiqiie, i.e. probably 'great humourist', whose
moods and whims are governed by the changeful moon. See O.E.D.,
whicii quotes :

Ther (i.e. women's) hertys chaunge never . , .

Ther sect ys no thing lunatyke. Lydgate.

' By nativitie they be lunaticke ... as borne under the influence of
Luna, and therefore as firnie ... as melting waxe.' Greene,
Ma mil Ha.

1. 22. Mtinster. The Cosniographia Universalis (1541) of Sebas-
tian Munster (1489-1552).

1, 22. Gesner. The Bibliotheca Universalis, sine Catalogus
Omnium Scriptorum in Lingids Lafina, Graeca, et Hebraica, 1545, by
Conrad von Gesner of Zurich (1516-1565). Norton quotes from
Morhof 's Polyhistor : ' Conradus Gesner inter universales et perpetuos
Catalogorum scriptores principatum obtinet'; and from Dr. Johnson :
' The book upon which all my fame was originally founded.'

1. 23. Gallo-belgicus. See Epigrams.

Page 173, 1. 56. Which casts at Portescues. Grosart offers the
only intelligible explanation of this phrase. He identifies the
' Portescue ' with the ' Portaque ' or ' Portegue ', the great crusado of
Portugal, worth ^^3 r zs., and quotes from Harrington, On Playe :
' Where lords and great men have been disposed to play deep play,
and not having money about them, have cut cards instead of counters,
with asseverance (on their honours) to pay for every piece of card so
lost a portegue.' Donne's reference to the use which is to be made
of Coryat's books shows clearly that he is speaking of some such
custom as this. Chambers asks pertinently, would the phrase not be
' for Portescues ' ? but ' to cast at Portescues ' may have been a term,
perhaps translated. A greater difficulty is that ' Portescue ' is not
given as a form of ' Portague ' by the O.E.D., but a false etymology
connecting it with ' escus ', crowns, may have produced it.

The following poem is also found among the poems prefi.xed to
Coryat's Crudities. It may be by Donne, but was not printed in any
edition of his poems :

. yncipit Joannes Dones.

Oe her's a Man, worthy indeede to trauell ;

,Fat Libian plaines, strangest Chinas grauell.
For Europe well hath scene him stirre his stumpes :
Turning his double shoes to simple pumpes.
And for relation, looke he doth afford
Almost for euery step he tooke a word ;
What had he done had he ere hug'd th'Ocean
With swimming Drake or famous Magelan ?

11 317.3 K

L'

130 Commentary, i:f\

And kis'd that vnturn'd^ cheeke of our old mother,
Since so our Europes world he can discouer ?
It's not that French * which made his Gyant ' see
Those vncouth Hands where wordes frozen bee,
Till by the thaw next yeare they'r voic't againe ;
Whose Fapagauts, Andoiiekts, and that traine
Should be such matter for a Pope to curse
As he would make ; make ! makes ten times worse.
And yet so pleasing as shall laughter moue :
And be his vaine, his gaine, his praise, his loue.

Sit not still then, keeping fames trump vnblowne :

But get thee Coryate to some land vnknowne.

From whece proclaime thy wisdom with those woders,

Rarer then sommers snowes, or winters thunders.

And take this praise of that th'ast done alreadie :

T'is pitty ere ^^-^ flow should haue an eddie.

Explicit loannes Dories.

Page 174. In eundem Macaronicum.

A writer in Notes and Queries^ 3rd Series, vii, 1865, gives the
following translation of these lines :

As many perfect linguists as these two distichs make.
So many prudent statesmen will this book of yours produce.
To me the honour is sufficient of being understood : for I leave
To you the honour of being believed by no one.

LETTERS TO SEVERALL PERSONAGES.

Of Donne's Letters the earliest are the Storme and Calme which
were written in 1597. The two letters to Sir Henry Wotton, ' Sir,
More then kisses ' and ' Heres no more newes, then vertue ', belong
to 1597-8. The fresh letter here published, H: W: in Hiber:
belligeratiti (^. 188), was sent to Wotton in 1599. That To Mr Rowland
Woodward (p. 185) was probably written about the same time, and to
these years — 1598 to about 1608 — belong also, I am inclined to think,
the group of short letters beginning with To Mr T. IV. at p. 205.
There are very few indications of date. In that to Mr. R. W.
(pp. 209-10) an allusion is made to the disappointment of hopes in
connexion with Guiana :

Guyanaes harvest is nip'd in the spring,
I feare ; And with us (me thinkes) Fate deales so
As with the Jewes guide God did ; he did show
Him the rich land, but bar'd his entry in :
Oh, slownes is our punishment and sinne.
Grosart and Chambers refer this, and * the Spanish businesse ' below,

' Terra incognita, '^ Rablais, ' Pantagruel.

(These notes are given in the margin of the original, opposite the words explained.)

Letters to Severa/l Personages. 131

to 1613-14. The more probable reference is to the disappointment
of Raleigh's hopes, in 1596 and the years immediately following, that
the Government might be persuaded to make a settlement in Guiana,
both on account of its wealth and as a strategic point to be used in
harassing the King of Spain. Coolly received by Burleigh, Raleigh's
scheme excited considerable enthusiasm, and Chapman wrote h\sDe
Guiana : Carmen Epicum, prefixed to Lawrence Keymis's A Relation
of the Second Voyage to Gtiiana (1596), to celebrate Raleigh's achieve-
ment and to promote his scheme. The ' Spanish businesse ', i. e.
businesses, which, Donne complains,

as the Earth between the Moone and Sun
Eclipse the light which Guiana would give,

are probably the efforts in the direction of peace made by the party
in the Government opposed to Essex. Guiana is referred to in the
Satyres which certainly belong to these years, and in Elegie XX: Loves
W^cr, which cannot be dated so late as 1613-14. In 1598 Chamber-
lain writes to Carleton : ' Sir John Gilbert, with six or seven saile, one
and other, is gone for Guiana, and I heare that Sir Walter Raleigh
should be so deeply discontented because he thrives no better, that he
is not far off from making that way himself. Chamberlain's Letters,
Camd. Soc. 1861. Compare also: 'The Queene seemede troubled
to-daye ; Hatton came out from her presence with ill countenance,
and pulled me aside by the gyrdle and saide in a secrete waie ; If
you have any suite to-day praie you put it aside. The sunne doth not
shine. Tis this accursede Spanish businesse ; so will I not adventure
her Highnesse choler, lest she should collar me also.' Sir John
Harington's Nugae Antiquae, i. 176. (Note dated 1598.) All these
letters are found in the Westmoreland MS. ( W), whose order I have
adopted, and the titles they bear— 'To Mr H. W.', 'To Mr C. B.'—
suggest that they belong to a period before either Wotton or Brooke was
well known, at least before Wotton had been knighted. The tone
throughout points to their belonging to the same time. They are full
of allusions now difficult or impossible to explain. They are written to
intimate friends. ' Thou ' is the pronoun used throughout, whereas
' You ' is the formula in the letters to noble ladies. Wotton, Christo-
pher and Samuel Brooke, Rowland and Thomas Woodward are among
the names which can be identified, and they are the names of Donne's
most intimate friends in his earlier years. Probably there were answers
to Donne's letters. He refers to poems which have called forth his
poems. One of these has been preserved in the Westmoreland MS.,
though we cannot tell who wrote it. A Bodleian MS. contains another
verse letter written to Donne in the same style as these letters, a little
crabbed and enigmatical, and it is addressed to him as Secretary to
Sir Thomas Egerton. This whole correspondence, then, I should be
inclined to date from 1597 to about 1607-8. The last is probably the
date of the letter To E. of D. or To L. of D. (so in IV), beginning :

k 2

132 Commentary,

See Sir, how as the Suns hot MascuHne flame

Begets strange creatures on Niles durty shme.
This I have transferred to the Divine Poems, and shall give
reasons later for ascribing it to about this year, and for questioning
the identification of its recipient with Viscount Doncaster, later Earl
of Carlisle.

Of the remaining Letters some date themselves pretty definitely.
Donne formed the acquaintance of Lady Bedford about 1 607-8 when
she came to Twickenham, and the two letters to her — 'Reason is our
Soules lefthand' (p. i89)and 'You have refin'dmee' (p. 191) — probably
belong to the early years of their friendship. The second suggests that
the poet is himself at Mitcham. The long, difficult letter, ' T'havc
written then ' (p. 195), belongs probably to some year following 1609.
There is an allusion to Virginia, in which there was a quickening of
interest in 1 609 (see Elegie XIV, Note), and the ' two new starres ' sent
' lately to the firmament ' may be Lady Markham (died May 4, 1609)
and Mris Boulstred (died Aug. 4, 1609). This is Chambers's conjec-
ture; but Norton identifies them with Prince Henry (diedNov.6, 1612)
and the Countess's brother, Lord Harington, who died early in 16 14.
Public characters like these are more fittingly described as stars, so
that the poem probably belongs to 16 14, to which year certainly belongs
the letter To the Countesse of Salisbury {^. 224). What New Year
called iorth the letter to Lady Bedford, beginning 'This twilight of two
years' (p. 198), we do not know, nor the date of the long letter in
triplets, ' Honour is so sublime perfection' (p. 218). But the latter
was most probably written from France in 1611-12, like the frag-
mentary letter which follows, and the letter, similar in verse and in
'metaphysics', To the Lady Carey and Mrs Essex Riche (p. 221).
Donne had a little shocked his noble lady friends by the extravagance
of his adulation of the dead child Mrs. Ehzabeth Drury, in 161 1, and
these letters are written to make his peace and to show the pitch he
is capable of soaring to in praise of their maturer virtues.

To Sir Henry Wotton (p. 214), Donne wrote in a somewhat more
elevated and respectful strain than that of his earlier letters, when
the former set out on his embassy to Venice in 1604. The letter to
Sir Henry Goodyere (p. 183) belongs to the Mitcham days, 1605-8.
To Sir Edward Herbert (p. 193) he wrote 'at Julyers', therefore in
1 610. The letter To the Countesse of Huntingdon (p. 201) was pro-
bably written just before Donne took orders, 1614-15. The date of
the letter To Mris M. H. (p. 216), that is, to Mrs. Magdalen Herbert,
not yet Lady Danvers, must have been earlier than her second
marriage in 1608 — the exact day of that marriage I do not know —
probably in 1604, as the verse, style and tone closely resemble that of
the letter to Wotton of that year. This suits the tenor of the
letter, which implies that she had not yet married Sir John Danvers.
The last in the collection of the letters to Lady Bedford, ' You that
are she and you ' (p. 227), seems from its position in 16}) and several

Letters to Several! Personages, 133

MSS. to have been sent to her with the elegy called Death, and
to have been evoked by the death of Lady Markhani or Mrs.
Boulstred in 1609.

The majority of the letters thus belong to the years 1596-7 to
1607-8, the remainder to the next six years. With the Futierall
Ek^^ies and the earlier of the Divine Poerns they represent the middle
and on the whole least attractive period of Donne's life and work.
The Songs and Sonets and Elegies are the expression of his brilliant
and stormy youth, the Holy Sonnets and the hymns are the utterance
of his ascetic and penitent last years. In the interval between the
two, the wit, the courtier, the man of the world, and the divine jostle
each other in Donne's works in away that is not a little disconcerting
to readers of an age and temper less habituated to strong contrasts.

Page 175. The Storm e.

After the Cadiz expedition in 1596, the King of Spain began the
preparation of a second Armada. With a view to destroying this
Elizabeth fitted out a large fleet under the command of Essex,
Howard, and Raleigh. The storm described in Donne's letter so
damaged the fleet that the larger purpose was abandoned and a
smaller expedition, after visiting the Spanish coast, proceeded to the
Azores, with a view to intercepting the silver fleet returning from
America. Owing to dissensions between Raleigh and Essex, it
failed of its purpose. This was the famous ' Islands Expedition '.

The description of the departure and the storm which followed
was probably written in Plymouth, whither the ships had to put back,
and whence they sailed again about a month later; therefore in July-
August, 1597. 'We imbarked our Army, and set sayle about the
ninth of July, and for two dayes space were accompanied with a faire

leading North-easterly wind.' (Mildly it kist our sailes, &c.)

'\\'ee now being in this faire course, some sixtie leagues onwards our
journey with our whole Fleet together, there suddenly arose a fierce
and tempestuous storme full in our teethe, continuing forfoure dayes
with so great violence, as that now everyone was inforced rather to
looke to his own safetie, and with a low saile to serve the Seas, then
to beate it up against the stormy windes to keep together, or to folUjw
the directions for the places of meeting.' A larger Relation of the
said Hand Voyage written by Sir Arthur Gorges, o>v. Pnrchas his
Pilgrimes. Glasg. mcmvii. While at Plymouth Donne wrote
a prose letter, to whom is not clear, preserved in the Burley Common-
place Book. There he speaks of ' so very bad wether y' even some
of y'= mariners have been drawen to think it were not altogether amiss
to pray, and myself heard one of them say, (jod help us '.

To Mr. Christopher Brooke. Donne's intimate friend and cham-
ber-fellow at Lincoln's Inn. He was Donne's chief abetter in his
secret marriage, his younger brother Samuel performing the ceremony.
They were the sons of Robert Brooke, Alderman of and once M.P.

134 Commentary,

for York, and his wife Jane Maltby, The Alderman had other sons
who followed in his footsteps and figure among the Freemen of York,
but Christopher and Samuel earned a wider reputation. At Lincoln's
Inn, Christopher wrote verses and cultivated the society of the wits.
Wood mentions as his friends and admirers Selden and Jonson,
Drayton and Browne, Wither and Davies of Hereford. Browne sings
his praises in the second song of the second book of Britannia's
Pastorals, and in The Shepherds Pipe ( 1 6 1 4) urges him to sing a higher
strain. His poems, which have been collected and edited by the late
Dr. Grosart, include an Elegy on Prince Henry, and a long poem of no
merit, The Ghost of Richard the Third {Miscellanies of the Ftdler
Worthies Library, vol. iv, 1872). In 16 14 he became a bencher and
Summer Reader at Lincoln's Inn. He died February 7, i62f.

1. 4. By Milliard draivne. Nicholas Hilliard (1537-1619), the first
English miniature painter. He was goldsmith, carver, and limner to
Queen Elizabeth, and engraved her second great seal in 1586. He
drew a portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots, at eighteen, and executed
miniatures of many contemporaries. He also wrote a treatise on
miniature painting. Mr. Laurence Binyon thinks it is quite possible
that the miniature from which Marshall, about 1635, engraved the
portrait of Donne as a young man, was by Hilliard. It is, he says,
quite in his style.

1. 13. From out her pregnant intrailes. The ancients attributed
winds to the effect of exhalations from the earth. Seneca, Qunestiones
Naturales, v. 4, discusses various causes but mentions this first :

* Sometimes the earth herself emits a great quantity of air, which she
breathes out of her hidden recesses ... A suggestion has been made
which I cannot make up my mind to believe, and yet I cannot pass
over without mention. In our bodies food produces flatulence, the
emission of which causes great offence to ones nasal susceptibilities ;
sometimes a report accompanies the relief of the stomach, sometimes
there is more polite smothering of it. In like manner it is supposed
the great frame of things when assimilating its nourishment emits air.
It is a lucky thing for us that nature's digestion is good, else we might
apprehend some less agreeable consequences.' {Q. N. translated by
John Clarke, with notes by Sir Archibald Geikie, 19 10.) These ex-
halations, according to one view, mounting up were driven back by
the violence of the stars, or by inability to pass the frozen middle
region of the air-- hence commotions. (Pliny, Nat. Hist. ii. 38, 45,
47, 48.) This explains Donne's ' middle marble room ', where

• marble ' may mean * hard ', or possibly ' blue ' referring to the colour
of the heavens. It is so used by Studley in his translations of
Seneca's tragedies : 'Whereas the marble sea doth fleete,' Hipp. i. 25 ;
'When marble skies no filthy fog doth dim,' Here. Oet. ii. 8 ; 'The
monstrous hags of marble seas ' (monstra caerulei mans), Hipp. v. 5,
I owe this suggestion to Miss Evelyn Spearing {The Elizabethan
' Tenne Tragedies of Seneca '. Mod. Lang. Revieiv, iv. 4). But the

Letters to Several! Personages, 135

peripatetic view was that the heavens were made of hard, solid,
though transparent, concentric spheres : * Tycho will have two distinct
matters of heaven and ayre ; but to say truth, with some small modi-
fications, they ' (i. e. Tycho Brahe and Christopher Rotman) ' have
one and the self same opinion about the essence and matter of
heavens ; that it is not hard and impenetrable, as Peripateticks hold,
transparent, of a quinta essentia^ but that it is penetrable and soft as
the ayre itself is, and that the planets move in it ', (according to the
older view each was fixed in its sphere) ' as birds in the ayre, fishes
in the sea.' Burton, Anat. of Melancholy, part ii, sect. 2, Men. 3.

' Wind ', says Donne elsewhere, ' is a mixt Meteor, to the making
whereof, diverse occasions concurre with exhalations.' Sermons 80.

3^- 305-

The movement which Donne has in view is described by

Du Bartas :

If heav'ns bright torches, from earth's Kidneys, sup
Som somwhat dry and heatfull Vapours up,
Th' ambitious lightning of their nimble Fire
Would suddenly neer th' Azure Cirques aspire :
But scarce so soon their fuming crest hath raught.
Or toucht the Coldness of the middle Vault,
And felt what force their mortall Enemy
In Garrison keeps there continually ;
When down again towards their Dam they bear,
Holp by the weight which they have drawn from her.
But in the instant, to their aid arrives
Another new heat, which their heart revives,
Re-arms their hand, and having staied their flight,
Better resolv'd brings them again to fight.

Well fortifi'd then by these fresh supplies, -
More bravely they renew their enterprize :
And one-while th' upper hand (with honor) getting,
Another-while disgracefully retreating.
Our lower Aire they tosse in sundry sort.
As weak or strong their matter doth comport.
This lasts not long ; because the heat and cold,
Equall in force and fortune, equall bold
In these assaults ; to end this sudden brail,
Th' one stops their mounting, th' other stayes their fall :
So that this vapour, never resting stound.
Stands never still, but makes his motion round,
Posteth from Pole to Pole, and flies amain
From Spain to India, and from Inde to Spain.

Sylvester, Du Bartas, First Week, Second Day.

1. 18. prisoners, which lye but for fees, i.e. the fees due to the gaoler.
* And as prisoners discharg'd of actions may lye for fees ; so when,' -Jicc.

136 Comme?ita7y,

Deaths Due// (1632), p. 9. Thirty-three years after this poem was
written. Donne thus uses the same figure in the last sermon he
ever preached.

V.\v,v. 176, 1. 38. /, a?id the Si/fine. The 'Yea, and the Sunne '
of Q shows that ' I ' here is probably the adverb, not the pronoun,
though the passage is ambiguous. Modern editors have all taken ' I '
as the pronoun.

11. 49-50. A/id do hear so

Like Jea/ous husba/ids, what tliey 7vould not ktiow.

Compare :

Crede mihi : nulli sunt crimina grata marito;

Nee quemquam, quamvis audiat ilia, iuvant.
Seu tepet, indicium securas perdis ad aures :

Sive amat, ofificio fit miser ille tuo.
Culpa nee ex facili, quamvis manifesta, probatur :

ludicis ilia sui tuta favore venit.
Viderit ipse licet, credet tamen ipse neganti :

Damnabitque oculos, et sibi verba dabit.
Adspiciet dominae lacrimas ; plorabit et ipse :

Et dicet, poenas garrulus iste dabit,

Ovid, Anions, II. ii. 51-60.

PAf.E 177, 1. 60. Strive. Later editions and Chambers read ' strives ',
but ' ordinance ' was used as a plural : ' The goodly ordinance which ,
were xii great Bombardes of brasse', and 'these six small iron ordi-
nance.' O. E. D. The word in this sense is now spelt 'ordnance'.

1. 66. tlie' Bermuda. It is probably unnecessary to change this to
'the'Bermudas.' The singular without the article is quite regular.

1. 67. Darknesse, lights elder /brother. The 'elder' of the MSS.
is grammatically more correct than the 'eldest' of the editions.
' We must return again to our stronghold, faith, and end with this,
that this beginning was, and before it, nothing. It is elder than
darkness, which is elder than light ; and was before confusion, which
is elder than order, by how much the universal Chaos preceded forms
and distinctions.' Essays in Divinity (ed. Jessop, 1855), p. 46.

Page 178. The Calme.

1. 4. // /'/oeke afflicts, d-^v. Aesop's Fab/es. Sir Thomas Rowc
recalled Donne's use of the fable, when he was Ambassador at the
Court of the Mogul. Of Ibrahim Khan, the Governor of Surat
after Zufilkhar Khan, he writes : * He was good but soe easy that he
does no good ; wee are not lesse afflicted with a block then before with
a storck." The Embassy, (s-'c. (Hakl. Soc), i. 82.

1. 8. t/iy mistresse g/asse. This poem, like the last, is prohab/y
addressed to Christopher Brooke, but it is not so headed in any

Letters to Several! Personages. 137

edition or MS. The Grolier Club editor ascribes the tirst heading
to both.

1. 14. or like ended playes. This suggests that the EHzabethan
stage was not so bare of furniture as used to be stated, and also that
furniture was not confined to the curtained-off rear-stage. What
Donne recalls is a stage deserted by the actors but cumbered with
furniture and decorations.

I. 16. a frippery, i.e. 'A place where cast-off clothes are sold',
O.E. D. 'Oh, ho, Monster; wee know what belongs to a frippery."
Tempest, iv. i. 225. Here the rigging has the appearance of an old-
clothes shop.

1. 17. No use of lantliornes. The reference is to the lanterns in
the high sterns of the ships, used to keep the fleet together. ' There
is no fear now of our losing one another.' Each squadron of a fleet
followed the light of its Admiral. Essex speaks of having lost, or
missing, 'Sir Walter Raleigh with thirty sailes that in the night
followed his light.' Purchas, xx. 24—5.

1. 18. Feathers and dust. 'He esteemeth John Done the first
poet in the world for some things : his verses of the Lost Chaine
he hath by heart : and that passage of the Calme, That dust and
feathers doe not stirre, all was soe quiet. Affirmeth Donne to have
written all his best peeces ere he was twenty-five yeares old.' Jonson's
Conversations 7vith Drummond. AVhen Donne wrote The Calme he
was in his twenty-fifth year.

1. 21. lost friends. Raleigh and his squadron lost the main fleet
while off the coast of Spain, before they set sail definitely for the
Azores. He rejoined the fleet at the Islands. Donne's poem was
l)robably written in the interval.

The reading of some MSS., ' lefte friends,' is quite a possible one.
Carleton, writing from Venice to Chamberlain, says : ' Let me tell you,
for your comfort (for I imagine what is mine is yours) that my last
news from the left island . . . took knowledge of my vigilancy and
diligency.' The ' left island ' is Great Britain, and Donne may mean
no more than that ' we can neither get back to our friends nor on to
our enemies.' There may be no allusion to Raleigh's ships.

1. 23. the Calenture. ' A disease incident to sailors within the
tropics, characterized by delirium in which the patient, it is said,
fancies the sea to be green fields, and desires to leap into it.'
O.E.D. Theobald had the Calenture in mind when he conjectured
that Falstaff * babbled o" green fields '.

Pac;e 179, 1. 33. Like Bajazet encaged, (S'c. : an echo of RLirlowe's
Taniburlaine :

There whiles he lives shall Bajazet be kept ;
And where I go be thus in triumph drawn :

This is my mind, and I will have it so.

138 Commentary,

Not all the kings and emperors of the earth,
If they would lay their crowns before my feet,
Shall ransom him or take him from his cage :
The ages that shall talk of Tamburlaine,
Even from this day to Plato's wondrous year,
Shall talk how I have handled Bajazet.

There are frequent references to this scene in contemporary
literature.

11. 35-6. a Miriade Of Ants, &-r. ' Erat ei ' (i. e. Tiberius) ' in
oblectamentis serpens draco, quem ex consuetudine manu sua
cibaturus, cum consumptum a formicis invenisset, monitus est ut
vim roultitudinis caveret.' Suetonius, Ti'd. 72.

1. 37. Sea-goales, i.e. sea-gaols, 'goale' was a common spelling.
See next poem, 1. 52, 'the worlds thy goale.' Strangely enough,
neither the Grolier Club editor nor Chambers seems to have recog-
nized the word here, in The Calme, though in the next poem they
change 'goale' to 'gaol' without comment. The Grolier Club
editor retains ' goales ' and Chambers adopts the reading of the later
editions, ' sea-gulls.' A gull would have no difficulty in overtaking the
swiftest ship which ever sailed. Grosart takes the passage correctly.
' Sea-goales ' is an accurate definition of the galleys. ' Finny-chips ' is
a vivid description of their appearance. Compare :

One of these small bodies fitted so,
This soul inform'd, and abled it to row
Itselfe with finnie oars.

Progresse of the Souk, I. 23.
Never again shall I with finny oar
Put from, or draw unto the faithful shore.

Herrick, His Tears to Thamesis.

1. 38. our Pinnaces. ' Venices ' is the reading of 16}} and most of
the MSS., where, as in i66(), the word is often spelt ' Vinices '. But
I can find no example of the word ' Venice ' used for a species of ship,
and Mr. W. A. Craigie of the Oxford English Dictionary tells me that he
has no example recorded. The mistake probably arose in a confusion
of P and V. The word 'Pinnace ' is variously spelt, ' pynice ', ' pinnes ',
' pinace ', &c., &c. The pinnaces were the small, light-rigged, quick-
sailing vessels which acted as scouts for the fleet.

1. 48. A scourge,' gaitisi which wee all forget to pray. The ' forgot '
of i66g and several MSS. is tempting — 'a scourge against which we
all in setting out forgot to pray.' I rather think, however, that what
Donne means is ' a scourge against which we all at sea always forget
to pray, for to pray for wind at sea is generally to pray for cold under
the poles, for heat in hell '. The ' forgot ' makes the reference too
definite. At the same time, ' forgot ' is so obvious a reading that it
is difficult to account for ' forget ' except on the supposition that it is
right.

Letters to Sever all Personages. 139

11. 51-4. How little more alas,

Is man now, then before he was ? he was
Nothing ; for us, wee are for nothing fit ;
Chance^ or ourselves still disproportion it.

Donne is here playing with an antithesis which apparently he owes
to the rhetoric of Tertullian. ' Canst thou choose ', says the poet in
one of his later sermons, ' but think God as perfect now, at least as
he was at first, and can he not as easily make thee up againe of
nothing, as he made thee of nothing at first ? Recogita quid fueris
aniequam esses. Think over thyselfe ; what wast thou before thou
wast anything? Meminisses utique, si fuisses: if thou had'st been
anything than, surely thou would'st remember it now. Qui non
eras, f actus es ; cum iterum non eris, fies. Thou that wast once
nothing, wast made this that thou art now ; and when thou shalt
be nothing again, thou shalt be made better then thou art yet.'
Sermons 50. 14. 109. A note in the margin indicates that the
quotations are from Tertullian, and Donne is echoing here the
antithetical Recogita quid fueris antequam esses.

This echo is certainly made more obvious to the ear by the
punctuation of 166^, which Grosart, the Grolier Club editor, and
Chambers all follow. The last reads :

How little more, alas,
Is man now, than, before he was, he was ?
Nothing for us, we are for nothing fit ;
Chance, or ourselves, still disproportion it.

This may be right ; but after careful consideration I have retained
the punctuation of 16^). In the first place, if the 1669 text be right
it is not clear why the poet did not preserve the regular order :

Is man now than he was before he was.

To place ' he was ' at the end of the line was in the circumstances
to court ambiguity, and is not metrically requisite. In the second
place, the rhetorical question asked requires an answer, and that is
given most clearly by the punctuation of 16^). ' How little more,
alas, is man now than [he was] before he was ? He was nothing ;
and as for us, we are fit for nothing. Chance or ourselves still throw
us out of gear with everything.' To be nothing and to be fit for
nothing — there is all the difference. In the i66g version it is not
easy to see the relevance of the rhetorical question and of the line
which follows ; 'Nothing for us, we are for nothing fit.' This seems
to introduce a new thought^ a fresh antithesis. It is not quite true.
A breeze would fit them very well.

The use of ' for ' in * for us ', as I have taken it, is quite idiomatic :

For me, I am the mistress of my fate.

Shakespeare, Rape of Lucrece, 102 1.

140 Commentary.

For the rest o' the fleet, they all have met again.

Id., The Tempest, i. i. 232.

Pace 180. To S' Henry Wotton.

The occasion of this letter was apparently (see my article. Bacon's
Poem, Tlie World: Its Date And Relation to Certain Other Poems :
Mod. Lang. Rev., April, 191 1) a literary dc'bat among some of the
wits of Essex's circle. The subject of the de'bat was ' Which kind
of life is best, that of Court, Country, or City ? ' and the suggestion
came from the two epigrams in the Greek Anthology attributed
to Posidippus and Metrodorus respectively. In the first {Uoi-qv T15
PioTOLo rdfjirj rpiftov \) each kind of life in turn is condemned ; in the
second each is defended. These epigrams were paraphrased in
Tottel's Miscellany (1557) by Nicholas Grimald, and again in the
Arte of English Poesie (1589), attributed to George Puttenham.
Stimulated perhaps by the latter version, in which the Court first
appears as one of the principal spheres of life, or by Ronsard's
French version in which also the ' cours des Roys ', unknown to the
Greek poet, are introduced. Bacon wrote his well-known para-
phrase :

The world's a bubble : and the life of man

Less than a span.

It is just possible too that he wrote a paraphrase, similar in verse,
of the second epigram, which I have printed in the article referred to.
A copy of The World was found among AVotton's papers and was
printed in the Reliquiae Wottonianae {16^ i) signed ' Fra. Lord Bacon '.
It had already been published by Thomas Farnaby in \\\s Florilegiuin
Epigrammatum Graecorum o^c. (1629). Bacon probably gave AN'otton
a copy and he appears to have shown it to his friends. Among these
was Thomas Bastard, who, to judge by the numerous epigrams he
addressed to Essex, belonged to the same circle as Bacon, I)onne, and
Wotton, — if We may so describe it, but probably every young man of
letters looked to Essex for patronage. Bastard's poem runs :

Ad Henricum Wottonum.

Wotton, the country, and the country swayne,
How can they yeeld a Poet any sense ?
How can they stirre him up or heat his vaine ?
How can they feed him with intelligence ?
You have that fire which can a witt enflame
In happy London Englands fayrest eye :
Well may you Poets have of worthy name
Which have the foode and life of Poetry.
And yet the Country or the towne may swaye
Or beare a part, as clownes do in a play.

Donne was one of those to whom Wotton showed Bacon's poem,

Letters to Sever all Personages. 141

and the result was the present letter which occasionally echoes Bacon's
words. Wotton replied to it in some characteristic verses preserved
in B (Lord Ellesmere's MS.) and P (belonging to Captain Harris).
I print it from the former :

To J: D : from M' H : IV:
W^orthie Sir :
Tis not a coate of gray or Shepheards life,
Tis not in feilds or woods remote to live,
That adds or takes from one that peace or strife.
Which to our dayes such good or ill doth give :
It is the mind that make the mans estate 5

For ever happy or unfortunate.

Then first the mind of passions must be free

Of him that would to happiness aspire ;
Whether in Princes Pallaces he bee,

Or whether to his cottage he retire ; lo

For our desires that on extreames are bent
Are frends to care and traitors to content.

Nor should wee blame our frends though false they bee
Since there are thousands false, for one that's true.

But our own blindness, that we cannot see 1 5

To chuse the best, although they bee but few :

For he that every fained frend will trust.

Proves true to frend, but to himself unjust.

The faults wee have are they that make our woe.

Our virtues are the motives of our joye, ao

Then is it vayne, if wee to desarts goe

To seek our bliss, or shroud us from annoy :

Our place need not be changed, but our Will,

For every where wee may do good or ill.

But this I doe not dedicate to thee, 25

As one that holds himself fitt to advise,
Or that my lines to him should precepts be

That is less ill then I, and much more wise :
Yet 'tis no harme mortality to preach.
For men doe often leame when they do teach.

The date of the deda/ is before April 1598, when Bastard's Chresto-
leros was entered on the Stationers' Register, probably 1597-8, the
interval between the return of the Islands Expedition and Donne's
entry into the household of Sir Thomas Egerton. Mr. Chambers has
shown that during this interval Donne was occasionally employed by
Cecil to carry letters to and from the commanders of the English
forces still in France. But it was not till about April 1598 that he
found permanent employment.

1. 8. Remoraes ; Browne doubts ' whether the story of the remora be

142 Commentary.

not unreasonably amplified '. The name is given to any of the fish
belonging to the family Echeneididae, which by means of a suctorial
disk situated on the top of the head adhere to sharks, other large
fishes, vessels, &:c., letting go when they choose. The ancient natural-
ists reported that they could arrest a ship in full course. See
Bartholomaeus Anglicus, Lib. xiii, De Aqua et ejus Ornatu.

1. ri. the even line is the reading of all the MS. copies, and must
have been taken from one of these by the 1669 editor. The use of
the word is archaic and therefore more probably Donne's than an
editor's emendation. Compare Chaucer's ' €lf his stature he was of
even length ', i. e. 'a just mean between extremes, of proper magnitude
or degree '. The * even line ' is, as the context Shows, the exact mean
between the ' adverse icy poles '. I suspect that 'raging ' is an editorial
emendation. There are several demonstrable errors in the 1633 text
of this poem. The * other ' of /*, and * over ' of S, are errors which
point to ' even ' rather than * raging '.

1. 12. tK adverse icy poles. ^ The 'poles' of most MSS. is obviously
necessary if we are to have two temperate regions. The expression
is a condensed one for * either of the adverse icy poles '. Compare :

He that at sea prayes for more winde, as well
Under the poles may begge cold, heat in hell.

One cannot be under both the poles at once. One is ' under ' the
pole in Donne's cosmology because the poles are not the termini of
the earth's axis but of the heavens'. ' For the North and Southern
Pole, are the invariable terms of that Axis whereon the Heavens do
move.' Browne, Pseud. Epidem. vi. 7.

Tristior ilia
Terra sub ambobus non iacet ulla polis. Ovid, Pont. ii. 7. 64.

1. 17. Can dung and gar like ^ &=€. This is the text of the 1633
edition made consistent with itself, and it has the support of several
MSS. Clearly if we are to read ' or ' in one line we must do so in both,
and adopt the i6}^-6g text. It is tempting at first sight to do so,
but I believe the MSS. are right. What Donne means is, ' Can we
procure a perfume, or a medicine, by blending opposite stenches or
poisons ? ' This is his expansion of the question, ' Shall cities, built
of both extremes, be chosen ? ' The change to ' or ' obscures the
exact metaphysical point. It would be an improvement perhaps to
bracket the lines as parenthetical.

According to Donne's medical science the scorpion (probably its
flesh) was an antidote to its own poison : • I have as many Antidotes
as the Devill hath poisons, I have as much mercy as the Devill hath
malice ; There must be scorpions in the world ; but the Scorpion shall
cure the Scorpion ; there must be tentations ; but tentations shall adde
to mine and to thy glory, and Eripiam^ I will deliver thee.' Sermons
80. 52. 527. Obviously Donne could not ask in surprise, 'Can a
Scorpion or Torpedo cure a man ? ' Each can ; it is their combination

Letters to Sever a /I Perso?iages. 143

he deprecates. In Ignatius his Conclave he writes, ' and two Poysons
mingled might do no harnie.'

In speaking of scent made from dung Donne has probably the
statement of Paracelsus in his mind to which Sir Thomas Browne also
refers : ' And yet if, as Paracelsus encourageth. Ordure makes the
best Musk, and from the most fetid substances may be drawn the
most odoriferous Essences ; all that had not Vespasian's nose, might
boldly swear, here was a subject fit for such extractions.' Pseudodoxia
Epidemica, iii. 26.

Page 181, 11. 19-20. Cities are tvorst of all three ; of all three

( O k7iottie riddle^ each is worst equally.

This is the punctuation of 16)) and of D, H49, Lee, and W. The
later punctuation which Chambers has adopted and modernized, is not
found to be an improvement if scrutinized. He reads :

Cities are worst of all three ; of all three ?
O knotty riddle ! each is worst equally.

The mark of interrogation after ' three ' would be justifiable only if
the poet were going to expatiate upon the badness of cities. ' Of all
three? that is saying very little, &c., &c.' But this is not the tenor of
the passage. From one thought he is led to another. ' Cities are
worst of all three (i. e. Court, City, Country). Nay, each is equally
the worst.' The interjected 'O knottie riddle ' does not mean, ' Who
is to say which is the worst ? ' but ' How can it come that each is
worst ? This is a riddle ! ' Donne here echoes Bacon :

And Where's the citty from foul vice so free
But may be term'd the worst of all the three ?

11. 25-6. The country is a desert, c^c. The evidence for this reading
is so overwhelming that it is impossible to reject it. I have modified
the punctuation to bring out more clearly what I take it to mean.
' The country is a desert where no goodness is native, and therefore
rightly understood. Goodness in the country is like a foreign language,
a faculty not born with us, but acquired with pain, and never
thoroughly understood and mastered.' Only Dr. Johnson could stigma-
tize in adequate terms so harsh a construction, but the j6jj-j4
emendation is not less obscure. Does it mean that any good which
comes there quits it with all speed, while that which is native and
must stay is not understood ? This is not a lucid or just enough
thought to warrant departure from the better authorized text.

1. 27. prone to more evil Is ; The reading * mere evils ' of several
MSS., including Z>, H49, Lee, is tempting and way be right. In that
case ' meere ' has the now obsolete meaning of ' pure, unadulterated ',
' meere English', 'meere Irish', (Sec. in O. E. D., or more fully,
' absolute, entire, sheer, perfect, downright ', as in ' Th'obstinacie,
willfuU disobedience, meere lienge and disceite of the countrie
gentlemen,' Hist. MSS. Com. (1600), quoted in O. E. D. ; 'the

144 Comme?itary.

niLMC perdition o( the Turkish fleet,' Shakespeare, O/hel/o, ii. ii. 3.
Such a strong adjective would however come better after 'devills' in
the next Hne. Placed here it disturbs the climax. What Donne says
here is that men in the country become beasts, and more prone to evil
than beasts because of their higher faculties :

If lecherous goats, if serpents envious
Cannot be damn'd ; Alas ; why should I bee ?
Why should intent or reason, borne in mee,
Make sinnes, else e([uall, in mee more heinous ?

Holy Sonnets, IX, p. 326.

And in this same letter, 11. 41-2, he develops the thought further.

Pace 182, 11. 59-62. Only in this one thing, be no Galenist, c""r.
The Galenists perceived in the living body four humours ; hot, cold,
moist, and dry, and held that in health these were present in fixed
proportions. Diseases were due to disturbance of these proportions,
and were to be cured by correction of the disproportion by drugs,
these being used as they were themselves hot, cold, moist, or dry ; to
add to whichever humours were defective. The chymiques or school of
Paracelsus, held that each disease had an essence which might be got rid
of by being purged or driven from the body by an antagonistic remedy.

Pack 183. To S' Henry Goodveke.

Goodyere and Walton form between them the Boswell to whom we
owe our fullest and most intimate knowledge of the life of Donne. To
the former he wrote apparently a weekly letter in the years of his
residence at Pyrford, Mitcham, and London, And Goodyere preserved
his letters and his poems. Of the letters published by Donne's son
in 1 65 1-4, the greatest number, as well as the most interesting
and intimate, are addressed to Goodyere. Some appeared with the
first edition of the poems, and it is ultimately to Goodyere that we
probably owe the generally sound text of that edition.

Sir Henry Goodyere was the son of Sir William Goodyere of Monks
Kirby in Warwickshire, who was knighted by James in 1603, and
was the nephew of Sir Henry Goodyere (1534-95) of Polesworth in
Warwickshire. The older Sir Henry had got into trouble in con-
nexion with one of the conspiracies on behalf of Mary, Queen of Scots,
but redeemed his good name by excellent service in the Low
Countries, where he was knighted by Leicester. He married Frances,
daughter of Hugh Lowther of Lowther, Westmoreland, and left two
daughters, Frances and Anne. The latter, who succeeded the Countess
of Bedford as patroness to the poet Michael Drayton and as the ' Idea'
of his sonnets, married Sir Henry Raynsford. The former married her
cousin, the son of Sir William, and made him proprietor of Polesworth,
to which repeated allusion is made in Donne's Letters. He was
knighted, in 1599, in Dublin, by Essex. He is addressed as a knight
by Donne in 1601, and appears as such in the earhest years of
King James. (See Nichol's Progresses of King James.)

Letters to Several/ Perso?iages. 145

He was a friend of wits and poets and himself wrote occasional
verses in rivalry with his friends. Like Donne he wrote satirical
congratulatory verses for Coryats Crudities (1611) and an elegy
on Prince Henry for the second edition of Sylvester's Lachryviac
Lachrymarum (16 13), and there are others in MS., including an
Epithalamiuin on Princess Elizabeth.

The estate which Goodyere inherited was apparently encumbered,
and he was himself generous and extravagant. He was involved all
his life in money troubles and frequently petitioned for relief and
appointments. It was to him probably that Donne made a present
of one hundred pounds when his own fortunes had bettered. The
date of the present letter was between 1605 and i6o8, when Donne
was living at Mitcham. These were the years in which Goodyere
was a courtier. In 1604-5 ^^20 was stolen from his chamber
'at Court', and in 1605 he participated in the jousting at the Barriers.
Life at the dissolute and glittering Court of James I was ruinously
extravagant, and the note of warning in Donne's poem is very audible.
Sir Henry Goodyere died in March 1627-8.

Additional MS. 23229 (^2/) contains the following :

Funerall Verses sett on the hearse ) r p 1 ^t

of Henry Goodere knighte ; late j ° eswor

[March 18. 162I c]

Esteemed knight take triumph over deathe,

And over tyme by the eternal fame
Of Natures workes, while God did lende thee breath ;

Adornd with witt and skill to rule the same.
But what avayles thy gifts in such degrees
Since fortune frownd, and worlde had spite at these.

Heaven be thy rest, on earth thy lot was toyle ;

Thy private loss, ment to thy countryes gayne,
Bredde grief of mynde, which in thy brest did boyle,

Confyning cares whereof the scarres remayne.
Enjoy by death such passage into lyfe
As frees thee quyte from thoughts of worldly stryfe.

Wm. Goodere.
Camden transcribes his epitaph :

An ill yeare of a Goodyere us bereft,
Who gon to God much lacke of him here left ;
Full of good gifts, of body and of minde.
Wise, comely, learned, eloquent and kinde.

The Epitaph is probably by the same author as the Verses, a nephew
perhaps. Sir Henry's son predeceased him.

Page 183, 1. i. It is not necessary to change 'the past' of 7<5j^-j^
to ' last ' with i66<). ' The past year ' is good English for ' last year '.

Page 184, 1. 27. Goe ; ivhitherl Hence ; c>r. My punctuation,

II 917.3 r

146 Cofmnefitary.

which is that of some MSS., follows Donne's usual arrangement in
dialogue, dividing the speeches by semicolons. Chambers's textual
note misrepresents the earlier editions. He attributes to t6})-^4
the reading, 'Go whither? hence you get'. But they have all 'Goe,
whither ? ', and 16^) has ' hence ; ' 16)^-^4 drop this semicolon. In
i66() the text runs, 'Goe, whither. Hence you get,' &:c. The
semicolon, however, is better than the full stop after ' Hence ', as
the following clause is expansive and explanatory : ' Anywhere will
do so long as it is out of this. In such cases as yours, to forget is
itself a gain.'

1. 34. The modern editors, by dropping the comma after
' asham'd ', have given this line the opposite meaning to what Donne
intended. I have therefore, to avoid ambiguity, inserted one before.
Sir Henry Goodyere is not to be asham'd to imitate his hawk, but is,
through shatne, to emulate that noble bird by growing more sparing of
extravagant display. ' But the sporte which for that daie Basilius would
principally shewe to Zelmane, was the mounting at a Hearne, which
getting up on his wagling wings with paine . , . was now growen
to diminish the sight of himself, and to give example to greate
persons, that the higher they be the lesse they should show,' Sidney's
Arcadia y ii. 4.

Goodyere's fondness for hawking is referred to in one of Donne's
prose letters, ' God send you Hawks and fortunes of a high pitch '
{Letters, p. 204), and by Jonson in Epigravi LXXXV.

1. 44. Tables, or fruit-trenchers. I have let the 'Tables' oi 16}}-
j4 stand, although ' Fables ' has the support of al/ the MSS. T is
easily confounded with F. In the very next poem i6))-j4 read
' 'I'ermers ' where I feel sure that ' Farmers ' (spelt ' Fermers ') is
the correct reading. Moreover, Donne makes several references to
the ' morals ' of fables :

The fable is inverted, and far more

A block inflicts now, then a stork before.

7he Ca/me, 11. 4-5.

O wretch, that thy fortunes should moralize
Aesop's fables, and make tales prophesies.

Satyre V.

If 'Tables' is the correct reading, Donne means, I take it, not
portable memorandum books such as Hamlet carried (this is Professor
Norton's explanation), but simply pictures (as in ' Table-book '),
probably Emblems.

Page 185. To M' Rowland Woodward.

Rowland Woodward was a common friend of Donne and Wotton.
The fullest account of Woodward is given by Mr. Pearsall Smith
{The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, 1907). Of his early life
unfortunately he can tell us little or nothing. He seems to have

Letters to Sever all Personages, 147

gone to Venice with Wotton in 1604, at least he was there in 1605.
This letter was, therefore, written probably before that date. One MS.,
viz. B, states that it was written ' to one that desired some of his
papers ', It is quite likely that Woodward, preparing to leave England,
had asked Donne for copies of his poems, and Donne, now a married
man, and, if not disgraced, yet living in ' a retiredness ' at Pyrford or
Camberwell, was not altogether disposed to scatter his indiscretions
abroad. He enjoins privacy in like manner on Wotton when he
sends him some Paradoxes. Donne, it will be seen, makes no
reference to Woodward's going abroad or being in Italy.

While with Wotton he was sent as a spy to Milan and imprisoned
by the Inquisition. In 1607, while bringing home dispatches, he was
attacked by robbers and left for dead. On Feb. 2, 1608, money
was paid to his brother, Thomas Woodward (the T. W. of several
of Donne's Letters), for Rowland's 'surgeons and diets'. In 1608
he entered the service of the Bishop of London. For subsequent
incidents in his career see Pearsall Smith, op. cit. ii. 481, He died
sometime before April 1636.

It is clear that the MSS. Cy, O'F, F, Sg6 have derived this
poem from a common source, inferior to that from which the 16})
text is derived, which has the general support of the best MSS.
These MSS. agree in the readings : 3 ' holiness', but O'/^ corrects, 10
'to use it,' 13 'whites' Cy, OF, 14 ' Integritie ', but O'T^ corrects, 33
' good treasure '. It is clear that a copy of this tradition fell into the
hands of the i6}S editor. His text is a contamination of the better
and the inferior versions. The strange corruption of 4-6 began by the
mistake of ' flowne ' for ' fhowne '. In GF and the editions 16)^-^4
the sense is adjusted to this by reading, ' How long loves weeds ', and
making the two lines an exclamation. The 'good treasure' (1. 33)
of i6))-6g, which Chambers has adopted, comes from this source
also. The reading at 1. 10 is interesting ; ' to use it ', for ' to us, it ',
has obviously arisen from ' to use and love Poetrie ' of the previous
verse. In the case of ' seeme but light and thin' we have an
emendation, even in the inferior version, made for the sake of the
metre (which is why Chambers adopted it), for though Cy, O'F, and F
have it, S^6 reads :

Thoughe to use it, seeme and be light and thin.

1. 2. a retirednesse. This reading of some MSS., including \V,
which is a very good authority for these Letters, is quite possibly
authentic. It is very like Donne to use the article ; it was very
easy for a copyist to drop it. Compare the dropping of ' a ' before
' span ' in Crucifying (p.' 320), 1. 8. The use of abstracts as common
nouns with the article, or in the plural, is a feature of Donne's
syntax. He does so in the next line : 'a chast fallownesse '. Again :
' Beloved, it is not enough to awake out of an ill sleepe of sinne, or
of ignorance, or out of a good sleep, out of a retirednesse, and take

L 2

148 Commentary,

some profession, if you winke, or hide your selves, when you are
awake.' Sermons 50. 11. 90. 'It is not that he shall have no
adversary, nor that that adversary shall be able to doe him no
harm, but that he should have a refreshing, a respiration. In vela-
mento alarum, under the shadow of Gods wings.' Sermons 80. 66.
670 — where also we find *an extraordinary sadnesse, a predominant
melancholy, a faintnesse of heart, a chearlessnesse, a joylessnesse of
spirit' (Ibid. 672). Donne does not mean to say that he is 'tied
to retirednesse ', a recluse. The letter was not written after he was
in orders, but probably, like the preceding, when he was at Pyrford
or Mitcham (1602-8). He is tied to a degree of retirednesse (com-
pared with his early life) or a period of retiredness. He does not
compare himself to a Nun but to a widow. Even a third widowhood
is not necessarily a final state. ' So all retirings ', he says in a letter
to Goodyere, ' into a shadowy life are alike from all causes, and alike
subject to the barbarousnesse and insipid dulnesse of the Country.'
Letters, p. 63. But the phrase here applies primarily to the Nun and
the widow.

I. 3. fallownesse ; I have changed the full stop of i6))-^4 to
a semicolon here because I take the next three lines tO' be an
adverbial clause giving the reason why Donne's muse 'affects . . .
a chast fallownesse'. The full stop disguises this, and Chambers,
by keeping the full stop here but changing that after ' sown ' (1. 6),
has thrown the reference of the clause forward to ' Omissions of
good, ill, as ill deeds bee.' — not a happy arrangement.

II. 16—18. There is no Vertue, &=€. Donne refers here to the
Cardinal Virtues which the Schoolmen took over from Aristotle.
There are, Aquinas demonstrates, four essential virtues of human
nature : ' Principium enim formale virtutis, de qua nunc loquimur,
est rationis bonum. Quod quidem dupliciter potest considerari :
uno modo secundum quod in ipsa consideratione consistit ; et
sic erit una virtus principalis, quae dicitur prudentia. Alio modo
secundum quod circa aliquid ponitur rationis ordo ; et hoc vel circa
operationes, et sic est justitia ; vel circa passiones, et sic necesse
est esse duas virtutes. Ordinem enim rationis necesse est ponere
circa passiones, considerata repugnantia ipsarum ad rationem. Quae
quidem potest esse dupliciter : uno modo secundum quod passio
impellit ad aliquid contrarium rationi ; et sic necesse est quod passio
reprimatur, et ab hoc d&noxmx\aX\xx temperantia ; alio modo secundum
quod passio retrahit ab eo quod ratio dictat, sicut timor periculorum
vel laborum ; et sic necesse est quod homo firmetur in eo quod est
rationis, ne recedat; et ab hoc denominatur fortitudo.' Summa,
Prima Secundae, 61. 2. Since the Cardinal Virtues thus cover the
whole field, what place is reserved for the Theological Virtues, viz.,
Faith, Hope, and Charity? Aquinas's reply is quite definite: 'Virtutes
theologicae sunt supra hominem . . . Unde non proprie dicuntur
virtutes humanae sed suprahumanae, vel divinae.^ Ibid., 6i. i.

Letters to Several! Personages. 149

Donne here exclaims that the cardinal virtues themselves are non-
existent without religion. They are, isolated from religion, habits
which any one can assume who has the discretion to cover his vices.
Religion not only gives us higher virtues but alone gives sincerity to
the natural virtues. Donne is probably echoing St. Augustine, De
Civ. Dei, xviiii. 25 : ' Quod fion possint ibi verae esse virtutes,
ubi non est vera religio. Quamlibet enim videatur animus
corpori et ratio vitiis laudibiliter imperare, si Deo animus et ratio
ipsa non servit, sicut sibi esse serviendum ipse Deus precepit,
nullo modo corpori vitiisque recte imperat. Nam qualis corporis
atque vitiorum potest esse mens domina veri Dei nescia nee eius
imperio subjugata, sed vitiosissimis daemonibus corrumpentibus
prostituta? Proinde virtutes quas habere sibi videtur per quas
imperat corpori et vitiis, ad quodlibet adipiscendum vel tenendum
rettulerit nisi ad Deum, etiam ipsae vitia sunt potius quam virtutes.
Nam licet a quibusdam tunc verae atque honestae esse virtutes cum
referentur ad se ipsas nee propter aliud expetuntur : etiam tunc
inflatae et superbae sunt, et ideo non virtutes, sed vitia iudicanda
sunt. Sicut enim non est a came sed super carnem quod carnem facit
vivere ; sic non est ab homine sed super hominem quod hominem
facit beate vivere : nee solum hominem, sed etiam quamlibet pote-
statem virtutemque caelestem.'

Page 186, 11. 25-7. You know^ Physitians, v>v. Paracelsus refers
more than once to the heat of horse-dung us.ed in * separations ', e. g.
On the Separations of the Elements from Metals he enjoins that when
the metal has been reduced to a liquid substance you must ' add to
one part of this oil two parts of fresh aqua fortis, and when it is
enclosed in glass of the best quality, set it in horse-dung for a month '.

1. 31. ]Vee are but farmers of our selves. The reading of 16))
is ' termers ', and as in * Tables ' ' Fables ' of the preceding poem it is
not easy to determine which is original. * Termer ' of course, in the
sense of ' one who holds for a term ' (see O.E.D.), would do. It is the
more general word and would include ' Farmer '. A farmer generally
is a ' termer ' in the land which he works. I think, however, that the
rest of the verse shows that ' farmer ' is used in a more positive sense
than would be covered by 'termer'. The metaphor includes not
only the terminal occupancy but the specific work of the farmer —
stocking, manuring, uplaying.

Donne's metaphor is perhaps borrowed by Benlowes when he says
of the soul :

She her own farmer, stock'd from Heav'n is bent
To thrive ; care 'bout the pay-day's spent.
Strange ! she alone is farmer, farm, and stock, and rent.

Donne in a sermon for the 5th of November speaks of those who
will have the King to be ' their Farmer of his Kingdome.' Sermons
50. 43. 403.

150 Commentary,

It must be remembered that in MS. ' Fermer ' and ' Termer ' would
be easily interchanged.

1. 34. to thy selfe be approved. There is no reason to prefer the
/66p 'improv'd' here. To be 'improv'd to oneself is not a very
lucid plirase. ^Vhat Donne bids Woodward do is to seek the approval
of his own conscience. His own conscience is contrasted with ' vaine
outward things '. Donne has probably Epictetus in mind : ' How then
may this be attained ? — Resolve now if never before, to approve
thyself to thyself; resolve to show thyself fair in God's sight ; long
to be pure with thine own pure self and God.' Golden Sayings, Ixxvi.,
trans, by Crossley.

Page 187. To S' Henry Wootton.

The date of this letter is given in two MSS. as July 20, 1598. Its
tone is much the same as that of the previous letter (p. i8o) and of
both the fourth and fifth Satyres. The theme of them all is the Court.

I. 2. Cales or St Michaels tale. The point of this allusion was
early lost and has been long in being recovered. The spelling ' Calis '
is a little misleading, as it was used both for Calais and for Cadiz.
In Sir Francis Vere's Commentaries (1657) he speaks of ' The Calis-
journey ' and the ' Island voiage '. I have taken * Cales ' from some
MSS. as less ambiguous. All the modern editors have printed
* Calais ', and Grosart considers the allusion to be to the Armada,
Norton to the ' old wars with France '. The reference is to the Cadiz
expedition and the Island voyage : ' Why should I tell you what we
both know?' In speaking of 'St. Michaels tale' Donne may be
referring to the attack on that particular island, which led to the loss
of the opportunity to capture the plate-fleet. But the ' Islands of St.
Michael' was a synonym for the Azores. 'Thus the ancient
Cosmographers do place the division of the East and Western
Hemispheres, that is, the first term of longitude, in the Canary or
fortunate Islands ; conceiving these parts the extreamest habitations
Westward : But the Moderns have altered that term, and translated
it unto the Azores or Islands of St Michael ; and that upon a plausible
conceit of the small or insensible variation of the Compass in those
parts,' &c. Browne, Pseud. Epidem. vi. 7.

II. lo-ii. Fate, (Gods Commissary): i.e. God's Deputy or Delegate.
Compare :

Fate, which God made, but doth not control.

The Progresse of the Souk, p. 295, 1. 2,

Great Destiny the Commissary of God

That hast mark'd out a path and period

For every thing ... Ibid., p. 296, 11. 31 f.

The idea that Fate or Fortune is the deputy of God in the sphere

of external goods (ra cktos ayaOd, i beni del mondo) is very clearly

expressed by Dante in the Convivio, iv. 11, and in the Inferno, vi. 67 f. :

' " Master," I said to him, " now tell me also : this Fortune of which

Letters to Sever a II Personages. 151

thou hintest to me ; what is she, that has the good things of the world
thus within her clutches ? " And he to me, " O foolish creatures, how
great is this ignorance that falls upon ye ! Now I wish thee to
receive my judgement of her. He whose wisdom is transcendent
over all, made the heavens " (i.e. the nine moving spheres) "and gave
them guides " (Angels, Intelligences) ; *' so that every part may shine to
every part equally distributing the light. In like manner, for worldly
splendours, he ordained a general minister and guide (ministro e
duce) ; to change betimes the vain possessions, from people to people,
and from one kindred to another, beyond the hindrance of human
wisdom. Hence one people commands, another languishes ; obeying
her sentence, which is hidden like the serpent in the grass. Your
knowledge cannot withstand her. She provides, judges, and maintains
her kingdom, as the other gods do theirs. Her permutations have
no truce. Necessity makes her be swift ; so oft come things requir-
ing change. This is she, who is so much reviled, even by those who
ought to praise her, when blaming her wrongfully, and with evil words.
But she is in bhss, and hears it not. With the other Primal Creatures
joyful, she wheels her sphere, and tastes her blessedness.'" Dante
finds in this view the explanation of the want of anything like
distributive justice in the assignment of wealth, power, and worldly
glory. Dante speaks here of Fortune, but though in its original
conception at the opposite pole from Fate, Fortune is ultimately
included in the idea of Fate. ' Necessity makes her be swift.'
'Sed talia maxime videntur esse contingentia quae Fato attribuuntur.'
Aquinas. The relation of Fate or Destiny to God or Divine
Providence is discussed by Boethius, De Cons. Phil. IV. Prose III,
whom Aquinas follows, Summa, I. cxvi. Ultimately the immovable
Providence of (lod is the cause of all things ; but viewed in the
world of change and becoming, accidents or events are ascribed to
Destiny. ' Uti est ad intellectum ratiocinatio ; ad id quod est, id
quod gignitur ; ad aeternitatem, tempus ; ad punctual medium,
circulus ; ita est fati series mobilis ad Providentiae stabilem simplici-
tatem.' Boethius. This is clearly what Donne has in view when
he calls Destiny the Commissary of God or declares that God made
but doth not control her. The idea of Fate in Greek thought which
Christian Philosophy had some difficulty in adjusting to its doctrines
of freedom and providence came from the astronomico-religious ideas
of the Chaldaeans. The idea of Fate ' arose from the observation
of the regularity of the sidereal movements '. Franz Cumont, Astrology
and Religion among the Greeks and Romans, 191 2, pp. 28, 69.

1. 14. wishing prayers. This may be a phrase corresponding to
' bidding prayers ', but ' wishing ' is comma'd off as a noun in some
MSS. and ' wishes ' may be the author's correction.

Page 188, 1. 24. dull Moralls of a game at Chests. The com-
parison of life and especially politics to a game of chess is probably
an old one. Sancho Panza develops it with considerable eloquence.

152 Comme?2tary.

Page 188. H:W: in Hiber: belligeranti.

This poem is taken from the Burley MS., where it is found along
with a number of poems some of which are by Donne, viz. : the
Safyres, one of the Elegies, and several of the Epigrams. Of the
others this alone has the initials ' J. D. 'added in the margin. There
can be little doubt that it is by Donne, — a continuation of the cor-
respondence of the years 1597-9 to which the last letter and * Letters
more than kisses ' belong. In Life and Letters of Sir Henry IVotton
Mr. Pearsall Smith prints what he takes to be a reply to this letter
and the charge of indolence. ' Sir, It is worth my wondering that
you can complain of my seldom writing, when your own letters come
so fearfully as if they tread all the way upon a bog. I have received
from you a few, and almost every one hath a commission to speak
of divers others of their fellows, like you know who in the old comedy
that asks for the rest of his servants. But you make no mention
of any of mine, yet it is not long since I ventured much of my
experience unto you in a long piece of paper, and perhaps not of
my credit ; it is that which I sent you by A. R., whereof till you
advertise me I shall live in fits or agues.' After referring to the
malicious reports in circulation regarding the Irish expedition he
concludes in the style of the previ'ous letters : ' These be the wise
rules of policy, and of courts, which are upon earth the vainest
places.'

I. ri. yong death : i.e. early death, death that comes to you while
young.

II. 13-15. These lines are enough of themselves to prove Donne's
authorship of this poem. Compare To S" He7iry Goodyere, p. 183,
11. 17-20.

Page 189. To the Countesse of Bedford.

Lucy, Countess of Bedford, occupies the central place among
Donne's noble patrons and friends. No one was more consistently
his friend ; to none does he address himselfe in terms of sincerer and
more respectful eulogy.

The eldest child of John Harington, created by James first Baron
Harington of Exton, was married to Edward, third Earl of Bedford,
in 1594 and was a lady in waiting under Elizabeth. She was one of
the group of noble ladies who hastened north on the death of the
Queen to welcome, and secure the favour of, James and Anne of
Denmark. Her father and mother were granted the tutorship of the
young Princess Elizabeth, and she herself was admitted at once as
a Lady of the Chamber. Her beauty and talent secured her a dis-
tinguished place at Court, and in the years that Donne was a prisoner
at Mitcham the Countess was a brilliant figure in more than one of
Ben Jonson's masques. * She was •' the crowning rose " in that garland
of English beauty which the Spanish ambassador desired Madame

Letters to Several! Personages, 153

Beaumont, the Lady of the French ambassador, to bring with her to
an entertainment on the 8th of December, 1603 : the three others
being Lady Rich, Lady Susan Vere, and Lady Dorothy (Sidney) ;
"and", says the Lady Arabella Stewart, "great cheer they had.'"
\Viffen, Histoncal Memoirs of the House of Russell, 1833. She figured
also in Daniel's Masque, The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses, which was
published (1604) with an explanatory letter addressed to her. In
praising her beauty Donne is thus echoing ' the Catholic voice '. The
latest Masque in which she figured was the Masque of Queens, 2nd of
February, 1609-10.

In Court politics the Countess of Bedford seems to have taken
some part in the early promotion of Villiers as a rival to the Earl of
Somerset ; and in 16 17 she promoted the marriage of Donne's patron
Lord Hay to the youngest daughter of the Earl of Northumberland,
against the wish of the bride's father. Match-making seems to have
been a hobby of hers, for in 1625 she was an active agent in arranging
the match between James, Lord Strange, afterwards Earl of Derby,
and Lady Charlotte de la Tremouille, the heroic Countess of Derby
who defended Lathom House against the Roundheads.

An active and gay life at Court was no proof of the want of a more
serious spirit. Lady Bedford was a student and a poet, and the patron
of scholars and poets. Sir Thomas Roe presented her with coins
and medals; and Drayton, Daniel, Jonson, and Donne were each in turn
among the poets whom she befriended and who sang her praises. She
loved gardens. One of Donne's finest lyrics is written in the garden
of Twickenham Park, which the Countess occupied from 1608 to 161 7 ;
and the laying out of the garden at Moore Park in Hertfordshire,
where she lived from 161 7 to her death in 1627, is commended by
her successor in that place, Sir William Temple.

Donne seems to have been recommended to Lady Bedford by Sir
Henry Goodyere, who was attached to her household. He mentions
the death of her son in a letter to Goodyere as early as 1602, but his
intimacy with the Countess probably began in 1608, and most of his
verse letters were written between that date and 16 14. Donne praises
her beauty and it may be that in some of his lyrics he plays the part
of the courtly lover, but what his poems chiefly emphasize is the
religious side of her character. If my conjecture be right that she
herself wrote ' Death be not proud ', her religion was probably of a
simpler, more pietistic cast than Donne's own was in its earlier
phase.

In 16 1 2 the Countess had a serious illness which began on November
22-3 (II. p. 10). She recovered in time to take part in the ceremonies
attending the wedding of the Princess Elizabeth (Feb. 14, i6if), but
Chamberlain in his letters to Carleton notes a change in her behaviour.
After mentioning an accident to the Earl of Bedford he continues :
' His lady who should have gone to the Spa but for lack of money,
shows herself again in court, though in her sickness she in a manner

154 Commentary,

vowed never to come there ; but she verifies the proverb, Nemo ex
morbo melior. Marry, she is somewhat reformed in her attire, and
forbears painting, which, they say, makes her look somewhat strangely
among so many vizards, which together with their frizzled, powdered
hair, makes them look all alike, so that you can scant know one from
another at the first view.' Birch, The Court and Times of James the
First, i. 262. Donne makes no mention of this illness, but it seems
to me probable that the first two of these letters, with the emphasis
which they lay on beauty, were written before, the other more serious
and pious verses after this crisis.

See notes on Twicknam Gardeti and the Nocturnall on St. Lucies
Day.

Page 189, 11. 4-5. light . . ./aire faith. I have retained the 'light'
and 'faire faith' of the editions, but the MS. readings 'sight' and 'farr
Faith ' are quite possibly correct. There is not much to choose
between ' light ' and ' sight ', but * farr ' is an interesting reading.
Indeed at first sight ' fair ' is a rather otiose epithet, a vaguely
complimentary adjective. There is, however, probably more in it than
that. ' Fair ' as an epithet of ' Faith ' is probably an antithesis to the
'squint ungracious left-handedness ' of understanding. If 'farr' be
the right reading, then Donne is contrasting faith and sight : ' Now
faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not
seen.' Heb. xi. r. The use of 'far' as an adjective is not uncommon:
' Pulling far history nearer,' Crashaw ; ' His own far blood,' Tennyson;
'Far travellers may lie by authority,' Gataker (1625), are some
examples quoted in the O. E. D. But there is no parallel to Donne's
use of ' far faith ' for ' faith that lays hold on things at a distance '.
' These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having
seen them afar off', Heb. xi. 13, is probably the source of the phrase.
Such a condensed elliptical construction is quite in Donne's manner-
Compare ' Neere death ', p. 28, 1. 63. Both versions may be original.
The variants in I. 19 point to some revision of the poem.

Page 190, 1. 22. In every thing there naturai/y groivs, ar-'c. * Every
thing hath in it as, as Physicians use to call it, Naturale Balsamum, a
naturall Balsamum, which, if any wound or hurt which that creature
hath received, be kept clean from extrinseque putrefaction, will heal
of itself. We are so far from that naturall Balsamum, as that we have
a naturall poyson in us, Originall sin : ' &c. Sermons 80. 32. 313.

' Now Physitians say, that man hath in his Constitution, in his
Complexion, a naturall Vertue, which they call Balsamum suum, his
owne Balsamum, by which, any wound which a man could receive in
his body, would cure itself, if it could be kept cleane from the
annoiances of the aire, and all extrinseque encumbrances. Something
that hath some proportion and analogy to this Balsamum of the body,
there is in the soul of man too : The soule hath Narduni suum, her
Spikenard, as the Spouse says, Nardus mea dedit odorem suum, she
hath a spikenard, a perfume, a fragrancy, a sweet savour in her selfe.

Letters to Sever all Personages. 155

For viriuies germanius atiingunt animam, quani corpus sanitas,
vertuous inclinations, and disposition to morall goodness, is more
naturall to the soule of man, and nearer of kin to the soule of man,
then health is to the body. And then if we consider bodily health,
Nulla oratio, nulla doctrinae formula nos docet morbum odisse, sayes
that Father : There needs no Art, there needs no outward Eloquence,
to persuade a man to be loath to be sick : Ita in anima inest naturalis
et citra dodrinam mali evitatio, sayes he : So the soule hath a naturall
and untaught hatred, and detestation of that which is evill,' &c.
Sermons 80. 51. 514.

Paracelsus has a great deal to say about this natural balsam, though
he declares that ' the spirit is 7nost truly the life and balsome of all
Corporeal things'. It was to supply the want of this balsam that
mummy was used as a medicine. Of a man suddenly slain Paracelsus
says : * His whole body is profitable and good and may be prepared
into a most precious Mummie. For, although the spirit of life went
out of such a Body, yet the Balsome, in which lies the Life, remains,
which doth as Balsome preserve other mens.'

I. 27. A meihridaie: i.e. an antidote. See note to p. 255, 1. 127.

II. 31-2. The first good Angell^ qt'c. * Our first consideration is
upon the persons ; and those we finde to be Angelicall women and
Evangelicall Angels : . . . And to recompense that observation, that
never good Angel appeared in the likenesse of woman, here are good
women made Angels, that is, Messengers, publishers of the greatest
mysteries of our Religion.' Sermons 80. 25. 242.

11.35-6. Make your returne home gracious ; and besiozv
This life on that ; so make one life of two.

* Make a present of this life to the next, by living now as you will
live then ; and so make this life and the next one ' — or, as another
poet puts it :

And so make life, death, and that vast forever
One grand, sweet song.

This I take to be Donne's meaning. The * This ' of 16)^-6^ and the
MSS., which Chambers also has adopted, seems required by the
antithesis. If one recalls that * this ' is very commonly written ' thys ',
and that final ' s ' is little more than a tail, it is easy to account for
' Thy ' in i6j). The meaning too is not clear at a glance, and ' Thy '
might seem to an editor to make it easier. The thought is much the
same as in the Obsequies to the Lord Harrington, p. 279.

And I (though with paine)
Lessen our losse, to magnifie thy gaine
Of triumph, when I say. It was more fit.
That all men should lacke thee, then thou lack it.

Compare also : ' Sir, our greatest businesse is more in our power then

156 Commentary.

the least, and we may be surer to meet in heaven than in any place
upon earth.' Letters, p. 188. And see the quotation in note to
p. 112, 1. 44, ' this and the next are not two worlds,' &c.

Page 191. To the Countesse of Bedford.

11. 1-6. The sense of this verse, carefully and correctly printed in
the 1633 edition, was obscured if not corrupted by the insertion of
a semicolon after ' Fortune ' in the later editions. The correct
punctuation was restored in 17 19, which was followed in subsequent
editions until Grosart returned to that of the 1635-39 editions
(which the Grolier Club editor also adopts), and Chambers
completed the confusion by printing the lines thus.

You have refined me, and to worthiest things —
Virtue, art, beauty, fortune.

Even Mr. Gosse has been misled into quoting this truncated and
enigmatical compliment to Lady Bedford, regarding it, I presume, as
of the same nature as Shakespeare's lines,

Spirits are not finely touch'd.
But to fine issues.
But this has a meaning ; what meaning is there in saying that a man
is refined to ' beauty and fortune ' ? Poor Donne was not likely to
boast of either at this time. What he says is something quite different,
and strikes the key-note of the poem. ' You have refined and
sharpened my judgement, and now I see that the worthiest things
owe their value to rareness or use. Value is nothing intrinsic, but
depends on circumstances.' This, the next two verses add, explains
why at Court it is your virtue which transcends, in the country your
beauty. To Donne the country is always dull and savage ; the court
the focus of wit and beauty, though not of virtue. On the relative
nature of all goodness he has touched in the Progresse of the Souk,
p. 316, 11. 518-20 :

There's nothing simply good nor ill alone ;

Of every quality Comparison

The only measure is, and judge, Opinion.

With the sentiment regarding Courts compare : ' Beauty, in courts, is
so necessary to the young, that those who are without it, seem to be
there to no other purpose than to wait on the triumphs of the fair ;
to attend their motions in obscurity, as the moon and stars do the
sun by day ; or at best to be the refuge of those hearts which others
have despised ; and by the unworthiness of both to give and take
a miserable comfort.' Dryden, Dedication of the Indian Emperor.

11. 8-9. ( Where a transcendent height, (as lownesse mee)
Makes her not be, or not show)

I have completed the enclosure of (Where . . . show) in brackets

Letters to Several! Personages, 157

which 16)} began but forgot to carry out. The statement is paren-
thetical, and it is of the essence of Donne's wit to turn aside in one
parenthesis to make another, dart from one distracting thought to
a further, returning at the end to the main track. He has left the
Countess for a moment to explain why the Court ' is not Vertues
clime '. She is too transcendent to be, or at any rate to be seen
there, as I (he adds, quite irrelevantly) am too low. Then taking up
again the thought of the first line he continues : * all my rhyme is
claimed there by your vertues, for there rareness gives them value.
I am the comment on what there is a dark text ; the usher who
announces one that is a stranger.'

For brackets within brackets compare : ' And yet it is imperfect
which is taught by that religion which is most accommodate to sense (I
dare not say to reason (though it have appearance of that too) because
none may doubt but that that religion is certainly best which is reason-
ablest) That all mankinde hath one protecting Angel ; all Christians
one other, all English one other, all of one Corporation and every civill
coagulation or society one other ; and every man one other.' Letters^

P- 43-

1. 13. To this place : i. e. Twickenham. GF heads the poem To the

Countesse of Bedford^ Twitnam. The poem is written to welcome
her home. See 1. 70.

The development of Donne's subtle and extravagant conceits is
a little difificult. The Countess is the sun which exhales the sweet-
ness of the country when she comes thither (13-18). Apparently
the Countess has returned to Twickenham in Autumn, perhaps
arriving late in the evening. When she emerges from her chariot it
is the breaking of a new day, the beginning of a new year or new
world. Both the Julian and the Gregorian computations are thus
falsified (19-22). It shows her truth to nature that she will not
suffer a day which begins at a stated hour, but only one that begins
with the actual appearance of the light (23-4 : a momentary digres-
sion). Since she, the Sun, has thus come to Twickenham, the Court
is made the Antipodes. While the ' vulgar sun ' is an Autumnal one,
this Sun which is in Spring, receives our sacrifices. Her priests, or
instruments, we celebrate her (25-30). Then Donne draws back
from the religious strain into which he is launching. He will not
sing Hymns as to a Deity, but offer petitions as to a King, that he may
view the beauty of this Temple, and not as Temple, but as Edifice.
The rest of the argument is simpler.

I. 60. The same thinge. The singular of the MSS. seems to be
required by ' you cannot two '. The ' s ' of the editions is probably
due to the final * e '. But ' things ' is the reading of Lee, the MS.
representing most closely that from which 16)^ was printed.

II. 71-2. Who hath seene one, ^c. 'Who hath seen one, e.g.
Twickenham, which your dwelling there makes a Paradise, would
fain see you too, as whoever had been in Paradise would not have

158 Commentary.

failed to seek out the Cherubim.' The construction is elliptical.
Compare :

Wee'had had a Saint, have now a holiday. P. 286, 1. 44.

The Cherubim are specially mentioned (although the Seraphim
are the highest order) because they are traditionally the beautiful
angels : ' The Spirit of Chastity . . in the likenesse of a faire beautifuU
Cherubine.' Bacon, Neiv Atlantis (1658), 22 (O.E.D.).

Page 193. To S' Edward Herbert, at Iulvers.

Edward Herbert, first Baron of Cherbury (1563- 1648), the eldest
son of Donne's friend Mrs. Magdalen Herbert, had not long returned
from his first visit to France when he set out again in 16 10 with Lord
Chandos ' to pass to the city of Juliers which the Prince of Orange
resolved to besiege. Making all haste thither we found the siege
newly begun ; the Low Country army assisted by 4,000 English
under the command of Sir Edward Cecil. We had not long been
there when the Marquis de la Chartre, instead of Henry IV, who was
killed by that villain Ravaillac, came with a brave French army
thither '. Autobiography, ed. Sidney Lee. The city was held by the
Archduke Leopold for the Emperor. The Dutch, French, and
English were besieging the town in the interest of the Protestant
candidates, the Elector of Brandenburg, and the Palatine of Neuburg.
The siege marked the beginning of the Thirty Years' War. Herbert
was a man of both ability and courage but of a vanity which out-
weighed both. Donne's letter humours both his Philosophical pose
and his love of obscurity and harshness in poetry. His own poems
with a few exceptions are intolerably difficult and unmusical, and
Jonson told Drummond that 'Donne said to him he wrote that
Epitaph upon Prince Henry, Look to me Faith, to match Sir Ed.
Herbert in obscureness '. (Jonson's C(£?«z/^r^a//(?w, ed. Laing.) The
poems have been reprinted by the late Professor Churton Collins.
In 1609 when Herbert was in England he and Donne both wrote
Elegies on Mistress Boulstred.

1. I. Man is a lumpe, &^c. The image of the beasts Donne has
borrowed from Plato, The Republic, ix. 588 b-e.

Page 194, 11. 23-6. A food which to chickens is harmless poisons
men. Our own nature contributes the factor which makes a food
into a poison either corrosive or killing by intensity of heat or cold :
' Et hie nota quod tantus est ordo naturae, ut quod est venenosum et
inconveniens uni est utile et conveniens alteri ; sicut jusquiamus qui est
cibus passeris licet homini sit venenosus ; et sicut napellus interficit
hominem solum portatus, et mulierem praegnantem non laesit man-
ducatus, teste Galieno ; et mus qui pascitur napello est tiriaca contra
napellum.' Benvenuto on Dante, Div. Comm. : Paradiso, i. The
plants here mentioned are henbane and aconite. Concerning hem-
lock the O.E.D. quotes Swan, Spec. M. vi. § 4 (1643), ' Hemlock . . .

Letters to Several! Personages, 159

is meat to storks and poison to men.' Donne probably uses the word
' chickens ' as equivalent to ' young birds ', not for the young of the
domestic fowl. For the cold of the hemlock see Persius, Sat. v, 145 ;
Ovid, Afuores, iii. 7. 13; and Juvenal, Sal. vii. 206^ a reference to
Socrates' gift from the Athenians of ' gelidas . . cicutas '.

11. 31-2. Thiis man, that 7night be' his pleasure, a^c. These lines are
condensed and obscure. The ' his ' must mean ' his own '. ' Man
who in virtue of that gift of reason which makes him man might be
to himself a source of joy, becomes instead, by the abuse of reason,
his own rod. Reason which should be the God directing his life
becomes the devil which misleads him.' Chambers prints ' His
pleasure ', ' His rod ', referring ' his ' to God — which seems hardly
possible.

11. 34-8. wee^are led awry, dfc. Chambers's punctuation of this
passage is clearly erroneous :

we're led awry
By them, who man to us in little show,
Greater than due ; no form we can bestow
On him, for man into himself can draw
All;

This must mean that we are led astray by those who, in their
^r^j)^ridgement of man, still show him to us greater than he really is.
' "BiirtMsTgTRe^ opposite of what Donne says. ' Greater than due '
goes with ' no form '. Compare :

' And therefore the Philosopher draws man into too narrow a table,
when he says he is Microcosmos, an Abridgement of the world in
little : Nazianzen gives him but his due, when he calls him Mundinn
Magnum, a world to which all the rest of the world is but subordinate :
For all the world besides, is but God's Foot-stool ; Man sits down
upon his right-hand,' &c. Sertnon$ 26, 25, 370.

' It is too little to call Man a little world ; Except God, Man is a
diminutive to nothing. Man consists of more pieces, more parts,
than the world ; than the world doth, nay than the world is.'
Devotions upon Emergefit Occasions, <^c. (1624), p. 64.

On the other hand the Grolier Club editor has erroneously
followed i6jj-6cf in altering the full stop after ' chaw ' to a comma ;
and has substituted a semicolon for the comma after ' fill ' (1. 39),
reading :

for man into himself can draw
All ; all his faith can swallow or reason chaw,
All that is filled, and all that which doth fill ;

But ' All that is fiU'd,' &c. is not object to 'can draw '. It is subject
(in apposition with ' All the round world ') to ' is but a pill '.

Page 195, 1. 47. This makes it credible. I have changed the comma
after * credible ' to a semicolon to avoid the misapprehension, into
which the Grolier Club editor seems to have fallen, that what is credible

i6o Commentary,

is ' that you have dwelt upon all worthy books '. It is because Lord
Herbert has dwelt upon all worthy books that it is credible that he
knows man.

Page 195. To the Countesse of Bedford.

I. I. T'have written then, Cst-'c. This is one of the most difficult
of Donne's poems. With his usual strain of extravagant compliment
Donne has interwoven some of his deepest thought and most out-of-
the-way theological erudition and scientific lore. Moreover the
poem is one of those for which the MS. resembling Z>, 1149, Lee
was not available. The text of 16)) was taken from a MS. belonging
to the group A 18, N, TCC, TCD, and contains several errors. Some
of these were corrected in i6jj; from O'F or a MS. resembling it,
but in the most vital case what was a right but difficult reading in
16)) was changed for an apparently easier but erroneous reading.

The emendations which I have accepted from 16^^ are —

1. 5. 'debt' for 'doubt'.

1. 7. ' tio things'' for ^ nothi?ig\

1. 20. ' or all It ; You.' for ' or all, in you.' There is not much to
choose between the two, but 'the world's best all' is not a very logical
expression. But the 16^) reading may mean ' the world's best part,
or the world's all, — you.' The alteration of i6)j is not necessary,
but looks to me like the author's own emendation.

I. 4. Then worst of civill vices, tha7iklessenesse. ' Naturall and morall
men are better acquainted with the duty of gratitude, of thankes-
giving, before they come to the Scriptures, then they are with the
other duty of repentance which belongs to Prayer ; for in all Solomons
bookes, you shall not finde halfe so much of the duty of thankeful-
nesse, as you shall in Seneca and in Plutarch. No book of Ethicks,
of moral doctrine, is come to us, where there is not, almost in every
leafe, some detestation, some Anathema against ingratitude.' Sermons

80. 55- 550-
Page 197, 1. 54. Wee {but noforratne tyrants could) remove. Follow-
ing the hint of O'F, I have bracketed all these words to show that the
verb to ' Wee ' is ' remove ', not ' could remove '.

II. 57-8. For, bodies shall from death redeemed bee.

Souks but preserved, not naturally free .

Here the later editions change ' not ' to ' borne ', and the correction
has been accepted by Grosart and Chambers. But 16)} is right. If
' not ' be changed, the force of the antithesis is lost. What is ' borne
free ' does not need to be preserved. What Donne expresses is a
form of the doctrine of conditional immortality. In a sermon on the
Penitential Psalms {Sermons 80. 53. 532) he says: 'We have a full
cleerenesse of the state of the soule after this life, not only above
those of the old Law, but above those of the Primitive Christian

Letters to Sever all Personages. 1 6 1

Church, which, in some hundreds of years, came not to a cleere under-
standing in that point, whether the soule were immortall by nature,
or but by preservation, whether the soule could not die or only
should not die,' &C. Here the antithesis between ' being preserved '
and ' being naturally free ' (i. e. immortal) is presented as sharply as
in this line of the verse Letter. But Donne states the doctrine
tentatively ' because that perchance may be without any constant
cleerenesse yet '. Elsewhere he seems to accept it : ' And for the
Immortality of the Soule, it is safelier said to be immortall by preser-
vation, then immortal, by nature; That God keepes it from dying, then,
that it cannot dye.' Sermons 80. 27. 269. This makes the correct
reading of the line quite certain.

The tenor of Donne's thought seems to me to be as follows : He
is speaking of the soul's eclipse by the body (11. 40-2), by the body
which should itself be an organ of the soul's life, of prayer as well as
labour (11. 43-8). He returns in 11. 49-52 to the main theme of the
body's corrupting influence, and this leads him to a new thought.
It is not only the soul which suffers by this absorption in the body, but
the body itself :

What hate could hurt our bodies like our love?

By this descent of the soul into the body we deprive the latter of its
proper dignity, to be the Casket, Temple, Palace of the Soul. Then
Donne turns aside to enforce the dignity of the Body. It will be
redeemed from death, and the Soul is only preserved. No more than
the Body is the Soul naturally immortal. These lines are almost
a parenthesis. The poet returns once more to his main theme, the
degradation of the soul by our exclusive regard for the body.

Thus the deepest thought of Donne's poetry, his love poetry and
his religious poetry, emerges here again. He will not accept the
antithesis between soul and body. The dignity of the body is hardly
less than that of the soul. But we cannot exalt the body at the
expense of the soul. If we immerse the soul in the body it is not
the soul alon^ which suffers but the body also. In the highest
spiritual life, as in the fullest and most perfect love, body and soul are
complementary, are merged in each other ; and after death the life
of the soul is in some measure incomplete, the end for which it was
created is not obtained until it is reunited to the body. ' Yet have not
those Fathers, nor those Expositors, who have in this text, acknow-
ledged a Resurrection of the soule, mistaken nor miscalled the matter.
Take Damascens owne definition of Resurrection : Resurrectio est ejus
ijuod cecidit secunda surrectio : A Resurrection is a second rising to
that state, from which anything is formerly fallen. Now though by
death, the soule do not fall into any such state, as that it can com-
plaine, (for what can that lack, which God fils ?) yet by death, the
soule fals from that, for wiiich it was infused, and poured into man at
first ; that is to be the forme of that body, the King of that Kingdom e ;

II »17.3 M

1 6 2 ComTuentary.

and therefore, when in the generall Resurrection, the soule returns
to that state, for which it was created, and to which it hath had an
affection, and a desire, even in the fulnesse of the Joyes of Heaven,
then, when the soule returns to her office, to make up the man,
because the whole man hath, therefore the soule hath a Resurrection :
not from death, but from a deprivation of her former state ; that state
which she was made for, and is ever enclined to.' Sermons 80. 19. 189.

Here, as before, Donne is probably following St. Augustine, who
combats the NeoPlatonic view (to which mediaeval thought tended
to recur) that a direct source of evil was the descent of the soul into
the body. The body is not essentially evil. It is not the body as
such that weighs down the soul (aggravat animam), but the body
corrupted by sin : ' Nam corruptio corporis . . . non peccati primi est
causa, sed poena; nee caro corruptibilis animam peccatricem, sed
anima peccatrix fecit esse corruptibilem carnem.' In the Resurrection
we desire not to escape from the body but to be clothed with a new
body, — ' nolumus corpore exspoliari, sed ejus immortalitate vestiri.'
Aug. De Civ. Dei, xiv. 3, 5. He cites St. Paul, 2 Cor. v. 1-4.

1. 59. As men to our prisons, new souks to us are sent, &'c.:
'new' is the reading of 16)) only, 'now' followed or preceded
by a comma of the other editions and the MSS. It is difficult
to decide between them, but Donne speaks of * new souls ' elsewhere :
'The Father creates new souls every day in the inanimation of
Children, and the Sonne creates them with him.' Sermons 50. 12.
100. ' Our nature is Meteorique, we respect (because we partake so)
both earth and heaven ; for as our bodies glorified shall be capable
of spiritual! joy, so our souls demerged into those bodies, are allowed
to partake earthly pleasure. Our soul is not sent hither, only to go
back again ; we have some errand to do here ; nor is it sent into
prison, because it comes innocent ; and he which sent it, is just.'
Letters (165 1), p. 46.

1. 68. Two new starres. See Introductory Note to Letters.

Page 198, 1. 72. Stand on hvoiruths: i. e. the wickedness of the
world and your goodness. You will believe neither.

Page 198. To the Countesse of Bedford.
Ox New-yeares day.

1. 3. of stuffe and forme perplext : i. e. whose matter and form are
a perplexed, intricate, difficult question :

Whose what, and where in disputation is.

Donne cannot mean that the matter and form are ' intricately inter-
twined or intermingled ', using the words as in Bacon : ' The formes
of substances (as they are now by compounding and transplanting
multiplied) are so perplexed.' Bacon, Adv. Learn, ii. 7. § 5. The ques-
tion of meteors in all their forms was one of great interest and great
difficulty to ancient science. Seneca, who gathers up most of what has
been said before him, recurs to the subject again and again. See the

Letters to Sever a II Personages. 163

Quaestiones Natr4raks, i. i, and elsewhere. Aristotle, he says, attri-
butes them to exhalations from the earth heated by the sun's rays.
They are at any rate not falling stars, or parts of stars, but * have their
origin below the stars, and — being without solid foundation or fixed
abode — quickly perish '. But there was great uncertainty as to their
uihat and where. Donne compares himself to them in the uncertainty
of his position and worldly affairs. ' Wind is a mixt Meteor, to the
making whereof divers occasions concurre with exhalations.' Sermons
80. 31. 305.

Page 199, 1. 19. cherish, us doe wast. The punctuation of i6j)
is odd at the first glance, but accurate. If with all the later
editions one prints ' cherish us, doe wast ', the suggestion is that
'wast' is intransitive — 'in cherishing us they waste themselves,'
which is not Donne's meaning. It is us they waste.

Page 200, 1. 44. Some piity. I was tempted to think that
Lowell's conjecture of ' piety ' for ' pitty ' must be right, the more so
that the spelling of the two words was not always differentiated. But
it is improbable that Donne would say that ' piety ' in the sense of
piety to God could ever be out of place. What he means is probably
that at Court pity, which elsewhere is a virtue, may not be so if it
induces a lady to lend a relenting ear to the complaint of a lover.

Beware faire maides of musky courtiers oathes
Take heed what giftes and favors you receive,

Beleeve not oathes or much protesting men,
Credit no vowes nor no bewayling songs.

Joshua Sylvester {attributed to Donne).

What follows is ambiguous. As punctuated in /6y the lines run :

some vaine disport.
On this side, sinne : with that place may comport.

This must mean, practically repeating what has been said : * Some vain
amusements which, on this side of the line separating the cloister from
the Court, would be sin ; are on that side, in the Court, becoming —
amusements, sinful in the cloister, are permissible at Court.' The last
line thus contains a sharp antithesis. But can * on this side ' mean
* in the cloister ' ? Donne is not writing from the cloister, and if he
had been would say ' In this place '. ' Faith ', he says elsewhere, ' is
not on this side Knowledge but beyond it.' Sermons 50. 36. 325.
This is what he means here, and I have so punctuated it, following
/7/p and subsequent editions : ' Some vain disport, so long as it
falls short of actual sin, is permissible at Court.'

1. 48. what none else lost : i. e. innocence. Others never had it.

Page aoi. To the Countesse of Huntingdon.

Elizabeth Stanley, daughter of Ferdinando, fifth Earl of Derby,
married Henry Hastings, fifth Earl of Huntingdon, in 1603. Her
mother's second husband was Sir Thomas Egerton, whom Lady

M 2

164 Commentary,

Derljy married in 1600. Donne was then Egerton's secretary, and
in lines 57—60 he refers to his early acquaintance with her, then
Lady Alice Stanley. If the letter in Appendix A, p. 417, ' That unripe
side ', «S:c., be also by Donne, and addressed to the Countess of
Huntingdon, it must have been written earlier than this letter, which
belongs probably to the period immediately before Donne's ordination.
1. 13. the Magi. The MSS. give Magis, and in The First
Anniversary (1. 390) Donne writes, ' The Aegyptian Mages '. The
argument of the verse is : 'As such a miraculous star led the Magi
to the infant Christ, so may the beams of virtue transmitted by your
fame guide fit souls to the knowledge of virtue ; and indeed none are
so bad that they may not be thus led. Your light can illumine and
guide the darkest.'

I, 18. the Sunnes fall. In Autumn? or does Donne refer to the
fall of the sun to the centre in the new Astronomy ? In the Letters,
p. 102, he says that ' Copernicisme in the Mathematiques hath carried
earth farther up from the stupid Center ; and yet not honoured it,
because for the necessity of appearances, it hath carried heaven so
much higher from it'. Compare An Anatomic of the World, 1. 274.

Page 202, 1. 25. She guilded ids : But you are gold, and Shee ; The
16)^ reading is the more pregnant, and therefore the more character-
istic of Donne. ' She guilded us, but you she changed into her own
substance,' The 16^^ reading implies transubstantiation, but does
not indicate so clearly the identity of the new substance with virtue's
own essence.

II. 33-6. Else being alike pure, &'c. This verse follows in the
closest way on what has gone before, and should not be separated
from it by a full stop as in Chambers and Grolier. The last line of
this stanza concludes the whole argument which began at 1. 29. ' The
high grace of virginity indeed is not yours, because virtue, having
made you one with herself, wished in you to reveal herself. Virtue and
Virginity are each too pure for earthly vision. As air and aqueous
vapour are each invisible till both are changed into thickened air or
cloud, so virtue becomes manifest in you as mother and wife. It is
for our sake you take these low names.'

II. 41—4. So you, as woman, one doth comprehend, 6^<r. ' One, your
husband, comprehends your being. To others it is revealed, but
under the veil of kindred ; to still others of friendship ; to me, who
stand more remote, under the relationship of prince to subject.'

1. 47. /, which doe soe. The edition of 1633 reads, 'I, which to
you \ making a logical and grammatical construction of the sentence
impossible. The editor has failed to note that the personal reference
of ' owe ' is supplied in 1. 45, ' To whom '. ' I, which doe so ' means
' I, who contemplate you '.

Page 203. To M' T. W.

To M'' T. W. The group of letters which begins with this I have
arranged according to the order in which they are found in W, Mr.

Letters to Sever all Personages. 165

Gosse's Westmoreland MS. In this MS. a better text of these poems
is given than that of /<5y ; Hnes are supph'ed which have been
dropped, and a few whole letters. The series contains also a reply
to one of Donne's letters. For these reasons it seems to me
preferable to follow an order which may correspond to the order of
composition.

In 16}}, which follows Ai8^ N, TCC, TCD, the letters are headed
M. T. W., M. R. W., &c., ' M ' standing, as often, for ' Mr. ' Seeing,
however, that ' Mr.' is the general form in IV, I have used it as clearer.

The first of the letters has been headed hitherto To M. I. W., and
Mr. Chambers conjectured that the person addressed might be Izaak
Walton. It is clear from the other MSS. that Aj8, N, TC, which
16^) follows, is wrong and that I. W. should be T. W., Thomas
Woodward. The T and I of this MS. are very similar, though
distinguishable. Unfortunately we know nothing more of Thomas
Woodward than that he was Rowland's brother and Donne's friend.
The ' sweet Poet ' must not be taken too seriously, Donne and his
friends were corresponding with one another in verse, and compli-
menting each other in the polite fashion of the day.

Page 204, 11. 13-16. But care not for me, c^v. These lines form
a crux in the textual criticism of Donne's poetry. I shall print them
as they stand in W:

But care not for mee : I y' ever was
In natures & in fortunes guifts alas
Before thy grace got in the Muses schoole
A monster & a begger, am now a foole.

Some copies of the 1633 edition (including those used by myself and
by the Grolier Club editor) print these words, but obscure the meaning
by bracketing 'alas . . . schoole'. Other copies (e.g. that used by
Chambers) insert after ' Before 'a ' by ', which the Grolier Club editor
also does as a conjecture. The 1635 editor, probably following
O'F, resorted to another device to clear up the sense and changed
' Before ' to ' But for ', which Grosart and Chambers follow. The
majority of the MSS., however, agree with \V, and the case illustrates
well the difficulties which beset an eclectic use of the editions.

If the bracket in 16}) is dropt, or rearranged as in the text, the
reading is correct and intelligible. The printers and editors have
been misled by Donne's phrase, ' In Natures, and in Fortunes gifts '.
They took this to go with ' A monster and a beggar ' : ' I that ever was
a monster and a beggar in Natures and in Fortunes gifts.' This is a
strange expression, taken, I suppose, to mean that Donne never
enjoyed the blessings either of Nature or of Fortune. But what
Donne says is somewhat different. The phrase ' I that ever was in
Natures and in Fortunes gifts ' means ' I that ever was the Almsman
of Nature and Fortune '. Donne is using metaphorically a phrase of
which the O.E.I), quotes a single instance: 'I live in Henry the

1 66 Commentary,

yth's Gifts '(i.e. his Almshouses). T. Barker, The Art of Angling {id^x).
The whole sentence might be paraphrased thus : * I, who was ever
the Almsman of Nature and Fortune, am now a fool.' Parenthetically
he adds, * Till thy grace begot me, a monster and a beggar, in the
Muses' school '. Possibly ' and a beggar ' should be left outside the
brackets and taken with ' In Natures and in Fortunes gifts ' : ' I, that
was an almsman and beggar, was by you begotten a poet, though a
monstrous one ; ' (' monster ' goes properly with ' got ') ' and am now a
fool ' — possibly the last allusion is to his rash marriage. Donne's prose
and verse of the years following 1601 are full of this melancholy
depreciation of himself and his lot. Daniel calls himself the

Orphan of Fortune, borne to be her scorne. Delia, 26.

Compare also :

O I am fortune's fool.

Shakespeare, Romeo a?id Juliet, 111. i. 129.

Let your study
Be to content your lord, who hath received you

At fortune's alms. Shakespeare, King Lear, i. i. 277-9.

So shall 1 clothe me in a forced content,

And shut myself up in some other course,
To fortune's alms. Shakespeare, Othello, in. iv. 120-2.

In W * All haile sweet Poet ' is followed at once by these lines,
presumably written by Thomas Woodward and possibly in reply to
the above. They are found standing by themselves in B, O'F, P, S^6.
In these they are apparently ascribed to Donne. I print from W:

To M^ J. D.
Thou sendst me prose and rimes, I send for those
Lynes, which, being neither, seem or verse or prose.
They'are lame and harsh, and have no heat at all
But what thy Liberall beams on them let fall.
The nimble fyre which in thy braynes doth dwell
Is it the fyre of heaven or that of hell ?
It doth beget and comfort like Heavens eye,
And like hells fyre it burnes eternally.
And those whom in thy fury and judgment
Thy verse shall skourge like hell it will torment.
Have mercy on mee and my sinful! Muse
Which rub'd and tickled with thine could not chuse
But spend some of her pith, and yeild to bee
One in that chaste and mistique Tribadree.
Bassaes adultery no fruit did Leave,
Nor theirs, which their swollen thighs did nimbly weave,
And with new armes and mouths embrace and kiss.
Though they had issue was not like to this.

Letters to Sever a II Personages. 167

Thy muse, Oh strange and holy Lecheree

Being a mayde still, gott this song on mee.
1. 25. Notv if this song, dr'c. By interchanging the stops at ' evill ' and
at * passe ' the old editions have obscured these lines. Mr. Chambers,
accepting the full stop at ' evill ', prints : —

If thou forget the rhyme as thou dost pass,
Then write ;

The reason for writing is not clear. * If thou forget,' &c. explains
' 'Twill be good prose '. ' Read this without attending to the rhymes
and you will find it good prose.' If we drop the epithet 'good ', this
criticism will apply to a considerable portion of metaphysical poetry.
Page 205, 1. 30. thy zanee, i.e. thy imitator, as the Merry-Andrew
imitates the Mountebank :

He's like the Zani to a tumbler

That tries tricks after him to make men laugh.

Jonson, Every Man out of his Humour^ iv. i.

Page 205. To M"^ T. W.

1. I. Haste thee, cr'c. By the lines 5-6, supplied from W, this poem
is restored to the compass of a sonnet, though a very irregular one in
form. The letter is evidently written from London, where the plague
is prevalent. The letter is to be (1. 14) Donne's pledge of affection
if he lives, his testament if he dies.

Page 206. To M^ T. W.

1. 5. hand and eye is the reading of all the MSS., including JV. It
is written in the latter with a contraction which could easily be
mistaken for ' or '.

To M' T. W.

1. 3. I to the Nurse, they to the child of Art. The 'Nurse of Art '
is probably Leisure, ' I to my soft still walks ' :

And add to these retired Leisure,
That in trim gardens takes his pleasure.

According to Aristotle, all the higher, mc-e intellectual arts, as
distinct from those which supply necessities or add to the pleasures
of life, are the fruits of leisure: 'At first he who invented any
art that went beyond the common perceptions of man was naturally
admired by men, not only because there was something useful in
the inventions, but because he was thought wise and superior to
the rest. But as more arts were invented, and some were directed
to the necessities of life, others to its recreation, the inventors of
the latter were naturally always regarded as wiser than the inventors
of the former, because their branches of knowledge did not aim
at utility. Hence when all such inventions were already established,
the sciences which do not aim at giving pleasure or at the necessities

1 68 Comme?ttary.

of life were discovered, and first in the places where men first began
to have leisure. This is why the mathematical arts were founded in
Egypt ; for there the priestly caste was allowed to be at leisure.'
Met. A. 981'' (translated by W. I). Ross).

1. 1 2. a Picture, or bare Sacrament. The last word would seem to be
used in the legal sense : 'The sacramefitum or pledge which each of the
parties deposited or became bound for before a suit.' O. E. D. The
letter is a picture of his mind or pledge of his affection.

Page 207. To M' R, W.

Muse not that by, &--c. 1. 7. a Zay Mans Genius : i.e. his Guardian
Angel. The ' I.ay Man " is opposed to the ' Poet '. Donne is very
familiar with the Catholic doctrine of Guardian Angels and recurs to
it repeatedly. Compare Shakespeare, Macbeth, iii. i. 55.

1. II. Wright then. The version of this poem in W'\% probably
made from Donne's autograph. One of his characteristic spellings is
' Wright 'for 'write'. The Losely Manuscripts (ed. Kempe, 1836),
in which some of Donne's letters are printed from the originals, show
this spelling on every page. It is perhaps worth noting that the
irregular past participle similarly spelt, i.e. 'wrought', has occasionally
misled editors by its identity of form with the past participle of the verb
' work ', which has ' gh ' legitimately. Thus Mr. Beeching {A Seiectiott
from the Poetry of Samuel Daniel and Michael Drayton, 1899) prints r

Read in my face a volume of despairs,

The wailing Iliads of my tragic woe,
Drawn with my blood, and painted with my cares.

Wrought by her hand that I have honoured so.

Here ' wrought ' should be * wrote ', used, as frequently, for ' written '.
In Professor Saintsbury's Patrick Carey (Caroline Poets, II.) we
read :

Who writ this song would little care

Although at the end his name were wrought,
i. e. ' wrote '.
See also Donne's The Litanie, i. p. 342, 1. 1 1 2.

Page 208. To M' C. B.
Pretty certainly Christopher Brooke, to whom The Storme and The
Calme, are addressed. Chambers takes ' the Saint of his affection ' to
be Donne's wife, and dates the letter after 1600. But surely the last
two lines would not have been written of a wife. They are in the
conventional tone of the poet to his cruel Mistress. If Ann More is
the ' Saint ' referred to, she was not yet Donne's wife. Possibly it is
some one else. \Vriting from Wales in 1599, Wotton says (in a letter
which Mr. Pearsall Smith thinks is addressed to Donne, but this is not
at all certain), ' May I after these, kiss that fair and learned hand of
your mistress, than whom the world doth possess nothing more
virtuous.' {Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, \. ^06.)

Letters to Sever all Personages. 169

1. 10. Heavens liberall and earths thrice fairer Siinne. 1 prefer the
/6y and i66^ reading, amended from /F which reads ' fairer ', to that
of the later editions, ' the thrice faire Sunne ', which Chambers adopts.
There are obviously two suns in question — the Heavens' liberal sun,
and the earth's thrice-fairer one, i. e, the lady. Exiled from both, Donne
carries with him sufficient fire to melt the ice of the wintry regions he
must visit — not ' that which walls her heart '. Commenting on a similar
conceit in Petrarch :

Ite caldi sospiri al freddo core,

Rompete il ghiaccio, che pieta contende,
Tassoni tells how while writing he found himself detained at an
Inn by a severe frost, and that sighs were of little use to melt it.
Consider azioni^ c^c. (1609), p. 228.

To M' E. G.

Gosse conjectures that the person addressed is Edward Guilpin, or
Gilpin, author of Skialetheia (1598), a collection of epigrams and
satires. Guilpin imitates one of Donne's Satyres, which may imply
acquaintance. He makes no traceable reference to Donne in his
works, and we know so little of Guilpin that it is impossible to affirm
anything with confidence. VVhoever is meant is in Suffolk. There
were Gilpins of Bungay there in 1664. It is worth noting that Sir
Henry Goodyere begins one of his poems (preserved in MS. at the
Record Office, State Papers Dom.y 1623) with the line : ' Even as lame
things thirst their perfection.' Goodyere's poem was written before
the issue of Donne's poems in 1633, and that edition does not
contain this letter. One suspects that E. G. may be a Goodyere.

11. 5-6. oreseest . . . overseene. Donne is probably punning : ' Thou
from the height of Parnassus lookest down upon London ; I in
London am too much overlooked, disregarded.' But it is not clear.
He may mean ' am too much in men's eye, or kept too strictly under
observation '. The first meaning seems to me the more probable.

P.\GE 209. To M' R. W.

1. 3. brother. JCf^reads'brethren', and Morpheus /5a^ many brothers;
but of these only two had with himself the power of assuming what
form they would, and of these two Phantasus took forms that lack life.
Donne, therefore, probably means Phobetor, but a friend copying the
poem thought to amend his mythology. See Ovid, Metam. xi. 635-41.

Page 210. To M' R. VV.

1. 18. Guyanaes harvest is nif din the spring. See introductory note
to the Letters.

1. 23. businesse. The use of * businesse ' as a trisyllable with plural
meaning is quite legitimate : ' Idle and discoursing men, that were
not much affected, how businesse went, so they might talke of them.'
Sertnon, Judges xx. 15. p. 7,

1 7 o Commentary,

Page 211. To M' S. B.

Probably Samuel Brooke, the brother of Christopher. He officiated
at Donne's marriage and was imprisoned. He was later Chaplain to
Prince Henry, to James I, and to Charles I ; professor of Divinity at
Gresham College{i6i2-29) and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge,
1629. He wrote Latin plays, poems, and religious treatises. The
tone of Donne's letter implies that he is a student at Cambridge. It
was written therefore before 1601, probably, like several of these
letters, while Donne was Egerton's secretary, and living in chambers
with Christopher Brooke. A poem by Samuel Brooke, On Tears, is
printed in Hannah's Courtly Poets.

Page 212. To M"^ J. L.

Of the J. L. of this and the letter which follows the next, no-
thing has been unearthed. He clearly belonged to the North of
England, beyond the Trent.

To M' B. B.

Grosart conjectures that this was Basil Brooke (1576-1646 ?),
a Catholic, who was knighted in 1604. In 1644 he was committed
to the Tower by Parliament and in 1646 imprisoned in the King's
Bench. He translated Entertainments for Lent from the French.
He was not a brother of Christopher and Samuel. The identifica-
tion is only a conjecture. The tenor of the poem is very similar to
that addressed to Mr.S. B.

Page 213, 1. 18. widowhed. ^here clearly gives us the form which
Donne used. The rhyme requires it and the poet has used it else-
where :

And call chast widowhead Virginitie. The Litanie, xii, 108.

11. 19-22. As punctuated in the old editions these lines are some-
what ambiguous :

My Muse, (for I had one) because I'am cold,
Divorc'd her self, the cause being in me,
That I can take no new in Bigamye,
Not my will only but power doth withhold.

Chambers and the Grolier Club editor, by putting a full stop or semi-
colon after ' the cause being in me ', connect these words with what
precedes. This makes the first two lines verbose (' the cause being in
me ' repeating ' because I'am cold ') and the last two obscure. I regard
' the cause being in me ' as an explanatory participial phrase qualifying
what follows. ' My Muse divorc'd me because of my coldness. The
cause of this divorce, coldness, being in me,' the divorced one, I lack
not only the will but the power to contract a new marriage '. I have
therefore, following fF, placed a colon after ' selfe '.

Letters to Several/ Personages, 171

Page 213. To M^ I, L.

1. 2. My Sun is with you. Here, as in the letter ' To Mr. C. B.'
(p. 208), reference is made to some lady whose ' servant ' Donne is.
See the note to that poem and the quotation from Sir Henry Wotton.
It seems to me most probable that the person referred to was neither
Ann More nor any predecessor of her in Donne's affections, but some
noble lady to whom the poet stood in the attitude of dependence
masking itself in love which Spenser occupied towards Lady Carey,
and so many other poets towards their patronesses. But in regard to
all the references in these letters we can only grope in darkness. As
Professor Saintsbury would say, we do not really knoxv to whom one of
the letters was addressed.

Page 214, 11. 11-12. These lines from ?F make the sense more
complete and the transition to the closing invocation less abrupt.
' Sacrifice my heart to that beauteous Sunne ; and since being with
her you are in Paradise where joy admits of no addition, think of me
at the sacrifice '; and then begins the prayer to his friend as an inter-
ceding saint. See note to p. 24, 1. 22.

The lines seem to have been dropped, not in printing, but at some
stage in transcription, for I have found them in no MS. but W.

1. 20. Thy Sonne ne'r Ward: i. e. * May thy son never become a
royal ward, to be handed over to the guardianship of some courtier who
will plunder his estate.' Sir John Roe's father, in his will, begs his
wife to procure the wardship of his son that he be not utterly ruined.

The series of letters which this to Mr. I. L. closes was probably
written during the years 1597 to 1608 or 1610. Donne's first Letters
were The Siorme and The Calme. These were followed by Letters to
Wotton before and after he went to Ireland, and this series continues
them during the years of Donne's secretaryship and his subsequent
residence at Pyrford and Mitcham. They are written to friends of his
youth, some still at college. Clearly too, what we have preserved
is Donne's side of a mutual correspondence. Of Letters to Donne
I have printed one, probably from Thomas Woodward. Chance
has preserved another probably in the form in which it was sent.
Mr. Gosse has printed it {Life, dr^c, i, p. 91). I reproduce it from the
original MS., Tanner 306, in the Bodleian Library :

To my ever to be respected freind

M"" John Done secretary to my
Lord Keeper give these.
As in tymes past the rusticke shepheards sceant
Thir Tideast lambs or kids for sacrefize
Vnto thir gods, sincear beinge thir intent
Thoughe base thir gift, if that shoulde moralize
thir loves, yet noe direackt discerninge eye
Will judge thir ackt but full of piety.

7 2 Commentary.

Soe offir I my beast affection
Apparaled in these harsh totterd rimes.
Think not they want love, though perfection
or that my loves noe truer than my lyens
Smothe is my love thoughe rugged be my vears
Yet well they mean, thoughe well they ill rehears.

What tyme thou meanst to offir Idillnes
Come to my den for heer she always stayes ;
If then for change of bowers you seem careles
Agree with me to lose them at the playes.
farewell dear freand, my love, not lyens respeackt,
So shall you shewe, my freandship you affeckt.

Yours
WiUiam Cornwaleys.

The writer is, Mr. Gosse says, Sir William Cornwallis, the eldest son
of Sir Charles Cornwallis of Beeston-in-Sprouston, Norfolk. Like
Wotton, Goodyere, Roe, and others of Donne's circle he followed Essex
to Ireland and was knighted at Dublin in 1599. The letter probably
dates from 1600 or 160 1. I have reproduced the original spelling,
which is remarkable.

This letter and that to Mr. E. G. show that Donne was a frequenter
of the theatre in these interesting years, 1593 to 1610, the greatest
dramatic era since the age of Pericles. Sir Richard Baker, in his
Chronicle of the Kings of England (1730, p. 424), recalls his 'Old
Acquaintance . . . Mr. John Dunne, who leaving Oxford, liv'd at the
Inns of Court, not dissolute but very neat : a great Visiter of Ladies,
a great Frequenter of Plays, a great Writer of conceited Verses'.
But of the Elizabethan drama there is almost no echo in Donne's
poetry. The theatres are an amusement for idle hours : ' Because
I am drousie, I will be kept awake with the obscenities and scurrilities
of a Comedy, or the drums and emulations of a Tragedy.' Sermons
80. 38. 383.

Page 214. To Sir H. W. at his going Ambassador to Venice.

On July 8 O.S., 1604, Wotton was knighted by James, and on the
1 3th sailed for Venice. * He is a gentleman ', the Venetian ambassador
reported, ' of excellent condition, wise, prudent, able. Your serenity,
it is to be hoped, will be very well pleased with him.' Mr. Pearsall
Smith adds, ' It is worth noting that while Wotton was travelling to
Venice, Shakespeare was probably engaged in writing his great
Venetian tragedy, Othello, which was acted before James I in
November of this year.'

Page 215, 11, 21-4. To sweare much love, c^c. The meaning of
this verse, accepting the 1633 text, is : ' Admit this honest paper to
swear much love, — a love that will not change until with your elevation
to the peerage (or increasing eminence) it must be called honour
rather than love.^ (We honour, not love, those who are high above us.)

Letters to Sever a II Personages. 173

' But when that time comes I shall not more honour your fortune, the
rank that fortune gives you, than I have honoured your honour ["noble-
ness of mind, scorn of meanness, magnanimity" (Johnson)J, your high
character, magnanimity, without it, i. e. when yet unhonoured.' Donne
plays on the word ' honour '.

Walton's version, and the slight variant of this in i6jj-6p, give
a different thought, and this is perhaps the correct reading, more
probably either another (perhaps an earlier) version of the poet or an
attempt to correct due to a failure to catch the meaning of the rather
fanciful phrase ' honouring your honour '. The meaning is, ' I shall
not then more honour your fortune than I have your wit while it was
still unhonoured, or {i6jj-6q) unennobled.' The 1633 version seems
to me the more likely to be the correct or final form of the text,
because a reference to character rather than ' wit ' or intellectual
ability is implied by the following verse :

But 'tis an easier load (though both oppresse)
To want then governe greatnesse, &:c.

This stress on character, too, and indifference to fortune, is quite in
the vein of Donne's and Wotton's earlier verse correspondence and
all Wotton's poetry.

For the distinction between love and honour compare Lyly's
Endimion^ v. iii. 150-80:

' Cinthia. Was there such a time when as for my love thou did'st
vow thyself to death, and in respect of it loth'd thy life ? Speake
Endimion, I will not revenge it with hate . . .

Endimion. My unspotted thoughts, my languishing bodie, my dis-
contented life, let them obtaine by princelie favour that, which to
challenge they must not presume, onelie wishing of impossibilities :
with im.agination of which I will spend my spirits, and to myselfe
that no creature may heare, softlie call it love. And if any urge to
utter what I whisper, then will I name it honor. . , .

. . . Cinthia. Endimion, this honourable respect of thine, shalbe
christened love in thee, and my reward for it favor.'

With the lines.

Nor shall I then honour your fortune, (!v:c.,

compare in the same play :

* O Endimion, Tellus was faire, but what availeth Beautie with-
out wisdom ? Nay, Endimion, she was wise, but what availeth wisdom
without honour? She was honourable, Endimion, belie her not.
I, but how obscure is honour without fortune ?' 11. iii. 11-17.

The antithesis here between 'honour' and 'fortune' is exactly
that which Donne makes.

If we may accept ' noble-wanting-wit ' as Donne's own phrase (and
Walton's authority pleads for it) and interpret it as 'wit that yet

174 Commentary,

wants ennoblement ' it forms an interesting parallel to a phrase of
Shakespeare's in Macbeth, when Banquo addresses the witches :

My noble partner
You greet with present grace and great prediction,
Of noble having and of royal hope.

Macbeth, i. iii. 55-7.

Some editors refer ' present grace ' to the first salutation, ' Thane
of Glamis '. This is unlikely as there is nothing startling in a salu-
tation to which Macbeth was already entitled. The Clarendon
Press editors refer the line, more probably, to the two prophecies,
' thane of Cawdor ' and ' that shalt be King hereafter '. The word
' having ' is then not quite the same as in the phrases ' my having is
not great', &c., which these editors quote, but is simply opposed to
'hope'. You greet him with 'nobility in possession', with 'royalty
in expectation', as being already thane of Cawdor, as to be king
hereafter. Shakespeare's 'noble having' is the opposite of Donne's
' noble wanting ',

One is tempted to put, as Chambers does, an emphasizing comma
after ' honour ' as well as ' fortune ' ; but the antithesis is between
' fortune ' and ' honour wanting fortune '.

' Sir Philip Sidney is none of this number ; for the greatness which
he affected was built upon true Worth, esteeming Fame more than
Riches, and Noble actions far above Nobility it self.' Fulke
Greville's Life of Sidney, c. iii. p. 38 {Tudor and Stuart Library).

Page 216. To M^^ M. H.

I. e. Mrs. Magdalen Herbert, daughter of Sir Richard Newport,
mother of Sir Edward Herbert (Lord Herbert of Cherbury), and of
George Herbert the poet. For her friendship with Donne, see
Walton's Life of Mr. George Herbert (1670), Gosse's Life and Letters
of John Donne, i. 162 f., and what is said in the Lntroduction to this
volume and the Introductory Note to the Elegies. In 1608 she
married Sir John Danvers. Her funeral sermon was preached by
Donne in 1627.

Page 217, 1. 27. For, speech of ill, and her, thou must abstaine.
The O.E.D. gives no example of 'abstain ' thus used without 'from '
before the object, and it is tempting with i6jj-6g and all the MSS.
to change ' For ' to From '. But none of the MSS. has great
authority textually, and the ' For ' in i6)j is too carefully comma'd
off to suggest a mere slip. Probably Donne wrote the line as it
stands. One does not miss the ' from ' so much when the verb comes
so long after the object. ' Abstain ' acquires the sense of ' forgo '.

II. 31-2. And since they' are but her cloathes, dr^c. Compare :

For he who colour loves and skinne,
Loves but their oldest clothes.

The Undertaking, p. 10.

Letters to Several! Personages. 175

Page 218. To the Countesse of Bedford.

1.13. Care not then^ Madavi^ how Imv your praysers lye. I cannot
but think that the ' praysers ' of the MSS. is preferable to the ' prayses '
of the editions. It is difficult to construe or make unambiguous
sense of ' how low your prayses lie '. Donne does not wish to
suggest that the praise is poor in itself, but that the giver is a * low
person '. The word ' prayser ' he has already used in a letter to the
Countess (p. 200), and there also it has caused some trouble to editors
and copyists.

11. 20-1. Your radiation can all clouds subdue ;

But one, 'tis best light to contemplate you.

Grosart and the Grolier Club editor punctuate these lines so as to
connect ' But one ' with what precedes.

Your radiation can all clouds subdue

But one ; 'tis best light to contemplate you.

I suppose .' death ' in this reading is to be regarded as the one
cloud which the radiation of the Countess cannot dispel. There
is no indication, however, that this is the thought in Donne's mind.
As punctuated (i. e. with a comma after ' subdue ', which I have
strengthened to a semicolon), ' But one ' goes with what follows,
and refers to God : ' Excepting God only, you are the most
illuminating object we can contemplate.'

Page 219, 1. 27. May in your through-shine front your hearts thoughts
see. All the MSS. agree in reading ' your hearts thoughts ', which is
obviously correct. N, O'F, and TCD give the line otherwise
exactly as in the editions. £ drops the ' shine ' after ' through ' ; and
Sg6 reads :

May in you, through your face, your hearts thoughts see.

Donne has used * through-shine ' already in ' A Valediction : of my
name in the window ' :

'Tis much that glasse should bee
As all confessing, and through-shine as I,

'Tis more that it shewes thee to thee,

And cleare reflects thee to thine eye.
But all such rules, loves magique can undoe,

Here you see mee, and I am you.

If there were any evidence that Donne was, as in this lyric, playing
with the idea of the identity of different souls, there would be reason
to retain the ' our hearts thoughts ' of the editions ; but there is no
trace of this. He is dwelling simply on the thought of the Countess's
transparency. Donne is fond of compounds with ' through '. Other
examples are ' through-light ', ' through-swome ', ' through-vaine ',
' through-piercd ".

176 Commentary.

11. 36-7. They fly not, cr-\: Chambers and the (iroHer Club editor
have here injured the sense by altering the punctuation. ' Nature's
first lesson ' does not complete the previous statement about the
relation of the different souls, but qualifies 'discretion'. 'Just as
the souls of growth and sense do not claim precedence of the rational
soul, so the first lesson taught us by Nature, viz. discretion, must not
grudge a place to zeal.' 'Anima rationalis est perfectior quam
sensibilis, et sensibilis quam vegetabilis,' Aquinas, Siimvia, ii. 57. 2.

Page 220, 1. 46. In those poor types, 6rr. The use of the circle as
an emblem of infinity is very old. ' To the mystically inclined the
perpendicular was the emblem of unswerving rectitude and purity ;
but the circle, " the foremost, richest, and most perfect of curves " was
the symbol of completeness and eternity, of the endless process of
generation and renascence in which all things are ever becoming
new.' W. B. Frankland, The Story of Euclid, p. 70. God was described
by St. Bonaventura as ' a circle whose centre is everywhere, whose
circumference nowhere '. See also supplementary note.

Page 221. A Letter to the Lady Carey, and
M'" Essex Riche, from Amvens.
Probably written when Donne was abroad with Sir Robert Drury in
1611-12. 'The two ladies', Mr. Chambers says, 'were daughters
of Robert, third Lord Rich, by Penelope Devereux, daughter of Walter,
Earl of Essex, the Stella of Sidney's Astrophel and Stella! Lady Rich
abandoned her husband after five years' marriage and declared that
the true father of her children was Charles Blount, Earl of Devon-
shire, to whom, after her divorce in 1605, she was married by Laud.
Lettice, the eldest daughter, married Sir George Carey, of Cockington,
Devon. Essex, the younger, was married, subsequently to this letter,
to Sir Thomas Cheeke, of Pirgo, Essex.

II. 10-12. Where, because Faith is in too low degree, &c. Donne
refers to the Catholic doctrine of good works as necessary to salvation
in opposition to the Protestant doctrine of Justification by Faith.
He is fond of the antithesis. Compare :

My faith I give to Roman Catholiques ;

All my good workes unto the Schismaticks

Of Amsterdam ; . . .

Thou Love taughtst mee, by making mee

Love her that holds my love disparity,

Onely to give to those that count my gifts indignity.

The Will, p. 57.

Page 222, 1. 14. ivhere no one is groT.vne or spent. Like the stars
in the firmament your virtues neither grow nor decay. According to
Aquinas the heavenly bodies are neither temporal nor eternal ; not
temporal because they are subject neither to growth nor decay ; not
eternal because they change their position. They are ' Aeonical ',
their life is measured by ages.

{

Letters to Several/ Personages. 177

1. 19. humilitie has such general support thai the 'humidity' of
i66g seems to be merely a conjecture.

Page 224. To the Countesse of Salisbury. 1614.

Catharine Howard, daughter of Thomas, first Earl of Suffolk,
married in 1608 William Cecil, second Earl of Salisbury, son of the
greater earl and grandson of Burghley, ' whose wisdom and virtues
died with them, and their children only inherited their titles '.
Clarendon,

It is not impossible, considering the date of this letter, that the
Countess of Salisbury may be ' the Countesse ' referred to in Donne's
letter to Goodyere quoted in my introduction on the canon of Donne's
poems. There is a difficulty in applying to the Countess of Hunting-
don the words * that knowledge which she hath of me, was in the
beginning of a graver course, then of a Poet '. Letters, cr'c., p. 103.
Donne made the acquaintance of Lady Elizabeth Stanley when he
was Sir Thomas Egerton's secretary. She must have known him as
a wit before his graver days. Nor would he have apologized for
writing to such an old friend whose prophet he had been in her
younger days.

The punctuation of this poem repays careful study. The whole is a
fine example of that periodic style, drawn out from line to line, and
forming sonorous and impressive verse-paragraphs, in which Donne
more than any other poet anticipated Milton. The first sentence
closes only at the thirty-sixth line. The various clauses which lead
up to the close are separated from one another by the full-stop
(11. 8, 24), the colon (11. 2, 7 (sonnets :), 34), and the semicolon
(11. 18, 21, 30 where the old edition had a colon), all with distinct
values. The onlychange I have made(and recorded) is at 1. 30 (fantasti-
cal!), where a careful consideration of the punctuation throughout shows
that a semicolon is more appropriate than a colon. The clause which
begins with 'Since' in 1. 25 does not close till I. 34, 'understood'.

In the rest of the poem the punctuation is also careful. The only
changes I have made are — 11. 42 'that day;' and 46 'yesterday ;' (a semi-
colon for a colon in each case), 6 1 ' mee : ' (a colon for a full stop),
and 63 'good ;' (a semicolon for a comma).

Page 227. To the Lady Bedford.

1. I. You that are she and you, that's double shee : The old punctua-
tion suggests absurdly that the clause ' and you that's double she ' is
an independent co-ordinate clause.

1. 7. Cusco. I note in a catalogue, 'South America, a very early Map,
with view of Cusco, the capital of Peru '.

I. 44, of Judith. ' There is not such a woman from one end of the
earth to the other, both for beauty of face and wisdom of words.'
Judith xi. 21.

II «»7S N

178 Co7n?nentary.

AN ANATOMIE OF THE WORLD.

The Anatomic of the World and Of The Progresse of the Souk were
the first poems published in Donne's lifetime. The former was issued
in 161 1. It is exceedingly rare. The copy preserved in Lord
Ellesmere's library at Bridgewater House is a small octavo volume
of 26 pages {Praise of the Dead, ^c. 3 pp., Anatomy 19 pp., and
Funeral! Elegie 4 pp., all unnumbered), with title-page as given on
the page opposite.

In 161 2 the poem was reissued along with \\\^ Second Anniversary .
A copy of this rare volume was sold at the Huth sale on the thirteenth
of June this year. With the kind permission of Mr. Edward Huth and
Messrs. Sotheby, Mr. Godfrey Keynes made a careful collation for me,
the results of which are embodied in my notes. The separate title-
pages of the two poems which the volurrie contains are here reproduced.

Mr. Keynes supplies the following description of the volume :
A first title, A-A4 To the praise of the Dead (in italics), A^-D2
(pp. T-44) The First Anniversary (in roman), D^-D-j (pp. 45-54)
A funerall Elegie (in italics), DS blank except for rules in margins :
Ei second title, E2-E4 recto The Harbinger (in italics), E4 verso
blank, Ej-H^ recto (pp. 1-49) The Second Anniversarie (in roman),
//f verso — H6 blank except for rules in margins. A fresh title-page
introduces the second poem.

In 161 1 the introductory verses entitled To the praise of the Dead,
and the Anatomy, zn^ the Anatomy itself, are printed in italic, A Funera//
Elegie following in roman type. This latter arrangement was reversed
in 1612. In the second part, only the poem entitled The Harbinger
to the Progresse is printed throughout in italic. Donne's own poem
is in roman type.

The reason of the variety of arrangement is, I suppose, this ; The
Funerall Elegie was probably, as Chambers suggests, the first part of
the poem, composed probably in i6ro. When it was published in
161 1 with the Anatomie, the latter was regarded as introductory and
subordinate to the Elegie. and accordingly was printed in italic. Later,
when the idea of the Anniversary poems emerged, and Of The Pro-
gresse of the Soule was written as a complement to An Anatomy of the
World, these became the prominent parts of the whole work in
honour of Elizabeth Drury.and the Funerall Elegie fell into the sub-
ordinate position.

The edition of 16 12 does not strike one as a very careful piece of
printing. It was probably printed while Donne was on the Continent.
It supplies only two certain emendations of the later text.

The reprints of this volume made in 162 1 and 1625 show in-
creasing carelessness. They were issued after Donne took orders
and probably without liis sanction. The title-pages of the editions
are here reproduced.

An Anatomie of the JVorld. 179

0.

o.

0^

vo\

■o

ANATOMY

of the World.

WHEREIN,
BY OCCASION OF

the vntimely death of Miftris

Elizabeth Drvry

the frailty and the decay

.of this whole world

is rcprcfcnted.

LONDON,

Printed for Samuel CMAchnm.

and are to be ioldc at hisHiop in

Paules Church-yard ., at the

iigncotthcbul-hcad.

y

JX'

i8o

Commentary.

The FirSl yinniuerfarte.
A N

ANATOMIE

of the World.

Wherein^

By Occasion Of

tbevnthnely death ofM'iftris

Elizabeth Drvry,
the frailtieand thedecayof

this whole World is
reprefented.

London,

Printed by>/. BraJwooJfovS. Macham^^^nd are

to be foldat his fhopin Pauls Church-yard at the

figneofthe Bull-head. \6ii.

An Anatomie of the World, 1 8 i

The Second Anniuerfarie.

OF

THE PROGRES

of the Soule.

Wherein:

By Occafion Of The

Religious Death of Miflris

Elizabeth Drvry,

the incommodities of the Soule

in this life and her exaltation in

the next, are Contem-

plated.

LON DON,

Printed by M. Bradwood for 5. Macham, and are

to be fould at his fhop in Pauls Church-yard at

the figne of the Bull-head.

1612.

The above title is not an exact facsimile.

•

l82

Commentary,

T^he Firji o^nniuerfarie.
A N

ANATOMIE

of the World.

wherein^

By Occasion Of

the yntimely death of Mi/iris

Elizabeth Drvry,
thefrailtieandthedecayof

this whole World is
reprefented.

London,

Printed by A. Matheives for 'Tho: Deive, and are

tobe fold at his fhopin Saint DM«/?o«xChinch-

yardinFleeteftreete. i6ii.

An Afiatomie of the lVo7^ld, 183

"Thefecond (L/lnniuerfarie.
OF

THE PROGRES

of the Soule.

Wherein^

By Occasion Of

the Tieligious death of Mijir'ts

Elizabeth D r v r y,
the incommodities of the Soule

in this life^ and her exaltation in

the next, are Contem-

pUted.

London,

Printed by A. Matheiues for Tho: Deive^ and are
to be fold at his fhop in Saint Dunflons Church-
yard in Fleeteftreete. i6i\.

184

Commentary.

^*^f^^-

A N

A N A T O M I
OF THE

World.
Wherein,
Bj Gccafion cf the yn

timely death of Milt

ELIZABETH DRVR

the frailtie and the decay

of this whole World is

repTifinted.

The firft AnniueiTarie.

LONDON

Printed by W.StansbyioxTho. Deive,

and are to be fold in S.T)Hnfianes

Church-yard. 1625

An Anatomie of the World. 185

\

OF

THE FROGRES

of the
SO V LE

Wherein,

Bj cccafion of the Re-
ligious death of Miitris

ELIZABETH DRVRY,

the incommoditics of the Soule in

this life, and her exaltation in the

next J are Contemplated.

The fecond Anniuerfarie.

LONDON

Printed by JV.StansbyforTho.Deive,

and are to befold inS.'D«M/?<*«ex

Chnrch-yard. 1625.

r^<giWTi»»*»^^^^==^k?

I 8 6 Commentary.

The symbolic figures in the title-pages of 1625 probably represent
the seven Liberal Arts. A feature of the editions of 1611, 1612,
and 162^ is the marginal notes. These are reproduced in 16)), but
a little carelessly, for some copies do not contain them all. They
are omitted in the subsequent editions.

The text of the Anniversaries in 16}) has been on the whole care-
fully edited. It is probable, judging from several small circumstances
(e. g. the omission of the first marginal note even in copies where all
the rest are given), that 16)^ was printed from i(>2^, but it is clear that
the editor compared this with earlier editions, probably those of /6//-/2,
and corrected or amended the punctuation throughout. My collation
of 16}) with 1611 has throughout vindicated the former as against
1621-J on the one hand and the later editions on the other.' Of
mistakes other than of punctuation I have noted only three : 1. 181,
thoughts 1611-12 ; thought 1621-^j. This was corrected, from the
obvious sense, in later editions {i6)^-6g), and Grosart, Chambers, and
Grolier make no note of the error in 1621-)^, 1. 318, proportions
1611-12 ; proportion 1621 and all subsequent editions without com-
ment. 1. 415, Impressions i6ii\ Impression 1612-2J : impression
16)) and all subsequent editions. All three cases are examples of the
same error, the dropping of final ' s '.

In typographical respects 1611 shows the hand of the author more
clearly than the later editions. Donne was fastidious in matters of
punctuation and the use of italics and capital letters, witness the
LX XX Sermons {16/^0), printed fromMSS. prepared for thepressbythe
author. But the printer had to be reckoned with, and perfection was
not obtainable. In a note to one of the separately published sermons
Donne says : ' Those Errors which are committed in mispointing, or
in changing the form of the Character, will soone be discernd, and
corrected by the Eye of any deliberate Reader '. The 1611 text shows
a more consistent use in certain passages of emphasizing capitals, and
at places its punctuation is better than that of /6y. My text repro-
duces 16)), corrected where necessary from the earHer editions ; and
I have occasionally followed the typography of 1611. But every case
in which 16)) is modified is recorded.

Of the Second Anniversarie, in like manner, my text is that of 16^^,
corrected in a few details, and with a few typographical features
borrowed, from the edition of 1612. The editor of 16)) had rather
definite views of his own on punctuation, notably a predilection for
semicolons in place of full stops. The only certain emendations
which 1612 supplies are in the marginal note at p. 234 and in

* 1621-2J abound in misplaced full stops which are not in 1611 and are generally
corrected in i6jj. The punctuation of the later editions {j6jj-6p) is the work of
the printer. Occasionally a comma is dropped or introduced with advantage to
the sense, but in general the punctuation grows increasingly careless. Often the
correction of one error leads to another.

An Anat07nie of the World, 187

1. 421 of the Second Anniversarie ' this ' for ' his '. The spelling is less
ambiguous in 11. 27 and 326.

The subject of the Anniversaries was the fifteen-year-old Elizabeth
Drury, who died in 1610. Her father, Sir Robert Drury, of Hawsted
in the county of Suffolk, was a man of some note on account of his
great wealth. He was knighted by Essex when about seventeen years
old, at the siege of Rouen (159 1-2). He served in the Low Countries,
and at the battle of Nieuport (1600) brought off Sir Francis Vere when
his horse was shot under him. He was courtier, traveller, member of
Parliament, and in 16 13 would have been glad to go as Ambassador
to Paris when Sir Thomas Overbury refused the proffered honour and
was sent to the Tower. Lady Drury was the daughter of Sir Nicholas
Bacon, the eldest son of Queen Elizabeth's Lord Keeper. She and
her brother, Sir Edmund Bacon, were friends and patrons of Joseph
Hall, Ponne's rival as an early satirist. From 1 600 to 1 608 Hall was rector
of Hawsted, and though he was not very kindly treated by Sir Robert
he dedicated to him his Meditations Moral! and Divine. This tie
explains the fact, which we learn from Jonson's conversations with
Drummond, that Hall is the author oHhc Harbifiger to the Progresse.
As he wrote this we may infer that he is also responsible for To the
praise of the dead, and the Anatomic.

Readers of Donne's Life by Walton are aware of the munificence
with which Sir Robert rewarded Donne for his poems, how he opened
his house to him, and took him abroad. Donne's letters, on the
other hand, reveal that the poem gave considerable offence to the
Countess of Bedford and other older patrons and friends. In his
letters to Gerrard he endeavoured to explain away his eulogies. In
verse-letters to the Countess of Bedford and others he atoned for his
inconstancy by subtle and erudite compliments.

The Funerall Elegie was doubtless written in 1610 and sent to Sir
Robert Drury. He and Donne may already have been acquainted
through VVotton, who was closely related by friendship and marriage
with Sir Edmund Bacon. (See Pearsall Smith, Life and Letters of
Sir Henry Wotton ( 1 907). The Anatomic of the World was composed in
161 1, Ojf the Progresse of the Soule \n France in 161 2, at some time
prior to the 14th of April, when he refers to his Anniversaries in
a letter to George Gerrard.

Ben Jonson declared to Drummond 'That Donnes Anniversaries
were profane and full of blasphemies : that he told Mr. Done if it
had been written of the Virgin Marie it had been something ; to which
he answered that he described the Idea of a Woman, and not as she
was '. This is a better defence of Donne's poems than any which he
advances in his letters, but it is not a complete description of his
work. Rather, he interwove with a rapt and extravagantly conceited
laudation of an ideal woman two topics familiar to his catholic and
mediaeval learning, and developed each in a characteristically subtle
and ingenious strain, a strain whose occasional sceptical, disintegrating

I 8 8 Commentary.

reflections belong as obviously to the seventeenth century as the
general content of the thought is mediaeval.

The burden of the whole is an impassioned and exalted meditatio
mortis based on two themes common enough in mediaeval devotional
literature — a De Contemptu Afutidi, and a contemplation of the
Glories of Paradise. A very brief analysis of the two poems, omitting
the laudatory portions, may help a reader who cannot at once see the
wood for the trees, and be better than detailed notes.

The Anaiomie of the World.

I. I. The world which suffered in her death is now fallen into the
worse lethargy of oblivion. /. 60. I will anatomize the world for the
benefit of those who still, by the influence of her virtue, lead a kind of
glimmering life. /. 9/. There is no health in the world. We are still
under the curse of woman. /. ///. How short is our life compared
with that of the patriarchs ! /. 1)4. How small is our stature compared
with that of the giants of old ! /. 14"]. How shrunken of soul we are,
especially since her death ! /. igi. And as man, so is the whole world.
The new learning or philosophy has shattered in fragments that
complete scheme of the universe in which we rested so confidently,
and (/. 211) in human society the same disorder prevails.
/. 2J0. There is no beauty in the world, for, first, the beauty of
proportion is lost, alike in the movements of the heavenly bodies,
and (/. 28j) in the earth with its mountains and hollows, and (/. }02)
in the administration of justice in society. /. jf/p. So is Beauty's
other element. Colour and Lustre. /. ^77. Heaven and earth are at
variance. We can no longer read terrestrial fortunes in the stars.
But (/. 4}j) an Anatomy can be pushed too far.

The Frogresse of the Soule.

I. I. The world's life is the life that breeds in corruption. Let
me, forgetting the rotten world, meditate on death. /. 8y. Think, my
soul, that thou art on thy death-bed, and consider death a release.
/. 7/7. Think how the body poisoned the soul, tainting it with
original sin. Set free, thou art in Heaven in a moment. /. 2^0. Here
all our knowledge is ignorance. The new learning has thrown all in
doubt. We sweat to learn trifles. In Heaven we know all we need
to know. 1. 321. Here, our converse is evil and corrupting. There
our converse will be with Mary ; the Patriarchs ; Apostles, Martyrs
and Virgins (compare A Litany). Here in the perpetual flux of
things is no essential joy. Essential joy is to see God. And even
the accidental joys of heaven surpass the essential joys of earth, were
there such joys here where all is casual :

Only in Heaven joys strength is never spent.
And accidental things are permanent.

One of the most interesting strands of thought common to the
twin poems is the reflection on the disintegrating effect of the New
Learning. Copernicus' displacement of the earth, and the consequent

An Anatomie of the World, 189

disturbance of the accepted mediaeval cosmology with its concentric
arrangement of elements and heavenly bodies, arrests and disturbs
Donne's imagination much as the later geology with its revelation of
vanished species and first suggestion of a doctrine of evolution
absorbed and perturbed Tennyson when he wrote In Memoriam and
throughout his life. No other poet of the seventeenth century
known to me shows the same sensitiveness to the consequences of the
new discoveries of traveller, astronomer, physiologist and physician
as Donne.

To THE Praise of the Dead,

Page 231, 1. 43. What high part thoitbearest in those best songs. The
contraction of ' bearest ' to ' bear'st ' in the earliest editions {1611-2J)
led to the insertion of ' of ' after • best ' in the later ones {16JJ-69).

An Anatomie of the World.

Page 235, 11. 133-6. Chambers alters the punctuation of these
lines in such a way as to connect them more closely :

So short is life, that every peasant strives,
In a torn house, or field, to have three lives ;
And as in lasting, so in length is man.
Contracted to an inch, who was a span.

But the punctuation of i6jj is careful and correct. A new para-
graph begins with * And as in lasting, so, &c.' From length of years
Donne passes to physical stature. The full stop is at 'lives', the
semicolon at ' span '. Grosart and the Grolier Club editor punctuate
correctly.

1. 144. We^are scarce our Fathers shadowes cast at noone : Compare :

But now the sun is just above our head,

We doe those shadowes tread ;
And to brave clearnesse all things are reduc'd.

A Lecture upon the Shadowe.

Page 236, 1. 160. And with new Physicke: i.e. the new mineral
drugs of the Paracelsians.

Page 237, 1. 190. Be more then man, or thou'rt lesse then an
Ant. Compare To M" Rowland Woodward, p. 185, II. 16-18 and
note.

I. 205. The new Philosophy calls all in doubt, &^c. The philosophy
of Gahleo and Copernicus has displaced the earth and discredited the
concentric arrangement of the elements, — earth, water, air, fire.
Norton quotes : ' The fire is an element most hot and dry, pure,
subtill, and so clear as it doth not hinder our sight looking through
the same towards the stars, and is placed next to the Spheare of the
Moon, under the which it is turned about like a celestial Spheare '.
M. Blundeville His Exercises, 1594.

190 Commentary.

When the world was formed from Chaos, then —

Earth as the Lees, and heavie dross of All
(After his kinde) did to the bottom fall :
Contrariwise, the light and nimble Fire
Did through the crannies of th'old Heap aspire
Unto the top ; and by his nature, light
No less than hot, mounted in sparks upright :
But, lest the Fire (which all the rest imbraces)
Being too near, should burn the Earth to ashes ;
As Chosen Umpires, the great All-Creator
Between these Foes placed the Aire and Water :
For, one suffiz'd not their stern strife to end.
Water, as Cozen did th^ Earth befriend :
Aire for his Kinsman Fire, as firmly deals (S:c.

Du Bartas, The second Day of the first Week
(trans. Joshua Sylvester).

Burton, in the Anatomy of Melancholy, Part 2, Sect. 2, Mem. 3, tells
how the new Astronomers Tycho, Rotman, Kepler, &c, by their
new doctrine of the heavens are ' exploding in the meantime that
element of fire, those fictitious, first watry movers, those heavens I
mean above the firmament, which Delrio, Lodovicus Imola, Patricius
and many of the fathers affirm '. They have abolished, that is to say,
the fire which surrounded the air, as that air surrounded the water
and the earth (all below the moon) ; and they have also abolished the
Crystalline Sphere and the Primum Mobile which were supposed
to surround the sphere of the fixed stars, or the firmament.

Page 238, 1. 215. Prince, Subject, Father, Sonne are things forgot.
Donne has probably in mind the effect of the religious wars in
Germany, France, the Low Countries, iSic.

1. 217. that then can be. This is the reading of all the editions
before 7669, and there is no reason to change * then ' to ' there ' :
' Every man thinks he has come to be a Phoenix (preferring private
judgement to authority) and that then comparison ceases, for there
is nothing of the same kind with which to compare himself. There
is nothing left to reverence.'

Page 239, 1. 258. It teares

The Firtnament in eight and forty sheires.

Norton says that in the catalogue of Hipparchus, preserved in the
Almagest of Ptolemy, the stars were divided into forty-eight
constellations.

1. 260. New starres. Norton says : * It was the apparition of a
new star in 1572, in the constellation of Cassiopeia, that turned
Tycho Brahe to astronomy : and a new bright star in Ophiuchus, in
1 604, had excited general wonder, and afforded Galileo a text for an
attack on the Ptolemaic system '.

An Anatomie of the World. 191

At p. 247, 1. 70, Donne notes that the ' new starres ' went out again.

Page 240, 1. 286. a Tenarif, or higher hill. 'Tenarif is the
161 1 spelling, ' Tenarus ' that of 16JJ-69. Donne speaks of 'Tenarus'
elsewhere, but it is not the same place.

It is not probable that Donne ever saw the Peak of Teneriffe,
although biographers speak of this line as a descriptive touch drawn
from memory. The Canary Isles are below the 30th degree of
latitude. The fleet that made the Islands Exhibition was never
much if at all further south than 43 degrees. After coasting off
Corunna 43° N. 8° \V., and some leagues south of that port, the fleet
struck straight across to the Azores, 37° N. 25° W. Donne was some-
what nearer in the previous year when he was at Cadiz, 36° N. 6° W.,
but too far off to descry the Peak. His description, though vivid, is
' metaphysical ', like that of Hell which follows : ' The Pike of
Teneriff, how high is it? 79 miles or 52, as Patricius holds, or 9 as
Snellius demonstrates in his Eratosthenes '. Burton, Anatomy of
Melancholy., Part 2, Sec. 2, Mem. 3.

On the other side, Satan, alarm'd,
Collecting all his might, dilated stood,
Like Teneriff or Atlas, unremov'd.

Milton, Par. Lost, iv. 985-7,

11. 295 f. Jf under all, a Vault infernal I bee, ^-c. Hell, according to
mediaeval philosophy, was in the middle of the earth. 'If this
be true,' says Donne, ' and if at the same time the Sea is in places
bottomless, then the earth is neither solid nor round. We use these
words only approximately. But you may hold, on the other hand,
that the deepest seas we know are but pock-holes, the highest hills but
warts, on the face of the solid earth. Well, even in that case you
must admit that in the moral sphere at any rate the world's proportion
is disfigured by the want of all proportioning of reward and punishment
to conduct.' The sudden transition from the physical to the moral
sphere is very disconcerting. Compare : ' Or is it the place of hell, as
Virgil in his Aeneides, Plato, Lucian, Dante, and others poetically
describe it, and as many of our divines think. In good earnest,
Antony Rusca, one of the society of that Ambrosian college in Millan,
in his great volume de Inferno, lib. i, cap. 47, is stiffe in this tenent. . .
Whatsoever philosophers write (saith Surius) there be certaine mouthes
of Hell, and places appointed for the punishment of mens souls, as at
Hecla in Island, where the ghosts of dead men are familiarly seen, and
sometimes talk with the living. God would have such visible places,
that mortal men might be certainly informed, that there be such
punishments after death, and learn hence to fear God,' &c. Burton,
Anal, of Melancholy, Part 2, Sec. 2, Mem. 3.

11. 296-8. Which sure is spacious, <^c. ' Franciscus Ribera will have
hell a materiall and locall fire in the centre of the earth, 200 Italian
miles in diameter, as he defines it out of those words Exivit sanguis

192 Commentary.

de terra . . . per stadia milk sexcenta, &'c. But Lessius (lib. 13, de
tnoribus divinis, cap. 24) will have thi.s locall hell far less, one Dutch
mile in diameter, all filled with fire and brimstone; because, as he
there demonstrates, that space, cubically multiplied, will make a
sphere able to hold eight hundred thousand millions of damned
bodies (allowing each body six foot square) ; which will abundantly
suffice, cum certiim sit, inquit, facia subductioiie, non futures ceniies
milk milliones damnandorum.' Burton, Anat. of Melancholy, ut sup.
Eschatology was the ' dismal science ' of those days and was studied
with astonishing gusto and acumen. 'For as one Author, who is
afraid of admitting too great a hoUownesse in the Earth, lest then the
Earth might not be said to be solid, pronounces that Hell cannot
possibly be above three thousand miles in compasse, (and then one
of the torments of Hell will be the throng, for their bodies must
be there in their dimensions, as well as their soules) so when the
Schoole-men come to measure the house in heaven (as they will
measure it, and the Master, God, and all his Attributes, and tell
us how Allmighty, and how Infinite he is) they pronounce that every
soule in that house shall have more roome to it selfe.then all this
world is.' Sermons 80. 73. 747. The reference in the margin is to
Munster.

1. 311. that Ancient, dfc. ' Many erroneous opinions are about the
essence and originall of it' (i.e. the rational soul), 'whether it be
fire, as Zeno held ; harmony, as Aristoxenus ; number, as Xenocrates,'
&c. Burton, Anat. of Melancholy, Part i, Sec. i, Mem. 2, Subsec.
9. Probably Donne has the same 'Ancient' in view. It is from
Cicero {Tusc. Disp. i. 10) that we learn that Aristoxenus held the soul
to be a harmony of the body. Though a Peripatetic, Aristoxenus
lived in close communion with the latest Pythagoreans, and the
doctrine is attributed to Pythagoras as a consequence of his theory
of numbers. Simmias, the disciple of the Pythagorean Philolaus,
maintains the doctrine in Plato's Phaedo, and Socrates criticizes it.
Aristotle states and examines it in the De Anima, 407b. 30. Two
classes of thinkers, Bouillet says (Plotinus, Fourth Ennead, Seventh
Book, note), regarded the soul as a harmony, doctors as Hippocrates
and Galen, who considered it a harmony of the four elements — the
hot, the cold, the dry and the moist (as the definition of health
Donne refers to this more than once, e.g. The good-morrow, 1. 19,
and The Second Anniversary, \\. 130 f.); and musicians like Aristoxenus,
who compared the soul to the harmony of the lyre. Donne leaves the
sense in which he uses the word quite vague ; but 1. 32 r suggests
the medical sense.

1. 312. at next. This common Anglo-Saxon construction is very
rare in later English. The O. E. D. cites no instance later than
1449, Pecock's Repression. The instance cited there is prepositional
in character rather than adverbial : ' Immediatli at next to the now
bifore alleggid text of Peter this proces folewith.' Donne's use seems

An Anatomie of the World. 193

to correspond exactly to the Anglo-Saxon : ' Johannes (Sa ofhreow
)?aere meden and ^'aera licmanna dreorignysse, and astrehte his
licaman to eort^an on langsumum gebede, and ?a aet nextan aras, and
eft upahafenum handum langlice baed.' Aelfric (Sweet's Anglo-
Saxon Reader, 1894, p. 67). But 'at next' in the poem possibly
does not mean simply 'next', but 'immediately', i.e. 'the first thing
he said would have been . . .'

1. 314. Resulia/ices : i.e. productions of, or emanations from, her.
' She is the harmony from which proceeds that harmony of our bodies
which is their soul.' Donne uses the word also in the sense of ' the
sum or gist of a thing ' : ' He speakes out of the strength and
resultance of many lawes and Canons there alleadged.' Pseudo-
martyr, p. 245 ; and Walton says that Donne 'left the resultance of
1400 Authors, most of them abridged and analysed with his own
hand.' Life (1675), p. 60. He is probably using Donne's own title.

Page 241, 1. 318. That tKArke to mans proportions xvas made.
The following quotation from St. Augustine will show that the plural
of 1611-12 is right, and what Donne had in view. St. Augustine is
speaking of the Ark as a type of the Church : ' Procul dubio figura
est peregrinantis in hoc seculo Civitatis Dei, hoc est Ecclesiae, quae
fit salva per lignum in quo pependit Mediator Dei et hominum, homo
lesus Christus. (i Tim. ii. 5.) Nam et mensurae ipsae longitudinis,
altitudinis,latitudinis eius,significant corpus humanum, in cuius veritate
ad homines praenuntiatus est venturus, et venit. Humani quippe
corporis longitudo a vertice usque ad vestigia sexies tantum habet,
quam latitudo, quae est ab uno latere ad alterum latus, et decies
tantum, quam altitudo, cuius altitudinis mensura est in latere a dorso
ad ventrem : velut si iacentem hominem metiaris supinum, seu pro-
num, sexies tantum longus est a capite ad pedes, quam latus a
dextra in sinistram, vel a sinistra in dextram, et decies, quam altus
a terra. Unde facta est area trecentorum in longitudine cubitorum,
et quinquaginta in latitudine, et triginta in altitudine.' De Civitate
Dei, XV. 26.

Page 242, 11. 377-80. Nor in ought more, ^c. 'The father' is the
Heavens, i.e. the various heavenly bodies moving in their spheres;
* the mother ', the earth :

As the bright Sun shines through the smoothest Glasse
The turning Planets influence doth passe
Without impeachment through the glistering Tent
Of the tralucing {French diafane) Fiery Element,
The Aires triple Regions, the transparent Water ;
But not the firm base of this faire Theater.
And therefore rightly may we call those Trines
(Fire, Aire and Water) but Heav'ns Concubines :
For, never Sun, nor Moon, nor Stars injoy
The love of these, but only by the way,

11 017.3 o

194 Commentary,

As passing by : whereas incessantly
The lusty Heav'n with Earth doth company ;
And with a fruitfull seed which lends All life,
With-childes each moment, his own lawfull wife ;
And with her lovely Babes, in form and nature
So divers, decks this beautiful Theater.

Sylvester, Du Bartas, Second Day, First Week.

Page 243, 1. 389. ne7v wormes : probably serpents, such as were
described in new books of travels.

1. 394. ImprisotCd in an Hearbe, or Charme, or Tree. Compare
A Valediction : of my name, in the window, p. 27, 11. 33-6 :

As all the vertuous powers which are
Fix'd in the starres, are said to flow
Into such characters, as graved bee

When these starres have supremacie.

1.409. But as some Serpents poyson, ^'c. Compare: 'But though
all knowledge be in those Authors already, yet, as some poisons, and
some medicines, hurt not, nor profit, except the creature in which
they reside, contribute their lively activitie and vigor ; so, much of
the knowledge buried in Books perisheth, and becomes ineffectuall,
if it be not applied, and refreshed by a companion, or friend. Much
of their goodnesse hath the same period which some Physicians of
Italy have observed to be in the biting of their Tarentola, that it
affects no longer, then the flie lives.' Letters, p. 107.

Page 245, 1. 460. As matter Jit for Chronicle, not verse. Compare
The Canonization, p. 15, 11. 31-2 :

And if no peece of Chronicle wee prove
We'll build in sonnets pretty roomes . , .

God's ' last, and lasting'st peece, a song ' is of course Moses' song
in Deuteronomy xxxii : ' Give ear, O ye heavens, and I will speak,' &c.
1. 467. Such an opinion (in due measure) made, ^c. The bracket
of i6ji makes the sense less ambiguous than the commas of 16)) :
Such an opinion, in due measure, made.

According to the habits of old punctuation, ' in due measure ' thus
comma'd off might be an adjunct of 'made me ... invade'. The
bracket shows that the phrase goes with ' opinion '. ' Such an opinion
(with all due reverence spoken),' &c. Donne finds that he is attributing
to himself the same thoughts as God.

A FUNERALL ElEGIE.

1. 2. to confine her in a marble chest. The ' Funerall Elegie'
was probably the first composed of these poems. Elizabeth Drury's
parents erected over her a very elaborate marble tomb.

Page 246, 1. 41. the Affrique Niger. Grosart comments on this:
'A peculiarity generally given to the Nile ; and here perhaps not spoken
of our Niger, but of the Nile before it is so called, when, according to

An Anatomie of the World. 195

Pliny {N. H. v. 9), after having twice been underground, and the second
time for twenty days' journey, it issues at the spring Nigris.' Prob-
ably Donne had been reading 'A Geographical Historie of Africa
written in Arabicke by lohn Leo a More, borne in Granada, and
brought up in Barbaric . . . Translated and collected by lohn Porie,
late of Gonevill and Caius College in Cambridge, 1600,' Of the
Niger he says : * This land of Negros hath a mighty river, which
taking his name of the region is called Niger : this river taketh his
originall from the east out of a certain desert called by the foresaide
Negros Sen . . . Our Cosmographers affirme that the said river of
Niger is derived out of Nilus, which they imagine for some certaine
space to be swallowed up of the earth, and yet at last to burst forth
into such a lake as is before mentioned.' Pory is mentioned occa-
sionally in Donne's correspondence.

Page 247, 1. 50. An Angell made a Throne, or Cherubin. See
Elegy XI, 11. 77-8 and note. Donne, like Shakespeare, uses 'Cheru-
bin ' as a singular. There can be no doubt that the lines in Macbeth,
I. vii. 21-3, should read :

And pity, like a naked new-born babe
Striding the blast, or heavens cherubins horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air, &c.

It is an echo of :

He rode upon the cherubins and did fly ;

He came flying upon the wings of the wind. Psalm xviii. 10.

' Cherubin ' is a singular in Shakespeare, and ' cherubim * as
a plural he did not know.

1. 73. a Lampe of Balsa7num, i.e. burning balsam instead of
ordinary oil : ' And as Constantine ordained, that upon this day '
(Christmas Day), * the Church should burne no Oyle, but Balsamum
in her Lamps, so let us ever celebrate this day, with a thankfull
acknowledgment, that Christ who is unctus Domini, The Anointed
of the Lord, hath anointed us with the Oyle of gladnesse above our
fellowes.' Sermons 80, 7. 72.

'1- 75-7- CloatKdin, or'c. Chambers's arrangement of these lines is
ingenious but, I think, mistaken because it alters the emphasis of the
sentences. The stress is not laid by Donne on her purity, but on
her early death : * She expir'd while she was still a virgin. She went
away before she was a woman.' Line 76 :

For marriage, though it doe not staine, doth dye.

is a sudden digression. Dryden filches these lines :

All white, a Virgin-Saint, she sought the skies
For Marriage, tho' it sullies not, it dies.

The Monument of a Faire Maiden Lady.
Page 248, 1. 83. said History is a strange phrase, but it has the
support of all the editions which can be said to have any authority.

o 2

196 Commentary,

1. 92, and then inferre. Compare: 'That this honour might be in-
ferred on some one of the blood and race of their ancient king.' Raleigh
(O.E.D.). Donne's sense of 'commit', 'entrust', is not far from
Raleigh's of ' confer ', ' bestow ', and both are natural extensions of
the common though now obsolete sense, ' bring on, occasion, cause ' :

Inferre faire Englands peace by this Alliance.

Shakespeare, Rich. Ill, iv, iv. 343.

1. 94. thus much to die. To die so far as this life is concerned.

OF THE PROGRESSE OF THE SOULE.
THE SECOND ANNIVERSARIE.

Page 252, 1. 43. These Hytmies thy issue, may encrease so long.
As till Gods great Vefiite change the song.

This is the punctuation of the editions 1612 to 16)). Grosart,
Chambers, and the Grolier Club editor follow the later editions,
i6jj-6g, in dropping the comma after ' issue ', which thus becomes
object to ' encrease '. ' These hymns may encrease thy issue so
long, &c.' This does not seem to me to harmonize so well with
1. 44 as the older punctuation of 1. 43. 'These Hymns, which
are thy issue, may encrease' (used intransitively, as in the phrase
'increase and multiply') 'so long as till, &c.' This suggests that
the Hymns themselves will live and sound in men's ears, quickening
in them virtue and religion, till they are drowned in the greater
music of God's Venite. The modern version is compatible with
the death of the hymns, but the survival of their issue.

1. 48. To th'only Health, to be Hydroptique so. Here again Grosart,
Chambers, and the Grolier Club editor have agreed in following the
editions i62j-6g against the earlier ones, 1612 and 1621. These
have connected * to be Hydroptic so ' with what follows :

to be hydroptic so,
Forget this rotten world . . .

But surely the full stop after ' so ' in 1612 is right, and ' to be
Hydroptique so ' is Donne's definition of ' th'only Health '. ' Thirst
is the symptom of dropsy ; and a continual thirst for God's safe-sealing
bowl is the best symptom of man's spiritual health.'

' Gods safe-sealing bowl' is of course the Eucharist : 'When thou
commest to this seal of thy peace, the Sacrament, pray that God will
give thee that light, that may direct and establish thee, in necessary
and fundamentall things ; that is the light of faith to see, that the
Body and Blood of Christ is applied to thee in that action ; But for
the manner, how the Body and Bloud of Christ is there, wait his
leisure if he have not yet manifested that to thee.' Sermons, &'c.

Page 253, 1. 72. Because shee was the forme, that made it live:
i. e. the soul of the world. Aquinas, after discussion, accepts the

Of the Progresse of the Soule. 197

Aristotelian view that the soul is united to the body as its form, that
in virtue of which the body lives and functions. ' Illud enim quo
primo aliquid operator, est forma eius cui operatio attribuitur . . .
Manifestum est autem quod primum quo corpus vivit, est anima.
Et cum vita manifestetur secundum diversas operationes, in diversis
gradibus viventium, id quo primo operamur unumquodque horum
operum vitae, est anima. Anima enim est primum quo nutrimur, et
sentimus, et movemur secundum locum, et similiter quo primo
intelliginius. Hoc ergo principium quo primo intelligimus, sive
dicatur intellectus, sive anima intellectiva, est forma corporis. Et
haec est demonstratio Aristotelis in 2 de Anima, text. 24-' Aquinas
goes on to show that any other relation as of part to whole, or mover
to thing moved, is unthinkable, Sunwia I. Ixxvi. i. Elizabeth
Drury in like manner was the form of the world, that in virtue of
which it lived and functioned.

Page 254, 1. 92. Division : a series of notes forming one melodic
sequence :

and streightway she

Carves out her dainty voice as readily,

Into a thousand sweet distinguish'd Tones,

And reckons up in soft divisions

Quicke volumes of wild Notes. Crashaw, Musicks Diiell.

1. 102. Satans Sergeants, i. e. bailiffs, watching to arrest for debt.
Compare :

as this fell Sergeant, Death,
Is strict in his arrest. Shakespeare, Hatnlet, v.

I. 120. but a Saint Lucies night. Compare p. 44. 'Saint Lucies
night ' is the longest in the year, yet it too passes, is only a night.
Death is a long sleep, yet a sleep from which we shall awaken. So
the Psalmist compares life to 'a watch in the night', which seems
so long and is so short.

II. 123-6. Shee whose Complexion, &'c.: i.e. 'in whose tempera-
ments the humours were in such perfect equilibrium that no one
could overgrow the others and bring dissolution ' :

What ever dyes, was not mixt equally.

The good- jfi or row.

And see the note to p. 182, 11. 59-62.

Page 255, 1, 127. Mithridate -. a universal antidote or preservative
against poison and infectious diseases, made by the compounding
together of rhany ingredients. It was also known as 'Theriaca' and
' triacle ' : 'As it is truly and properly said, that there are more
ingredients, more simples, more means of restoring in our dram of
triacle or mithridate then in an ounce of any particular syrup, in
which there may be 3 or 4, in the other perchance, so many
hundred.' Sermons 26. 20. 286-7. Vipers were added to the other

198 Com mentary.

ingredients by Androniachus, physician to the Emperor Nero, whence
the name 'theriaca' or 'triacle': 'Can an apothecary make a
sovereign triacle of Vipers and other poysons, and cannot God admit
offences and scandalls into his physick.' Sermons ^o. 17. 143. See
To S"^ Henry Wotion, p. 180, 1. 18 and note.

11. 143-6. Compare p. 269, 11. 71-6.

1. 152. Heaven was content, &>€. 'And from the days of John the
Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the
violent take it by force.' Matthew xi. 12,

1. 158. 7vast ?nade but in a sinke. Compare : ' Formatus est homo
. . . de spurcissimo spermate.' Pope Innocent, De Contetnptti
Mundi ; and

With Goddes owene finger wroght was he,
And nat begeten of mannes sperme unclene.

Chaucer, Monkes Tale.

Page 256, 11. 159-62. Thinkethat . . . first of growth. According
to Aquinas, who follows Aristotle, the souls of growth, of sense, and
of intelligence are not in man distinct and (as Plato had suggested)
diversely located in the liver, heart, and brain, but are merged in one :
' Sic igitur anima intellectiva continet in sua virtute quidquid habet
anima sensitiva brutorum at nutritiva plantarum,' Sumtna I. Ixxvi. 3.
He cites Aristotle, De Anima, ii. 30-1.

1. 190. Meteors. See note to The Storme, 1. 13. A meteor was
regarded as due to the effect of the air's cold region on exhalations
from the earth :

If th'Exhalation hot and oily prove.
And yet (as feeble) giveth place above
To th'Airy Regions ever-lasting Frost,
Incessantly th'apt-tinding fume is tost
Till it inflame : then like a Squib it falls.
Or fire-wing'd shaft, or sulphry Powder-Balls.
But if this kind of Exhalation tour
Above the walls of Winters icy bowr
'T-inflameth also ; and anon becomes
A new strange Star, presaging wofuU dooms.

Sylvester's £)u Bartas. Second Day of the First JVeeke.

i. e. a Meteor below the middle region, it becomes a Comet above.

1. 189 to Page 257, 1. 206. Donne summarizes in these lines the
old concentric arrangement of the Universe as we find it in Dante.
Leaving the elements of earth and water the soul passes through the
regions of the air (including the central one where snow and hail and
meteors are generated), and through the element of fire to the Moon,
thence to Mercury, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and the Firma-
ment of the fixed stars. He has already indicated (p. 237, 11. 205 f.)
how this arrangement is being disturbed by ' the New Philosophy '.

Of the Progresse of the Soule, 199

1. 192. Whether tKayres middle region be intense. Compare :
th'ayres middle marble roome. The Storme, p. 175, 1. 14.

Page 257, 11. 219-20. This must, my Souk, ^s'c. This is the
punctuation of 1612-2^ : i6j^ and all the later editions change as
in the note. Chambers and Grolier follow suit. It is clearly a
corruption. The ' long-short Progresse ' is the passage to heaven
which has been described. A new thought begins with ' T'advance
these thoughts '. Grosart puts a colon after (1. 219) ' bee ', but as he
also places a semicolon after (1. 220) 'T'advance these thoughts' it is
not quite clear how he reads the lines. The mistake seems to have
arisen from forgetting that the 'she' whose progress has been described
is not Elizabeth Drury but the poet's own soul emancipated by death.

Page 258, 11. 236-40. The Tutelar Angels, 6^c. 'And it is as
imperfect which is taught by that religion which is most accommodate
to sense . . . That all mankinde hath one [)rotecting Angel ; all
Christians one other, all English one other, all of one Corporation and
every civill coagulation of society one other; and every man one
other.' Letters, p. 43. Aquinas insists {Summa I. cxiii) on the
assignment of a guardian angel to every individual. He mentions
also, following St. Gregory, the guardian angel assigned to the
Kingdom of the Persians (Dan. x. 13).

1. 242. Her body ivas the Eledrum. 'The ancient Electrum',
Bacon says, 'had in it a fifth of silver to the Gold.' Her body,
then, is not pure gold, but an alloy in which are many degrees of
gold. In Paracelsus' works, Electrum is the middle substance
between ore and metal, neither wholly perfect nor altogether imperfect.
It is on the way to perfection. The Hermetic and Alchemical Writings
of . . . Paracelsus, Arthur E. Waite, 1894. ' Christ is not that Spectrum
that Damascetie speaks of, nor that Electrum that Tertullian speakes
of . . .a third metall made of two other metals.' Donne, Sertnons
80. 40. 397.

Page 259, 1. 270. breake. Here — as at p. 260, 1. 326, 'choose' —
I have reverted to the spelling of 1612.

I. 292. by sense, and Fantasie : i.e. by sense and the phantasmata
which are conveyed by the senses to the intellect to work upon.
See Aristotle, De Anima, iii. and Aquinas, Summa I. Ixxxv. i.
Angels obtain their knowledge of material things through immaterial,
i. e. through Ideas. Their knowledge is immediate, not as ours
mediate, by sense and ratiocination, ' collections '.

Page 261, 1. 342. Joy in ?iot being that, which men have said
' Joy in not being " sine labe concepta ", for then she would have had
no virtue in being good.' Norton. Her own goodness has gained
for her a higher exaltation than the adventitious honour of being the
Mother of God.

II. 343-4. Where she is exalted more for being good,

Then for her interest of Mot her- hood.

2 o o Com?ne7jtary.

' Scriptum est in Evangclio, quod mater et fratres Christi, hoc est
consanguinei carnis eius, cum illi nuntiati fuissent, et foris exspecta-
rent, quia non possent eum adire prae turba, ille respondit : Quae est
tnater mea, aiii qui sioit fratres mei ? Et extetidens manum super
discipulos suos, ait: Hi sunt fratres fnei ; et quicumque fecerit volu?i-
tatem Patris mei, ipse mihi frater, et mater, et soror est (Matt, xii. 46-
50). Quid aliud nos docens, nisi carnali cognationi genus nostrum
spirituale praeponere ; nee inde beatos esse homines, si iustis et San-
ctis carnis propinquitate iunguntur, sed si eorum doctrinaeac moribus
obediendo atque imitando cohaerescunt ? Beatior ergo Maria per-
cipiendo fidem Christi, quam concipiendo carncm Christi. Nam et
dicenti cuidam, Beatus venter qui te portavit ; ipse respondit, Into
beati qui audiunt verlnim Dei, et custodiunt' (Luc. xi. 27, 28),
Augustini De Sancta Virginitate, I. 3. (Migne, 40. 397-8.) If a
Protestant in the previous two Hnes, Donne is here as sound a
CathoHc as St. Augustine.

1. 354. Joyntenants with the Holy Ghost. ' We acknowledge the
Church to be the house one/y of God, and that we admit no Saint,
no Martyr, to be a lointenant with him.' Sermons 50. 21. 86.

1. 360. royalties : i. e. the prerogatives, rights, or privileges pertaining
to the sovereign. Donne here enumerates them as the power to
make war and conclude peace, uncontrolled authority (' the King can
do no wrong '), the administration of justice, the dispensing of pardon,
coining money, and the granting of protection against legal arrest.

Page 262, 1. 369. impressions. The plural of the first edition
must, I think, be accepted. Her stamp is set upon each of our
acts as the impression of the King's head on a coin : ' Ignoraunce
maketh him unmeete metall for the impressions of vertue.' Fleming,
Panopl. Epist. 372 (O.E.D.).

Your love and pitty doth th'impression fill.
Which vulgar scandall stampt upon my brow.

Shakespeare, Sonnets cxii.

U. 397-9. So floives her face, and thine eyes, neither now

That Saint, nor Pi/grime, which your loving voiv
Concerned, remaines . . .

I have kept the comma after * eyes ' of 1621 {1612 seems to
have no stop) rather than change it with later and modern
editions to a semicolon, because I take it that the clauses are not
co-ordinate ; the second is a subordinate clause of degree after ' so '.
' Her face and thine eyes so flow that now neither that Saint nor that
Pilgrim which your loving vow concern'd remains — neither you nor the
lady you adore remain the same.' The lady is the Saint, the lover
the Pilgrim, as in Romeo and Juliet :

Pom. If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this,

Of the Progresse of the Souk. 201

My lips two blushing pilgrims ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
Jul. Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this ;
For saints have hands that pilgrims hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers kiss.

Punctuated as the sentence is in modern editions ' so ' must mean
' in like manner ', referring back to the statement about the river.

Page 263, 1. 421. this Center, is the reading of the first edition
and is doubtless correct, the ' t ' having been dropped accidentally
in 162 J and so in all subsequent editions. 'This Center' is 'this
Earth.' The Earth could neither support such a tower nor provide
material with which to build it. Compare :

The Heavens themselves, the Planets, and this Center,
Observe degree, priority, and place.

Shakespeare, Troil. atid Cress, i. iii. 85.

As far remov'd from God and light of Heav'n
As from the Center thrice to th' utmost Pole.

Milton, Far. Lost, i. 74.

Page 264, 1. 442. For it is both the object and the ivit. God, the
Idea of Good, is the source of both being and knowing — the ultimate
object of knowledge and the source of the knowledge by which
Himself is known.

11. 445-6. Tis such a full, and such a filling good \

Had th' Afigels once look'd on him they had stood.

After discussion Aquinas concludes (I. Ixiii. 5) that the devil was
not evil through fault of his own will in the first instant of his creation,
because this would make God the cause of evil: 'Ilia operatio quae
simul incipit cum esse rei est ei ab agente a quo habet esse . . .
Agens autem quod Angelos in esse produxit, scilicet Deus, non
potest esse causa peccati.' He then considers whether there was
any delay between his creation and his fall, and concludes that the
most probable conclusion and most consonant with the words of the
Saints is that there was none, otherwise by his first good act he
would have acquired the merit whose reward is the happiness which
comes from the sight of God and is enduring : ' Si diabolus in primo
instanti, in gratia creatus, meruit, statim post primum instans beati-
tudinem accepisset, nisi statim impedimentum praestitisset peccando.'
This ' beatitudo ' is the sight of God : ' Angeli beati sunt per hoc
quod Verbum vident.' And endurance is of the essence of this
blessedness : ' Sed contra de ratione beatitudinis est stabilitas, sive
confirmatio in bono.' Thus, as Donne says, ' Had th' Angells," &c.
SuTfima Ixii. i, 5 ; Ixiii. 6.

Page 265, 1. 479. Apostem : \. e. Imposthume, deep-seated abscess.

2 o 2 Commentary,

Page 266, 1. 509. Long'd for, and longing for it, ^c. So Dante \

of Beatrice : i

Angelo chiama in divino intelletto, \

E dice : * Sire, nel mondo si vede i

Meravigha nell' atto, che procede I

Da un' anima, che fin quassu risplende. 1

Lo cielo, che non have altro difetto )
Che d'aver lei, al suo Signor la chiede,
E ciascun santo ne grida mercede.'

An Angel, of his blessed knowledge, saith ^

To God : ' Lord, in the world that Thou hast made, i

A miracle in action is display'd j

By reason of a soul whose splendors fare 1

Even hither : and since Heaven requireth \
Nought saving her, for her it prayeth Thee,
Thy Saints crying aloud continually.'

and again :

Madonna e desiata in I'alto cielo. I

My lady is desired in the high Heaven.

Donne, one thinks, must have read the Vita Nuova as well as the ,
Divina Commedia. It is possible that in the eulogy of Elizabeth i
Drury he is following its transcendental manner without fully
appreciating the transfiguration through which Beatrice passed in |
Dante's mind. I

11. 511-18. Here in a place, qt'c. These lines show that The
Second Anniversary was written while Donne was in France with
Sir Robert and Lady Drury. Compare A Letter to the Lady
Carey, d^c, p. 221 :

Here where by All All Saints invoked are, &c.

EPICEDES AND OBSEQUIES, &c., '

Of all Donne's poems these are the most easy to date, at least \

approximately. The following are the dates of the deaths which '

called forth the poems, arranged in chronological order : .

Lady Markham (p. 279), May 4, 1609. I

Mris Boulstred (pp. 282, 284), Aug, 4, 1609.

Prince Henry (p. 267), Nov. 6, 1612.

Lord Harington (p. 271), Feb. 27, 1 614. 1

Marquis Hamilton (p. 288), March 22, 1625. ,

Those about whose date and subject there is uncertainty are that \

entitled in 1635 Elegie on the L. C. and that headed Death. If with i
Chambers and Norton we assume that the former poem is an Elegy on

Epicedes and Obsequies, 203

the death of the Lord Chancellor, Baron Ellesmere, it will have been
written in 1617. The conjecture is a natural one and may be correct,
but there are difificulties. (i) This title is affixed to Elegie in 16)^ for
the first time. The poem bears no such heading in j6)) or in
any MS. in which I have found it. Probably ' L. C stands for
Lord Chancellor (though this is not certain) ; but on what authority
was the poem given this reference? (2) The position which it
occupies in 16}} is due to its position in the MS. from which it was
printed. Now in Z>, H4^, Lee, and in W, it is included among the
Elegies, i. e. Love Elegies. But in the last of these, IV, it appears
with a collection of poems (Satyres, Elegies, the Lincoln's Inn
Epithalamium, and a series of letters to Donne's early friends) which
has the appearance of being, or being derived from, an early collection,
a collection of poems w'ritten between 1597 and 1608 to 1610 at the
latest. (3) The poem is contained, but again without any title, in
HN, the Hawthornden MS. in Edinburgh. Now we know .at
Drummond was in London in 16 10, and there is no poem, of those
which he transcribed from a collection of Donne's, that is demon-
strably later than 1609, though the two Obsequies, 'Death, I recant'
and ' Language, thou art too narrowe and too weak ', must have
been written in that year. Drummond may have been in London
at some time between 1625 and 1630, during which years his move-
ments are undetermined (David Masson : Drummond of Hawthorn-
den, ch. viii), but if he had made a collection of Donne's poems at
this later date it would have been more complete, and would certainly
have contained some of the religious poems. At a later date he
seems to have been given a copy of the Hytnn to the Saints and to
Marquesse Hajyiylton, for a MS. of this poem is catalogued among the
books presented to the Edinburgh University Library by Drummond.
Unfortunately it has disappeared or was never actually handed over.
Most probably, Drummond's small collection of poems by Donne,
Pembroke, Roe, Hoskins, Rudyerd, and other ' wits ' of King James's
reign, now in the library of the Society of Antiquaries, was made in
1610.

All this points to i\\e Elegie in question being older than 1617. It
is very unlikely that a poem on the death of his great early patron
would have been allowed by him to circulate without anything
to indicate in whose honour it was written. Egerton was as great
a man as Lord Harington or Marquis Hamilton, and if hope of
reward from the living was the efficient cause of these poems quite
as much as sorrow for the dead. Lord Ellesmere too left dis-
tinguished and wealthy successors. Yet the MS. of Donne's poems
which belonged to the first Earl of Bridgewater contains this poem
without any indication to whom it was addressed.

In 16 10 Donne sent to the Lord Chancellor a copy of his Pseudo-
Martyr, and the following hitherto unpublished letter shows in what
high esteem he held him :

2 04 Comme?itary.

* AsRyvers though in there Course they are content to serve publique
uses, yett there end is to returne into the Sea from whence they issued.
So, though I should have much Comfort that thys Booke might give
contentment to others, yet my Direct end in ytt was, to make it a
testimony of my gratitude towards your Lordship and an acknow-
ledgement that those poore sparks of Vnderstandinge or Judgement
which are in mee were derived and kindled from you and owe them-
selves to you. All good that ys in ytt, your Lordship may be pleased
to accept as yours ; and for the Errors I cannot despayre of your
pardon since you have long since pardond greater faults in mee.'

If Donne had written an Elegie on the death of Lord Ellesmere it
would have been as formally dedicated to his memory as his Elegies to
Lord Harington and Lord Hamilton. But by 1617 he was in orders.
His Muse had in the long poem on Lord Harington, brother to the
Countess of Bedford, ' spoke, and spoke her last '. It was only at the
express instance of Sir Robert Carr that he composed in 1625 his
lines on the death of the Marquis of Hamilton, and he entitled it not
an Elegy but A Hymn to the Saints and to Marquesse Hatnylton.

It seems to me probable that the Elegie^ ' Sorrow, who to this house',
was an early and tentative experiment in this kind of poetry, on the
death of some one, we cannot now say whom, perhaps the father of the
Woodwards or some other of his earlier correspondents and friends.

The Elegie headed Death is also printed in a somewhat puzzling
fashion. In 16)) it follows the lyrics abruptly with the bald title
Elegie. It is not in Z>, H4^, Lee, nor was it in the MS. resembling
this which 16}^ used for the bulk of the poems. In HN
also it bears no title indicating the subject of the poem. The other
MSS. all describe it as an Elegie upon the death of M''" Boulstred,
and from 16)) and several MSS. it appears that it was sent to the
Countess 01 Bedford with the verse Letter (p. 227), 'You that are
shee and you, that's double shee'. It is possible that the MSS. are
in error and that the dead friend is not Miss Bulstrode but Lady
Markham, for the closing line of the letter compares her to Judith :

Yet but oi Judith no such book as she.
But Judith was, like Lady Markham, a widow. The tone of the poem
too supports this conclusion. The Elegy on Miss Bulstrode lays stress
on her youth, her premature death. In this and the other Elegy (whose
title assigns it to Lady Markham) the stress is laid on the saintliness
and asceticism of life becoming a widow.

Page 267. Elegie upon . . . Prince Henry.

The death of Prince Henry (1594-1612) evoked more elegiac
poetry I^tin and English than the death of any single man has
probably ever done. See Nichols's Progresses of James /, pp. 504-1 2.
He was the hope of that party, the great majority of the nation,
which would fain have taken a more active part in the defence of the

Epicedes and Obsequies. 205

Protestant cause in Europe than James was willing to venture upon.
Donne's own Elegie appeared in a collection edited by Sylvester :
'■ Lachrymae Lachrymaruvi, or The Spirit of Teares distilled from the
utiiiviely Death of the Incomparable Prince Panaretus. By Joshua
Sylvester. The Third Edition, with Additions of His Owne and Elegies.
161 3. Printed by Humphrey Lownes.' Sylvester's own poem is
followed by poems in Latin, Italian, and English by Joseph Hall and
others, and then by a separate title-page : Sundry Funerall Elegies
. . . Composed />y severall Authors. The authors are G. G. (probably
George Gerrard), Sir P. O., Mr. Holland, Mr. Donne, Sir William
Cornwallis, Sir Edward Herbert, Sir Henry Goodyere, and Henry
Burton. Jonson told Drummond 'That Done said to him, he wrott
that Epitaph on Prince Henry Look to me, Faith to match Sir Ed :
Herbert in obscurenesse ' (Drummond's Conversations, ed. Laing).
Donne's elegy was printed with some carelessness in the Lachrymae
Lachrymarum, The editor of i6)) has improved the punctuation in
places.

The obscurity of the poem is not so obvious as its tasteless
extravagance : ' The death of Prince Henry has shaken in me both
Faith and Reason, concentric circles or nearly so (1. i8), for Faith
does not contradict Reason but transcend it.' See Sermons 50. 36.
' Our Faith is shaken because, contemplating his greatnesse and its
influence on other nations, we believed that with him was to begin
the age of peace :

Ultima Cumaei venit iam carminis aetas,
Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo.

But by his death this faith becomes heresy. Reason is shaken
because reason passes from cause to effect. Miracle interrupts this
progress, and the loss of him is such a miracle as brings all our
argument to a standstill. We can predict nothing with confidence.'
In his over-subtle, extravagant way Donne describes the shattering of
men's hopes and expectations.

At the end he turns to her whom the Prince loved,

The she-Intelligence which mov'd this sphere.

Could he but tell who she was he would be as blissful in singing her
praises as they were in one another's love.

A short epitaph on Prince Henry by Henry King (i 592-1 669), the
friend and disciple of Donne, bears marks of being inspired by this
poem. It is indeed ascribed to 'J. D.' in Le Prince d' Amour
(1660), but is contained in King's Poems, Elegies, Paradoxes and
So fine ts (1657).

Page 269, 11. 71-6. These lines are printed as follows in the
Lachrymae Lachrymarum :

If faith have such a chaine, whose diverse links
Industrious man discerneth, as hee thinks

2 o 6 Com?nentary.

When Miracle doth joine ; and to steal-in
A new link Man knowes not where to begin :
At a much deader fault must reason bee,
Death having broke-off such a linke as hee.
But compare The Second Anniversary, p. 255, 11. 143-6.

Page 271. Obsequies to the Lord Harrington, &c.

The MS. from which 16)) printed this poem probably had the
title as arbove. It stands so in D, II49, Lee. By a pure accident it
was changed to Obsequies to the Lord Harringtons brother. To the
Countesse of Bedford. There was no Lord Harington after the death
of the subject of this poem.

John Harington, the first Baron of Exton and cousin of Sir John
Harington the translator of the Orlando Furioso, died at Worms in
1 613, when returning from escorting the Princess Elizabeth to her new
home at Heidelberg. His children were John, who succeeded him
as Second Baron of Exton, and Lucy, who had become Countess of
Bedford in 1594. The young Baron had been an intimate friend of
Prince Henry. In 1609 he visited Venice and was presented to the
Doge as likely to be a power in England when Henry should succeed.
' He is learned ', said Wotton, ' in philosophy, has Latin and Greek to
perfection, is handsome, well-made as any man could be, at least
among us.' His fate was as sudden and tragic as that of his patron.
Travelling in France and Italy in 1613 he grew ill, it was believed he
had been poisoned by accident or design, and died at his sister's house
at Twickenham on the 27th of February, 1614.

There is not much in Donne's ingenious, tasteless poem which
evinces affection for Harington or sorrow for his tragic end, nor is
there anything of the magnificent poetry, ' ringing and echoing with
music,' which in Lycidas makes us forgetful of the personality of King.
Donne's poem was written to please Lady Bedford :
And they who write to Lords rewards to get.
Are they not like singers at dores for meat ?

Apparently it served its purpose, for in a letter written a year or two
later Donne says to Goodyere : ' I am almost sorry, that an Elegy
should have been able to move her to so much compassion heretofore,
as to offer to pay my debts ; and my greater wants now, and for so
good a purpose, as to come disingaged into that profession, being
plainly laid open to her, should work no farther but that she sent me
;^3o,' &c. Letters, 6^r., p. 219.

Of Harington, Wiffen, in his Historical Memoirs of the House of
Russell, says : * Whilst he devoted much of his time to literary study he
is reported to have uniformly begun and closed the day with prayer
. . . and to have been among the first who kept a diary wherein his
casual faults and errors were recorded, for his surer advancement in
happiness and virtue.' Wiffen's authority is probably The Churches

Epicedes and Obsequies, 207

Lamentation for the losse of the Godly Delivered in a Sermon at the
funerals of that tnily noble, and 7nost hopefuH yotuig Gentleman John
Lord Harington, Baron of Exton, Knight of the noble order of the
Bathetc. by R. Stock. 1614. To this verses Latin and English by I. P.,
F. H. D. M., and Sir Thomas Roe are appended. The preacher
gives details of Harington's religious life. The D. N. B. speaks of
two memorial sermons. This is a mistake.

1. 15. TTiou seest nie here at ?nidnight, notv all rest ; Chambers by
placing a semicolon after ' midnight ' makes ' now all rest ' an indepen-
dent, rhetorical statement :

Thou seest me here at midnight ; now all rest ;

The Grolier Club editor varies it :

Thou seest me here at midnight now, all rest ;

But surely as punctuated in the old editions the line means 'at
midnight, now when all rest ', ' the time when all rest '. * I watch,
while others sleep.'

Donne's description of his midnight watch recalls that of Herr
Teufelsdroeckh : ' Gay mansions, with supper rooms and dancing
rooms are full of light and music and high-swelling hearts, but in the
Condemned Cells the pulse of life beats tremulous and faint, and
bloodshot eyes look out through the darkness which is around and
within, for the light of a stern last morning,' &c. Sartor Resartus,

i- 3-

Page 272, 1. 38. Things, m proportion fit, by perspective. It is by an

accident, I imagine, that 16}^ drops the comma after ' fit ', and I have

restored it. The later punctuation, which Chambers adopts, is

puzzling if not misleading :

Things, in proportion, fit by perspective.

It is with ' proportion ' that ' fit ' goes. Deeds of good men show
us by perspective things in a proportion fitted to our comprehension.
They bring the goodness or essence of things, which is seen aright
only in God, down to our level. The divine is most clearly revealed
to us in the human.

Page 274, 1. 102. Sent hither, this worlds tempests to becalme. I
have adopted the reading to which the MSS. point in preference
to that of the editions. Both the chief groups read * tempests ', and
' this ' (for ' the ') has still more general support. Now if the * s ' in
* tempests ' were once dropped, ' this ' would be changed to ' the ', the
emphasis shifting from ' this ' to ' world '. I think the sense is better.
If but one tempest is contemplated, then either so many ' lumps of
balm' are not needed, or they fail sadly in their mission. They
come rather to allay the storms with which human life is ever and
again tormented. Moreover, in Donne's cosmology ' this world ' is
frequently contrasted with other and better worlds. Compare An
Anatomie of the World, pp. 225 et seq.

2 o 8 Comme7itary.

I. no. Which the whole world, or man the abridgment hath. The
comma after ' man ' in i6)} gives emphasis. The absence of a comma,
however, after ' abridgment ' gives a reader to-day the impression that
it is object to ' hath '. I have, therefore, with i6)^-6g, dropped the
comma after ' man '. The omission of commas in appositional phrases
is frequent. ' Man the abridgment ' means of course ' Man the
microcosm ' : ' the Macrocosme and Microcosme, the Great and the
Lesser World, man extended in the world, and the world contracted
and abridged into man.' Serfiions 8o. 31. 304.

II. 1 1 1-30. Thou kno7i>st, (b^c. The circles running parallel to
the equator are all equally circular, but diminish in size as they
approach the poles. But the circles which cut these at right angles,
and along which we measure the distance of any spot from the
equator, from the sun, are all of equal magnitude, passing round the
earth through the poles, i.e. meridians are great circles, their planes
passing through the centre of the earth.

Harington's life would have been a Great Circle had it completed
its course, passing through the poles of youth and age. In that case
we should have had from him lessons for every phase of life,
medicines to cure every moral malady.

In The Crosse Donne writes :

All the Globes frame and spheares, is nothing else
But the Meridians crossing Parallels.

And in the Anatomie of the World, p. 239, 11. 278-80 :

For of Meridians, and Parallels,

Man hath weav'd out a net, and this net throwne

Upon the Heavens, and now they are his owne.

Page 275, 1. 133. Whose hand, C^c. The singular is the reading
of all the MSS., and is pretty certainly right. The minute and
second hands were comparatively rare at the beginning of the seven-
teenth century. See the illustrations in F. J. Britten's Old Clocks
and Hatches and their Makers, ^c. (1904) ; and compare : 'But yet,
as he that makes a Clock, bestowes all that labour upon the severall
wheeles, that thereby the Bell might give a sound, and that thereby
the hand might give knowledge to others how the time passes,' &c.
Sermons 80. 55. 550.

Page 276, 1. 154. And great Sun-dyall to have set us All.
Compare :

The lives of princes should like dyals move.

Whose regular example is so strong,

They make the times by them go right or wrong.

Webster, White Devil, i. ii. 313.

Page 279, 1. 250. French soldurii. The reading of the editions is
a misprint. The correct form is given in D, H4g, Lee, and is used
by Donne elsewhere : ' And we may well collect that in Caesars time,

Rpicedes a?icl Obsequies, 209

in France, for one who dyed naturally, there dyed many by this
devout violence. For hee says there were some, whom hee calls
Devotos, and Clientes (the latter Lawes call them Soldurios) which
enjoying many benefits, and commodities, from men of higher ranke,
alwaies when the Lord dyed, celebrated his Funerall with their owne.
And Caesar adds, that in the memorie of man, no one was found
that ever refused it.' Biathanatos, Part I, Dist. 2, Sect. 3. The
marginal note calls them ' Soldurii ', and refers to Caes., Bell. Gall.
3, and Tholosa. Sym. lib. 14, cap. 10, N. 14.

Page 279. Elegie on the Lady Marckham.

The wife of Sir Anthony Markham, of Sedgebrook in the county of
Notts. She was the daughter of Sir James Harington, younger
brother of John, first Baron Harington of Exton. See note to last
poem. She was thus first cousin to Lucy, Countess of Bedford, and
died at her home at Twickenham on May 4, 1609. On her tomb-
stone it is recorded that she was ' inclytae Luciae Comitissae de
Bedford sanguine (quod satis) sed et amicitia propinquissima '. It is
probably to this friendship of a great patroness of poets that she
owes this and other tributes of verse. Francis Beaumont wrote one
which is found in several MS. collections of Donne's poems,
sometimes with his, sometimes with Beaumont's initials. In it he
frankly confesses that he never knew Lady Markham. I quote a
few lines :

As unthrifts grieve in strawe for their pawnd Beds,
As women weepe for their lost Maidenheads
(When both are without hope of Remedie)
Such an untimelie Griefe, have I for thee.
I never sawe thy face ; nor did my hart
Urge forth mine eyes unto it whilst thou wert,
But being lifted hence, that which to thee
Was Deaths sad dart, prov'd Cupids shafte to me.

The taste of Beaumont's poem is execrable. Elegies like this, and
I fear Donne's among them, were frankly addressed not so much to
the memory of the dead as to the pocket of the living.

According to two MSS. {RFjT and B40) the Elegie, ' Death be
not proud ', was written by Lady Bedford herself on the death of her
cousin. It is much simpler and sincerer in tone than Donne's or
Beaumont's, but the tenor of the thought seems to connect it with
the Elegie oji M"^'' Boulsired, ' Death I recant '. The same MSS.
contain the following Epitaph uppon the Ladye Markham, which
shows that she was a widow when she died :

A Mayde, a Wyfe shee liv'd, a Widdowe dy'd :
Her vertue, through all womans state was varyed.
The widdowes Bodye which this vayle doth hide
Keepes in, expecting to bee justlie [highly If4o] marryed,

II 917-3 P

2 I o Commejitary.

When that great Bridegroome from the cloudes shall call
And ioyne, earth to his owne, himself to all.

1. 7. Then our land waters, *>v. ' That hand which was wont to
ivipe all teares frotn all our eyes, doth now but presse and squeaze us
as so many spunges, filled one with one, another with another cause of
teares. Teares that can have no other banke to bound them, but the
declared and manifested will of God: For, till our teares flow to that
heighth, that they might be called a murmuring against the declared
will of God, it is against our Allegiance, it is Disloyaltie, to give our
teares any stop, any termination, any measure.' Sermons 50. 33. 303 :
On the Death of King James.

Page 280, 1. 11. And even these teares, c^c. : i.e. the

Teares which our Soule doth for her sins let fall,

which are the waters adove our firmament as opposed to the land or
earthly waters which are the tears of passion. The ' these ' of the
MSS. seems necessary for clearness of references : * For, Lacrymae
sunt sudor animae maerentis, Teares are the sweat of a labouring
soule, . . . Raine water is better then River water ; The water of
Heaven, teares for offending thy God, are better then teares for
worldly losses ; But yet come to teares of any kinde, and whatsoever
occasion thy teares, Deus absterget omnem lacrymam, there is the
largeness of his bounty, Ife will wipe all teares from thine eyes ; But
thou must have teares first : first thou must come to this weeping, or
else God cannot come to this wiping ; God hath not that errand to
thee, to wipe teares from thine eyes, if there be none there ; If thou
doe nothing for thy selfe, God finds nothing to doe for thee.'
Sermons 80. 54. 539-40.

The waters above the firmament were a subject of considerable diffi-
culty to mediaeval philosophy— so difficult indeed that St. Augustine
has to strengthen himself against sceptical objections by reaffirming
the authority of Scripture : Maior est Scripturae huius auctoritas quam
omnis humani ingenii capacitas. Unde quoquo modo et qualeslibet
aquae ibi sint, eas tamen ibi esse, minime dubitamus. Aquinas, who
quotes these words from Augustine, comes to two main conclusions,
himself leaning to the last. If by the firmament be meant either the
firmament of fixed stars, or the ninth sphere, the primum mobile, then,
since heavenly bodies are not made of the elements of which earthly
things are made (being incorruptible, and unchangeable except in posi-
tion), the waters above the firmament are not of the same kind diS those
on earth {non sunt eiusdem speciei cum inferioribus). If, however, by the
firmament be meant only the upper part of the air where clouds are
condensed, called firmament because of the thickness of the air in
that part, then the waters above the firmament are simply the
vaporized waters of which rain is formed {aquae quae vaporabiliter
resolutae supra aliquant partem aeris elevantur, ex quibus pluviae

Ejpicedes and Obsequies. 211

generantur). Above the firmament waters are generated, below they
rest. Summa i. 68.

If I follow him, Donne to some extent blends or confounds these
views. Tears shed for our sins differ in kind from tears shed for
worldly losses, as the waters above from those below. But the
extract from the sermon identifies the waters above the firmament
with rain-water. * Rain water is better than River-water.' It is
purer ; but it does fioi differ from it in kind.

1. 12. Wee, after Gods JVoe, drowne our ivorld agai/ie. I think
the 'our' of the majority of the MSS. must be correct. From the
spelling and punctuation both, it is clear that the source from which
i6^j printed closely resembled D, H49, Lee, which read ' our '. The
change to ' the ' was made in the spirit which prompted the grosser
error of certain MSS. which read ' Noah '. Donne has in view the
' microcosm ' rather than the ' macrocosm '. There is, of course, an
allusion to the Flood and the promise, but the immediate reference is
to Christ and the soul. ' After Christ's work of redemption and his
resurrection, which forbid despair, we yet yield to the passion of
sorrow.' We drown not ike world but oiir world, the world within
us, or which each one of us is. This sense is brought out more
clearly in Cy's version, which is a paraphrase rather than a version :

Wee after Gods mercy drowne our Soules againe.

1. 22. Porcelane, where they buried Clay. * We are not thoroughly
resolved concerning Porcelane or China dishes, that according to
common belief they are made of Earth, which lieth in preparation
about an hundred years under ground ; for the relations thereof are
not only divers, but contrary, and Authors agree not herein.' Browne,
Vulgar Errors, ii. 5. Browne quotes some of the older opinions and
then points out that a true account of the manufacture of porcelain
had been furnished by Gonzales de Mendoza, Linschoten, and
Alvarez the Jesuit, and that it was confirmed by the Dutch Embassy
of 1665. The old physical theories were retained for literary purposes
long after they had been exploded.

1. 29. They say, the sea, when it gaines, loseth too. * But we passe
from the circumstance of the time, to a second, that though Christ
thus despised by the Gergesens, did, in his Justice, depart from them ;
yet, as the sea gaines in one place, what it loses in another, his
abundant mercy builds up more in Capernaum, then his Justice
throwes downe among the Gergesens : Because they drave him away,
in Judgement he went from them, but in Mercy he went to the
others, who had not intreated him to come.' Sermons 80. 11. 103.

' They flatly say that he eateth into others dominions, as the sea
doth into the land, not knowing that in swallowing a poore Hand as
big as Lesbos he may cast up three territories thrice as big as Phrj'gia :
for what the sea winneth in the marshe, it looseth in the sand.'
Lyly, Midas v. 2. 17.

p 2

2 12 Commentary,

Compare also Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Part 2, Sect 2,
Mem. 3.

Pope has borrowed the conceit from Donne in An Essay on
Criticism^ 11. 54-9 :

As on the land while here the ocean gains,
In other parts it leaves wide sandy plains ;
Thus in the soul while memory prevails,
The solid power of understanding fails ;
Where beams of warm imagination play,
The memory's soft figures melt away.

1. 34. For, graves our trophies are, and both deaths dust. The
modern printing of this as given in the Grolier Club edition makes
this line clearer — ' both Deaths' dust.' ' Graves are our trophies, their
dust is not our dust but the dust of the elder and the younger death,
i. e. sin and the physical or carnal death which sin brought in its
train.' Chambers's ' death's dust ' means, I suppose, the same thing,
but one can hardly speak of ' both death'.

Page 281, 11. 57-8. this fonvard heresie.

That women can tto parts of friendship bee.

Montaigne refers to the same heresy in speaking of ' Marie deGournay
le Jars, ma fille d'alliance, et certes aymee de moy beaucoup plus que
paternellement, et enveloppee en ma retraitte et solitude com me I'une
des meilleures parties de mon propre estre. Je ne regarde plus qu'elle
au monde. Si I'adolescence peut donner presage, cette ame sera quel-
que jour capable des plus belles choses et entre autres de la perfec-
tion de cette tressaincte aviitie' ou nous ne Hsons point que son sexe ait pu
monter encores : la sincerite et la solidite de ses moeurs y sont desja
bastantes.' Essais (1590), ii. 17.

Page 282. Elegie on M''' Boulstred.

Cecilia Boulstred, or Bulstrode, was the daughter of Hedgerley
Bulstrode, of Bucks. She was baptized at Beaconsfield, February 1 2,
158I, and died at the house of her kinswoman. Lady Bedford, at
Twickenham, on August 4, 1609. So Mr. Chambers, from Sir James
Whitelocke's Liber Famelicus (Camden Society). He quotes also from
the Twickenham Registers : ' M"^ Boulstred out of the parke, was
buried ye 6th of August, 1609.' In a letter to Goodyere Donne
speaks of her illness : ' but (by my troth) I fear earnestly that
Mistresse Bolstrod will not escape that sicknesse in which she labours
at this time. I sent this morning to aske of her passage this night,
and the return is, that she is as I left her yesternight, and then by
the strength of her understanding, and voyce, (proportionally to her
fashion, which was ever remisse) by the eavenesse and life of her pulse,
and by her temper, I could allow her long life, and impute all her
sicknesse to her minde. But the History of her sicknesse makes me

Epicedes and Obsequies, 213

justly fear, that she will scarce last so long, as that you, when you
receive this letter, may do her any good office in praying for her.'
Poor Miss Bulstrode, whose

voice was
Gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman,

has not lived to fame in an altogether happy fashion, as the subject of
some tortured and tasteless Epicedes, a coarse and brutal Epigram by
]onson {Aft Epigram on the Court Fucell m Undenvoods, — Jonson told
Drummond that the person intended was Mris Boulstred), a com-
plimentary, not to say adulatory. Epitaph from the same pen, and a
dubious Elegy by Sir John Roe (' Shall I goe force an Elegie,' p. 404).
It was an ugly place, the Court of James I, as full of cruel libels as of
gross flattery, a fit subject for Milton's scorn. The epitaph which
Jonson wrote is found in more than one MS., and in some where
Donne's poems are in the majority. Chambers very tentatively
suggested that it might be by Donne himself, and I was inclined for
a time to accept this conjecture, finding it in other MSS. besides
those he mentioned, and because the sentiment of the closing lines is
quite Donnean. But in the Farmer-Chetham MS. (ed. Grosart) it is
signed B. J., and Mr. Percy Simpson tells me that a letter is extant
from Jonson to George Gerrard which indicates that the epitaph
was written by Jonson while Gerrard's marr waited at the door. I quote
it from B :

On the death of M" Boulstred.

Stay, view this Ston;e, and if thou beest not such

Reade here a little, that thou mayest know much.

It covers first a Virgin, and then one

That durst be so in Court ; a Virtue alone

To fill an Epitaph ; but shee hath more :

Shee might have claym'd to have made the Graces foure,

Taught Pallas language, Cynthia modesty ;

As fit to have encreas'd the harmonye

Of Spheares, as light of Starres ; she was Earths eye,

The sole religious house and votary

Not bound by rites but Conscience ; wouldst thou all ?

She was Sil. Boulstred, in which name I call

Up so much truth, as could I here pursue,

Might make the fable of good Woemen true.

The name is given as ' Sal ', but corrected to ' Sil ' in the margin. Other
MSS. have ' Sell '. It is doubtless ' Cil ', a contraction for ' Cecilia '.
Chambers inadvertently printed ' still '.

The language of Jonson's Epitaph harmonizes ill with that of his
Epigram. Of all titles Jonson loved best that of ' honest ', but
* honest ', in a man, meant with Jonson having the courage to tell
people disagreeable truths, not to conceal your dislikes. He was a
candid friend to the living ; after death — nil nisi bonum.

2 14 Commentary,

For the relation of this Elegie to that beginning ' Death, be not
proud ' (p. 416) see Text and Canon, 6^^., p. cxliii.

The 16)) text of this poem is practically identical with that of D,
Jl4g, Lee. With these MSS. it reads in 1. 27 ' life ' for the ' lives ' of
other MSS. and editions, and ' but ' for ' though ' in the last line.
The only variant in 16)^ is ' worke ' for ' workes ' in 1. 45. The latter
reading has the support of other MSS. and is very probably what
Donne wrote. Such use of a plural verb after two singular subjects
of closely allied import was common. See Franz, Shakespeare-
Grammafik, § 673, and the examples quoted there, e. g. ' Both wind
and tide stays for this gentleman,' Com. of Err. iv. i. 46, where Rowe
corrects to 'stay'; 'Both man and master is possessed,' ibid. iv.
iv, 89.

1. 10. Eating the best first, well preserved to last. The 'fruite' or
'fruites' of A18, N, TC, which is as old as P {1627,), is probably
a genuine variant. The reference is to the elaborate dainties of the
second course at Elizabethan banquets, the dessert. Sleep, in
Macbeth's famous speech, is

great Nature's second course,

and Donne uses the same metaphor of the Eucharist : ' This fasting
then ... is but a continuation of a great feast : where the first course
(that which we begin to serve in now) is Manna, food of Angels, —
plentiful, frequent preaching ; but the second course is the very body
and blood of Christ Jesus, shed for us and given to us, in that
Blessed Sacrament, of which himself makes us worthy receivers at that
time.' Serfnons. * The most precious and costly dishes are always
reserved for the last services, but yet there is wholesome meat before
too.' Ibid.

1. 18. In birds, 6^r. : 'birds ' is here in the possessive case, 'birds'
organic throats '. I have modified the punctuation so as to make
this clearer.

1. 24. All the foure Monarchies : i. e. Babylon, Persia, Greece, and
Rome. John Sleidan, mentioned in a note on the Satyres, wrote
The Key of Historie : Or, A most Methodicall Abridgement of the
foure chiefe Monarchies &'c., to quote its title in the English trans-
lation.

1. 27. Our births and lives, &^c. iSjj and the two groups of MSS.
D, II49, Lee and A18, L']4, N, TC read ' life '. If this be correct,
then ' births ' would surely need to be ' birth '. HN shows, I think,
what has happened. The voiced 'f was not always distinguished
from the breathed sound by a different spelling ('v' for 'f'), and
' lifes ' would very easily become ' life '. On the other hand ' v ' was
frequently written where we now have 'f, and sometimes misleads.
Peele's The Old Wives Tale is not necessarily, as usually printed,
Wives'. It is just an Old Woman's Tale.

Epicedes and Obsequies. 215

Page 284. Elegie.

Page 285, 1. 34. The Et hicks speake, &-c. A rather strange ex-
pression for ' Ethics tell '. The article is rare. Donne says, ' No
booke of Ethicks.' Sertnons 80. 55. 550. In HN Drummond has
altered to ' Ethnicks ' a word Donne uses elsewhere : ' Of all nations
the Jews have most chastely preserved that ceremony of abstaining
from Ethnic names.' Essays in Divinity. It does not, however,
seem appropriate here, unless Donne means to say that she had all
the cardinal virtues of the heathen with the superhuman, theological
virtues which are superinduced by grace :

Her soul was Paradise, &c.
But this is not at all clear. Apparently there is no more in the line
than a somewhat vaguely expressed hyperbole : ' she had all the
cardinal virtues of which we hear in Ethics '.

Page 286, 1. 44. Wee' had had a Saint, have notv a holiday : i. e.
' We should have had a saint and should have now a holiday ' — her
anniversary. The MS. form of the line is probably correct :
We had had a Saint, n6w a h61iday.

1. 48. That what we turne to feast, she turn'd to pray. As printed
in the old editions this line, if it be correctly given, is one of the
worst Donne ever wrote :

That what we turne to feast, she turn'd to pray,

i.e. apparently ' That, the day which we turn into a feast or festival
she turned into a day of prayer, a fast '. But ' she turn'd to pray ' in
such a sense is a hideously elliptical construction and cannot, I think,
be what Donne meant to write. Two emendations suggest them-
selves. One occurs in HN:

That when we turn'd to feast, she turn'd to pray.

When we turn'd aside from the routine of life's work to keep holiday,
she did so also, but it was to pray. This is better, but it is difficult
to understand how, if this be the correct reading, the error arose,
and only HN reads ' when '. The emendation I have introduced
presupposes only careless typography or punctuation to account for
the bad line. I take it that Donne meant ' feast ' and ' pray ' to be
imperatives, and that the line would be printed, if modernized, thus :
That what we turn to ' feast ! ' she turn'd to ' pray ! '

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 in-
terpreted 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 :

2 I 6 Com7ne?ita?y,

(ioe then to people curst before they were,
Their spoyles in triumph of thy conquest weare.

1. 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 com-
ponent 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, 1. 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 Litera-
iure and Learning in England, is wonderfully just and appreciative.

Page 287. Elegie on the L. C.

Whoever may be the subject of this Elegie, Donne speaks as though
he were a member of his household. In 161 7 Donne had long ceased
to be in any way attached to the Lord Chancellor's retinue. The
reference to his ' children ' also without any special reference to his
son the new earl, soon to be Earl of Bridgewater, is very unlike
Donne. Moreover, Sir Thomas Egerton never had more than two
sons, one of whom was killed in Ireland in 1599.

11. 13-16. As 2ve for him dead : though, '^'c. Both Chambers and
the Grolier Club editor connect the clause ' though no family . . ,
with him in joy to share ' with the next, as its principal clause, 'We
lose what all friends lov'd, (S:c.' To me it seems that it must go with
the preceding clause, ' As we [must wither] for him dead '. I take it
as a clause of concession. ' With him we, his family, must die (as
the briar does with the tree on which it grows) ; but no family could
die with a more certain hope of sharing the joy into which their head
has entered ; with none would so many be willing to " venture estates "
in that great voyage of discovery.' With the next lines, ' We lose,' 8cc.,
begins a fresh argument. The thought is forced and obscure, but the
figure, taken from voyages of discovery, is characteristic of Donne.

Page 288. An hymne to the Saints, and to
Marquesse Hamvlton.

In the old editions this is placed among the Divine Poems, and
Donne meant it to bear that character. For it was rather unwillingly
that Donne, now in Orders, wrote this poem at the instance of his friend
and patron Sir Robert Ker, or Carr, later (1633) Earl of Ancrum.

Rpicedes and Obsequies. 217

James Hamilton, b. 1584, succeeded his father in 1604 as Marquis
of Hamilton, and his uncle in 1609 as Duke of Chatelherault and Earl
of Arran. He was made a Gentleman of the Bed-Chamber and held
other posts in Scotland. On the occasion of James I's visit to Scotland
in 161 7 he played a leading part, and thereafter became a favourite
courtier, his name figuring inall the great functions described inNichol's
Progresses. In 161 7 Chamberlain writes : ' I have not heard a man
generally better spoken of than the Marquis, even by all the English ;
insomuch that he is every way held as the gallantest gentleman of both
the nations.' He was High Commissioner to the Parliament held at
Edinburgh in 1624, where he secured the passing of the Five Articles
of Perth. In 1624 he opposed the French War policy of Bucking-
ham, and when he died on March 2, i62|, it was maintained that
the latter had poisoned him.

The rhetoric and rhythm of this poem depend a good deal on getting
the right punctuation and a clear view of what are the periods. 1 have
ventured to make a few emendations in the arrangement of i6)j. The
first sentence ends with the emphatic 'wee doe not so' (1. 8), where
'wee ' might be printed in italics. The next closes with 'all lost a
limbe' (1. 18), and the effect is marred if, with Chambers and the
Grolier Club editor, one places a full stop after ' Music lacks a song ',
though a colon might be most appropriate. The last two lines clinch
the detailed statement which has preceded. The next sentence again
is not completed till 1. 30, ' in the form thereof his bodie's there ', but,
though 16)) has only a semicolon here, a full stop is preferable, or
at least a colon. Chambers's full stops at 1. 22, ' none', and 1. 28,
' a resurrection ', have again the effect of breaking the logical and
rhythmical structure. Lines 23-4 are entirely parenthetical and would
be better enclosed in brackets. Four sustained periods compose the
elegy.

Page 289, 11. 6—7. If every severall Angell bee A kind alone. Ea
enim quae conveniunt specie, et differunt numero, conveniunt in
forniA sed distinguuntur materialiter. Si ergo Angeli non sunt
compositi ex materia et forma . . . sequitur quod impossibile sit esse
duos Angelas jitiius speciei : sicut etiam impossibile esset dicere quod
essent plures albedines (whitenesses) separatae aut plures humani-
tates : ... Si tamen Angeli haberent materiam nee sic possent esse
plures Angeli unius speciei. Sic enim opporteret quod principium
distinctionis unius ab alio esset materia, non quidem secundum
divisionem quantitatis, cum sint incorporei, sed secundum diversitatem
potentiarum : quae quidem diversitas materiae causat diversitatem
non solum speciei sed generis. Aquinas, Sumtna I. 1. 4.

Page 293. INFINITATI SACRUM, &c.

Page 294, I. ir. a Muchej-on: i.e. a mushroom, here equivalent
to a fungus. Chambers adopts without note the reading of the later

2 I 8 Commentary.

editions, ' Maceron ', but spells it ' Macaron '. Grosart prints
* Macheron ', taking * Mucheron ' as a mis-spelling. Captain Shirley
Harris first pointed out, in Notes and Queries, that ' Mucheron '
must be correct, for Donne has in view, as so often elsewhere, the
threefold division of the soul — vegetal, sensitive, rational. Captain
Harris quoted the very apt parallel from Burton, where, speaking
of metempsychosis, he says : ' Lucian's cock was first Euphorbus,
a captain :

Ille ego (nam memini Troiani tempore belli)

Panthoides Euphorbus eram,

a horse, a man, a spunge.' Anatomy of Melancholy, Part i, Sect, i,
Mem. 2, Subs. lo. Donne's order is, a man, a horse, a fungus.
But to Burton a sponge was a fungus. The word fungus is cognate
with or derived from the Greek o-Troyyos.

As for the form 'mucheron' (n. b. 'mushrome' in G) the O.E.D.
gives it among different spellings but cites no example of this exact
spelling. From the Promptorium Parvulorum it quotes, ' Muscheron,
toodys hatte, bole/us, fungus.^ Captain Harris has supplied me with
the following delightful instance of the word in use as late as i8o8.
It is from a catalogue of Maggs Bros. (No. 263, 1910) :

'THE DISAPPOINTED KING OF SPAIN, or the downfall of
the Mucheron King Joe Bonaparte, late Pettifogging Attorney's
Clerk. Between two stools the Breech comes to the Ground.'

The caricature is etched byG. Cruikshank and is dated 1808.

The ' Maceron ' which was inserted in i6)j is not a misprint, but
a pseudo-correction by some one who did not recognize ' mucheron '
and knew that Donne had elsewhere used ' maceron ' for a fop or
puppy (see p. 163, 1. 117).

* Mushrome ', the spelling of the word in G, is found also in the
Sermons (80. 73. 748).

1. 22. which Eve eate : 'eate'is of course the past tense, and
should be *ate' in modernized editions, not 'eat' as in Chambers's
and the Grolier Club editions.

THE PROGRESSE OF THE SOULE.

The strange poem The Frogresse of the Souk, or Metempsychosis, is
dated by Donne himself, 16 Augusti 1601. The different use of the
same title which Donne made later to describe the progress of the
soul heavenward, after its release from the body, shows that he had
no intention of publishing the poem. How widely it circulated in
MS. we do not know, but I know of three copies only which are
extant, viz. G, OF, and that given in the group A18, N, TCC, TCD.
It was from the last that the text of 16^^ was printed, the editor sup-
plying the punctuation, which in the MS. is scanty. In some copies of
16)} the same omissions of words occur as in the MS. but the poem was
corrected in several places as it passed through the press. G, though
not without mistakes itself, supplies some important emendations.

The Progresse of the Soule, 219

The sole light from without which has been thrown upon the poem
comes from Ben Jonson's conversations with Drummond : ' The con-
ceit of Dones Transformation or Mcre/xt/'uxwcns was that he sought
the soule of that aple which Eve pulled and thereafter made it the
soule of a bitch, then of a shee wolf, and so of a woman ; his generall
purpose was to have brought in all the bodies of the Hereticks from
the soule of Cain, and at last left in the bodie of Calvin. Of this he
never wrotte but one sheet, and now, since he was made Doctor,
repenteth highlie and seeketh to destroy all his poems,'

Jonson was clearly recalling the poem somewhat inaccurately, and
at the same time giving the substance of what Donne had told him.
Probably Donne mystified him on purpose, for it is evident from the
poem that in his first intention Queen Elizabeth herself was to be
the soul's last host. It is impossible to attach any other meaning to
the seventh stanza ; and that intention also explains the bitter tone
in which women are satirized in the fragment. Women and courtiers
are the chief subject of Donne's sardonic satire in this poem, as of
Shakespeare's in Hamlet.

I have indicated elsewhere what I think is the most probable
motive of the poem. It reflects the mood of mind into which Donne,
like many others, was thrown by the tragic fate of Essex in the spring
of the year. In Cynthia's Revels, acted in the same year as Donne's
poem was composed, Jonson speaks of 'some black and envious
slanders breath'd against her' (i.e. Diana, who is Elizabeth) 'for her
divine justice on Actaeon ', and it is well known that she incurred
both odium and the pangs of remorse. Donne, who was still a
Catholic in the sympathies that come of education and association,
seems to have contemplated a satirical history of the great heretic in
lineal descent from the wife of Cain to Elizabeth — for private circu-
lation. See The Poetry of John Donne, II. pp. xvii-xx.

Page 295, 1.9. Seths pillars. Norton's note on this runs : 'Seth,
the son of Adam, left children who imitated his virtues. ' They were
the discoverers of the wisdom which relates to the heavenly bodies
and their order, and that their inventions might not be lost they made
two pillars, the one of brick, the other of stone, and inscribed their
discoveries on them both, that in case the pillar of brick should be
destroyed by the flood, the pillar of stone might remain and exhibit
these discoveries to mankind . . . Now this remains in the land of
Siriad to this day.' Josephus, Antiqidties of the Jews (Whiston's
translation), I. 2, § 3.

Page 296, 1. 21. holy lanus. 'Janus, whom Annius of Viterbo
and the chorographers of Italy do make to be the same with
Noah.' Browne, Vulgar Errors, vi. 6. The work referred to is
the Antiquitatum variarum volumina XVII (1498, reprinted and
re-arranged 151 1), by Annius of Viterbo (1432-1502), a Dominican
friar, Era Giovanni Nanni. Each of the books, after the first, consists
of a digest with commentary of various works on ancient history, the

2 2 o Comme7itary.

aim being apparently to reconcile Biblical and heathen chronology
and to establish the genealogy of Christ. Liber XIIII is a digest, or
' defloratio ', of Philo (of whom later) ; Liber XV oi Berosus, a reputed
Chaldaean historian ('patria Babylonicus ; et dignitate Chaldaeus'),
cited by Josephus. From him Annius derives this identification of
Janus with Noah : ' Hoc vltimo loco Berosus de tribus cognominibus
rationes tradit : Noa : Cam & Tythea. De Noa dicit quod fuit illi
tributum cognomen lanus a Iain : quod apud Aramaeos et Hebraeos
sonat vinum : a quo lanus id est vinifer et vinosus : quia primus
vinum invenit et inebriatus est : vt dicit Berosus : et supra insinuavit
Propertius : et item Moyses Genesis cap ix. vbi etiam Iain vinum lani
nominal : vbi nos habemus : Cum Noa evigilasset a vino. Cato
etiam in fragmentis originum ; et Fabius Pictor in de origine vrbis
Romae dicunt lanum dictum priscum Oenotrium : quia invenit
vinum et far ad religionem magis quam ad vsum,' &c., XV, Fo. cxv.
Elsewhere the identity is based not on this common interest in wine
but on their priestly office, they being the first to offer ' sacrificia et
holocausta ', VII, Fo. Iviii. Again, ' Ex his probatur irrevincibiliter
a tempore demonstrato a Solino et propriis Epithetis lani : eundem
fuisse Ogygem : lanum et Noam . . . Sed Noa fuit proprium : Ogyges
verum lanus et Proteus id est Vertumnus sunt solum praenomina ejus,'
XV, Fo. cv. No mention of the ark as a link occurs, hut a ship
figured on the copper coins distributed at Rome on New Year's day,
which was sacred to Janus. The original connexion is probably
found in Macrobius' statement {Saturn. I. 9) that among other titles
Janus was invoked as ' Consivius ... a conserendo id est a propagine
generis humani quae lano auctore conseritur '. Noah is the father of
the extant human race.

Page 299, 11, 1 14-17. There can be no doubt, I think, that the
1633 text is here correct, though for clearness a comma must be
inserted after 'reasons'. The emendation of the 1635 editor which
modern editors have followed gives an awkward and, at the close,
an absurdly tautological sentence. It is not the reason, the rational
faculty, of sceptics which is like the bubbles blown by boys, that
stretch too thin, ' break and do themselves spill,' What Donne says
is that the reasons or arguments of those who answer sceptics, like
bubbles which break themselves, injure their authors, the apologists.
The verse wants a syllable — not a unique phenomenon in Donne's
satires ; but if one is to be supplied ' so ' would give the sense better
than 'and'.

Page 300, 1, 129. foggie Plot. The word ' foggie ' has here the in
English obsolete, in Scotch and perhaps other dialects, still known
meaning of 'marshy', 'boggy'. The O.E.D. quotes, 'He that is
fallen into a depe foggy well and sticketh fast in it,' Coverdale, Bk.
Death, I. xl. 160 ; ' The foggy fens in the next county,' Fuller, Worthies.

1.137. To see the Prince, and have so fiird the way. The grammatic-
ally and metrically correct reading of G appears to me to explain the

The Progresse of the Soule. 221

subsequent variation. ' Prince' struck the editor of the 1633 edition
as inconsistent with the subsequent ' she ', and he therefore altered it
to ' Princess'. He may have been encouraged to do so by the fact
that the copy from which he printed had dropped the * have ', or he
may himself have dropped the ' have ' to adjust the verse to his
alteration. The former is, I think, the more likely, because what
would seem to be the earlier printed copies of i6jj read ' Prince ' :
unless he himself overlooked the ' have ' and then amended by
' Princess '. The 1635 editor restored ' Prince ' and then amended the
verse by his usual device of padding, changing ' fill'd ' to * fill up '. Of
course Donne's line may have read as we give it, with ' Princess ' for
' Prince ', but the evidence of the MSS. is against this, so far as it goes.
The title of ' Prince ' was indeed applicable to a female sovereign.
The O.E.D. gives : 'Yea the Prince ... as she hath most of yearely
Revenewes ... so should she have most losse by this dearth,' W.
Stafford, 1581 ; 'Cleopatra, prince of Nile,' Willobie, Avisa, 1594;
'Another most mighty prince, Mary Queene of Scots,' Camden
(Holland), 1610.

Pace 301, 11. 159-160. dut'/^ by the guest,
This living buried 7nan, 6"V.

The comma after guest is dropped in the printed editions, the
editor regarding ' this living buried man ' as an expansion of ' the
guest'. But the man buried alive is the 'soul's second inn', the
mandrake. ' Many Molas and false conceptions there are of Man-
drakes, the first from great Antiquity conceiveth the Root thereof
resembleth the shape of Man which is a conceit not to be made out
by ordinary inspection, or any other eyes, than such as regarding the
clouds, behold them in shapes conformable to pre-apprehensions.'
Browne, Vulgar Errors.

Page 303, 11. 203-5. '^he punctuation of this stanza is in the
editions very chaotic, and I have amended it. A full stop should
be placed at the end of 1. 203, ' was not ', because these lines complete
the thought of the previous stanza. Possibly the semicolon after ' ill '
was intended to follow ' not ', but a full stop is preferable. Moreover,
the colon after 'soule' (1. 204) suggests that the printer took ''twas
not ' with ' this soule '. The correct reading of 1. 204 is obviously :

So jolly, that it can move, this soul is.
Chambers prefers :

So jolly, that it can move this soul, is
The body . . .

but Donne was far too learned an Aristotelian and Scholastic to
make the body move the soul, or feel jolly on its own account :

thy fair goodly soul, which doth
Give this flesh power to taste joy, thou dost loathe.

Saiyre III, 11. 41-2.

2 2 2 Commentary,

' The soul is so glad to be at last able to move (having been im-
prisoned hitherto in plants which have the soul of growth, not of
locomotion or sense), and the body is so free of its kindnesses to
the soul, that it, the sparrow, forgets the duty of self-preservation.'

1. 214. hid nets. In making my first collation of the printed
texts I had queried the possibility of ' hid ' being the correct reading
for * his ', a conjecture which the Gosse MS. confirms.

Page 305, 1. 257. None scape, bid feiv, and fit for use, to get.
I have added a comma after ' use ' to make the construction a little
clearer ; a pause is needed. ' The nets were not wrought, as now,
to let none scape, but were wrought to get few and those fit for use ;
as, for example, a ravenous pike, &c.'

Page 306, 11. 267-8. ' To make the water thinne, and airelike
faith cares not^ What Chambers understands by ' air like faith ', I
do not know. What Donne says is that the manner in which
fishes breathe is a matter about which faith is indifferent. Each man
may hold what theory he chooses. There is not much obvious
relevance in this remark, but Donne has already in this poem
touched on the difference between faith and knowledge :

better proofes the law
Of sense then faith requires.

A vein of restless scepticism runs through the whole.

I. 280. Ifs rais'd, to be the Raisers instrument and food. If with
16J0-69, Chambers, and the Grolier Club editor, we alter the full
stop which separates this line from the last to a comma, ' It ' must
mean the same as ' she ', i. e. the fish. This is a harsh construction.
The line is rather to be taken as an aphorism. ' To be exalted is
often to become the instrument and prey of him who has exalted
you.'

Page 307, 1. 296. That many leagues at sea, now tit^d hee lyes.
The reading of G represents probably what Donne wrote. It is
quite clear that i6)j was printed from a MS. identical with A18, N,
TC, and underwent considerable correction as it passed through the
press. In no poem does the text of one copy vary so much from
that of another as in this. Now in this MS. a word is dropped.
The editor supplied the gap by inserting 'o're-past', which simply
repeats ' flown long and fast '. G shows what the dropped word was.
' Many leagues at sea ' is an adverbial phrase qualifying ' now tir'd
he lies '.

II. 301-10. I owe the right punctuation of this stanza to the
Grolier Club edition and Grosart. The 'as' of 1. 303 requires to
be followed by a comma. Missing this. Chambers closes the
sentence at 1. 307, 'head', leaving 'This fish would seem these'
in the air. The words ' when all hopes fail ' play with the idea of
' the hopeful Promontory ', or Cape of Good Hope.

The Progresse of the Soule. 223

Page 308, 11. 321-2, He hunts not fish, but as an officer,
Stayes i?i his court, at his oivne net.

Compare: 'A confidence in their owne strengths, a sacrificing to
their own Nets, an attributing of their securitie to their own wise-
dome or power, may also retard the cause of God.' Sermons,
Judges XV. 20 (1622).

' And though some of the Fathers pared somewhat too neare the
quick in this point, yet it was not as in the Romane Church, to lay
snares, and spread nets for gain.' Sermons 80. 22. 216.

' The Holy Spirit, the Spirit of comfort comes to him ' (the
courtier) ' but hee will die in his old religion, which is to sacrifice to
his owne Nets, by which his portion is plenteous.' Sermons 80. 70. 714.

The image of the net is probably derived from Jeremiah v. 26 :
' For among my people are found wicked men ; they lay wait as he
that setteth snares ; they set a trap, they catch men.' Compare also :
' he lieth in wait to catch the poor : he doth catch the poor when he
draweth him into his net.' Psalm x. 9,

Pages 310-11, 11. 381-400. Compare: 'Amongst naturall
Creatures, because howsoever they differ in bignesse, yet they
have some proportion to one another, we consider that some very
little creatures, contemptible in themselves, are yet called enemies
to great creatures, as the Mouse is to the Elephant.' Sermons
50. 40. 372. ' How great an Elephant, how small a Mouse destroys.'
Devotions, p. 284.

11. 405-6. Who in that trade, of Church, and kitigdomes, there
Was the first type.

The 16}^ punctuation of this passage is right, though it is better
to drop the comma after ' Kingdoms ' and obviate ambiguity.
The trade is the shepherd's ; in it Abel is type both of Church and
Kingdom, Emperor and Pope. As a type of Christ Donne refers
to Abel in The Litanie, p. 341, 1. 86.

Page 312, 1. 419. Nor {make) resist. I have substituted 'make'
for the ' much ' of the editions, confident that it is the right reading
and explains the vacillation of the MSS. The proper alternative to
' show ' is ' make '. The error arose from the obsolescence of ' resist '
used as a noun. But the O. E. D. cites from Lodge, Forbonius and
Priscilla (1585), ' I make no resist in this my loving torment ', and
other examples dated 1608 and 1630. Donne is fond of verbal nouns
retaining the form of the verb unchanged.

1. 439. soft Moaba. ' Moaba ', 'Siphatecia ' (1. 457), 'Tethlemite '
(1. 487), and ' Themech ' (1. 509) are not creatures of Donne's inven-
tion, but derived from his multifarious learning. It is, however, a
little difficult to detect the immediate source from which he drew.
The ultimate source of all these additions to the Biblical narrative
and persons was the activity of the Jewish intellect and imagination
in the interval between the time at which the Old Testament closes and

2 2 4 Comme72tary.

the dispersion under Titus and Vespasian, the desire of the Jews
in Palestine and Alexandria to ' round off the biblical narrative,
fill up the lacunae, answer all the questions of the inquiring mind of
the ancient reader '. Of the original Hebrew writings of this period
none have survived, but their traditions passed into mediaeval works
like the Historia Scholastica of Petrus Comestor and hence into
popular works, e. g. the Middle English Cursor Mundi. Another com-
pendium of this pseudo-historical lore was the Philonis Judaei
Alexandrini. Libri Antiquitatum. Quaestionum et Solutionian in
Genesin. de Essacis. de Nominibus hebraicis. de Mundo. Bask. 1527.
An abstract of this work is given by Annius of Viterbo in the book
referred to in a previous note. Dr. Cohn has shown that this Latin
work is a third- or fourth-century translation of a Greek work, itself a
translation from the Hebrew. More recently Rabbi M. Gaster has
brought to light the Hebrew original in portions of a compilation of
the fourteenth century called the Chronic/e of Jerahmeel, of which he
has publishedan English translation under the 'Patronage of the Royal
Asiatic Society', Oriental Translation Fund, New Series, iv. 1899.
In chapter xxvi of this work we read : * Adam begat three sons and
three daughters, Cain and his twin wife Qualmana, Abel and his
twin wife Deborah, and Seth and his twin wife Noba. And
Adam, after he had begotten Seth, lived seven hundred years, and there
were eleven sons and eight daughters born to him. These are the
names of his sons : Eli, Sheel, Surei, 'Almiel, Berokh, Ke'al, Nabath,
Zarh-amah, Sisha, Mahtel, and Anat ; and the names of his daughters
are : Havah, Gitsh, Hare, Bikha, Zifath, Hekhiah, Shaba, and 'Azin.'
In Philo this reappears as follows : ' Initio mundi Adam genuit tres
filios et unam filiam, Cain, Noaba, Abel, et Seth : Et vixit Adam,
postquam genuit Seth, annos dcc, et genuit filios duodecim, et
filias octo : Et haec sunt nomina virorum, Aeliseel, Suris, Aelamiel,
Brabal, Naat, Harama, Zas-am, Maathal, et Anath : Et hae filiae
eius, Phua, lectas, Arebica, Siphatecia, Sabaasin.' It is clear there
are a good many mistakes in Philo's account as it has come to us.
His numbers and names do not correspond. Clearly also some of
the Latin names are due to the running together of two Hebrew ones,
e.g. Aeliseel, Arebica, and Siphatecia. Of the names in Donne's
poem two occur in the above lists — Noaba (Heb. Noba) and Sipha-
tecia. But Noaba has become Moaba : Siphatecia is ' Adams fift
daughter ', which is correct according to the Hebrew, but not accord-
ing to Philo's list ; and there is no mention in these lists of Teth-
lemite (or Thelemite) among Adam's sons, or of Themech as Cain's
wife. In the Hebrew she is called Qualmana. Doubtless since two
of the names are traceable the others are so also. \V'e have not
found Donne's immediate source. I am indebted for such information
as I have brought together to Rabbi Gaster.

Page 314, 1. 485. (A?M). I have adopted this reading from the
insertion in TCC^ not that much weight can be allowed to this

The Progresse of the Souk. 225

anonymous reviser (some of whose insertions are certainly wrong),
but because ' loth " or ' looth ' is more likely to have been changed to
' tooth ' than ' wroth '. The occurrence of ' Tooth ' in 6^ as well as
in i6}} led me to consult Sir James Murray as to the possibility of a
rare adjectival sense of that word, e. g. ' eager, with tooth on edge
for ". I venture to quote his reply : ' We know nothing of tooth as
an adjective in the sense eager ; or in any sense that would fit here.
Nor does ivroth seem to myself and my assistants to suit well. In
thinking of the possible word for which tooth was a misprint, or rather
misreading . . . the word loth, loath, looth, occurred to myself and an
assistant independently before we saw that it is mentioned in the
foot-note. . . . Loath seems to me to be exactly the word wanted, the
true antithesis to willing, and it was a very easy word to write as
tooth' Sir James Murray suggests, as just a possibility, that * wroth '
{i6))-6^) may have arisen from a provincial form 'wloth'. He
thinks, however, as I do, that it is more probably a mere editorial
conjecture.

Page 315, 11. 505-9. these limbes a soule attend ;
And now they Joyn'd : keeping some quality
Of every past shape, she knew treachery,
Rapine, deceit, and lust, and ills enoiv
To be a ivoman.

Chambers and the Grolier Club editor have erroneously followed
j6)^-6<) in their punctuation and attached ' keeping some quality of
every past shape ' to the preceding ' they '. The force of Donne's
bitter comment is thus v/eakened. It is with ' she ', i. e. the soul, that
the participial phrase goes. ' She, retaining the evil qualities of all the
forms through which she has passed, has thus " ills enow " (treachery,
rapine, deceit, and lust) to be a woman.'

DIVINE POEMS.

The dating of Donne's Divine Poems raises some questions that
have not received all the consideration they deserve. They fall into
two groups — those written before and those written after he took
orders. Of the former the majority would seem to belong to the
years of his residence at Mitcham. The poem On the Aiinunciation
and Passion was written on March 25, i6o|. The Litanie was written,
we gather from a letter to Sir Henry Goodyere, about the same
time. The Crosse we cannot date, but I should be inclined with Mr.
Gosse to connect it rather with the earlier than the later poems. It is
in the same somewhat tormented, intellectual style. On the other
hand the Holy Sonnets were composed, we know now from Sonnet
XVII, first published by Mr. Gosse, after the death of Donne's wife
in 161 7 ; and The Lamentations of Jeremy appear to have been written

11 017 3 O

2 2 6 Commentary,

at the same juncture. The first sermon which Donne preached after
that event was on the text (Lam. iii. i): 'I am the man that hath
seen affliction,' and Walton speaks significantly of his having ended
the night and begun the day in lamentations.

The more difficult question is the date of the La Corona group of
sonnets. It is usual to attribute them to the later period of Donne's
ministry. This is not, I think, correct. It seems to me most
probable that they too were composed at Mitcham in or before i6og.

Dr. Grosart first pointed out that one of Donne's short verse-letters,
headed in /6y and later editions To E. of D. with six holy Sonnets^
must have been sent with a copy of six of these sonnets, the seventh
being held back on account of some imperfection. It appears with
the same heading in O'F, but in ]V it is entitled simply To L. of Z>.,
and is placed immediately after the letter To Mr. T. IV., ' Haste thee
harsh verse ' (p. 205), and before the next to the same person, ' Preg-
nant again ' (p. 206). It thus belongs to this group of letters written
apparently between 1597 and 1609-10.

Who is the E. of D. ? Dr. Grosart, Mr. Chambers, and Mr. Gosse
assume that it must be Lord Doncaster, though admitting in the same
breath that the latter was not Earl of, but Viscount Doncaster, and
that only between 1618 and 1622, four short years. The title ' L. of
D.' might indicate Doncaster because the title 'my Lord of is
apparently given to a Viscount, In his letters from Germany Donne
speaks of ' my Lord of Doncaster '. It may, therefore, be a mistake of
the printer or editor of 16}) which turned ' L. of D.' into * E. of D.' ;
but Hay was still alive in 1633, and the natural thing for the printer
to do would have been to alter the title to 'E. of C or 'Earl of
Carlisle'. Before 16 18 Donne speaks of 'the Lord Hay' or 'the L.
Hay' (see Letters, p. 145),' and this or 'the L. H.' is the title the
poem would have borne if addressed to him in any of the years to
which the other letters in the Westmoreland MS. ( IV) seem to
belong.

Moreover, there is another of Donne's noble friends who might
correctly be described as either E. of D. or L. of D. and that is
Richard Sackville, third Earl of Dorset. Donne generally speaks of
him as ' my Lord of Dorset ' : ' I lack you here ', he writes to Goodyere,
' for my L. of Dorset, he might make a cheap bargain with me now,
and disingage his honour, which in good faith, is a little bound,
because he admitted so many witnesses of his large disposition
towards me.' Born in 1589, the grandson of the great poet of
Elizabeth's early reign, Richard Sackville was educated at Christ
Church, Oxford. He succeeded as third Earl of Dorset on February
27, i6o|, having two days previously married Anne, Baroness Cliflford

' This letter was written in November or December, 1608, and seems to be the
first in which Donne speaks of Lord Hay as a friend and patron. The kindness
he has shown in forwarding a suit seems to have come somewhat as a surprise to
Donne.

Divine Poems. 2 2"]

in her own right, the daughter of George CHfford, the buccaneering
Earl of Cumberland, and Margaret, daughter of Francis, second Earl of
Bedford. The Countess of Dorset was therefore a first cousin to
Edward, third Earl of Bedford, the husband of Donne's patroness Lucy,
Countess of Bedford.

The earliest date at which the letter could have been addressed to
Dorset as L. of D. or E. of D. is 1609, just after his marriage into the
circle of Donne's friends. Now in Harleian MS. 4955 {^49) we find
the heading,

Holy Sonnets : written 20 yeares since.

This is followed at once by ' Deign at my hands ', and then the title
La Corona is given to the six sonnets which ensue. Thereafter
follow, without any fresh heading, twelve of the sonnets belonging to
the second group, generally entitled Holy Sonnets. It will be noticed
that in the editions this last title is used twice, first for both groups
and then, in italics, for the second alone. The question is, did the
copyist of H^g intend that the note should apply to all the sonnets
he transcribed or only to the La Corona group ? If to all, he was
certainly wrong as to the second lot, which were written later ; but he
was quite possibly right as to the first. Now twenty years before 1629,
which is the date given to some of Andrewes' poems in the MS.,
would bring us to 1609, the year of the Earl of Dorset's accession and
marriage, and the period when most of the letters among which that
to L. of D. in W appears were written.

Note, nioreover, the content of the letter To L. of D. Most of
the letters in this group, to Thomas and Rowland Woodward, to
S.B., and B.B., are poetical replies to poetical epistles. Now that To
L. of D. is in the same strain :

See Sir, how as the Suns hot Masculine flame
Begets strange creatures on Niles durty slime,
In me, your fatherly yet lusty Ryme

(For, these songs are their fruits) have wrought the same.

This is in the vein of the letter To Mr. R. W., * Muse not that by thy
mind,' and of the epistle To J. Z>. which I have cited in the notes (p. 166).
"\V'e hear nowhere that Lord Hay wrote verses, and it is very unlikely
that he, already when Donne formed his aquaintance a rising courtier,
should have joined with the Woodwards, and Brookes, and Corn-
wallis, in the game of exchanging bad verses with Donne. It is quite
likely that the young Lord of Dorset, either in 1609, or earlier when
he was still an Oxford student or had just come up to London, may
have burned his pinch of incense to the honour of the most brilliant
of the wits, now indeed a grave /pisiolier and moralist, but still capable
of 'kindling squibs about himself and flying into sportiveness '. We
gather from Lord Herbert of Cherbury that the Earl of Dorset must
have been an enthusiastic young man. When Herbert returned to

Q 2

2 28 Commentary,

England after the siege of Julyers (whither Donne had sent him
a verse epistle), ' Richard, Earl of Dorset, to whom otherwise I was
a stranger, one day invited me to Dorset House, where bringing me
into his gallery, and showing me many pictures, he at last brought me
to a frame covered with green taffeta, and asked me who I thought
\vas there ; and therewithal presently drawing the curtain showed me
my own picture ; whereupon demanding how his Lordship came to
have it, he answered, that he had heard so many brave things of me,
that he got a copy of a picture which one Larkin a painter drew for
me, the original whereof I intended before my departure to the Low
Countries for Sir Thomas Lucy.' Autobiography, ed. Lee. A man so
interested in Herbert may well have been interested in Donne even
before his connexion by marriage with Lucy, Countess of Bedford.
He became later one of Donne's kindest and most practical patrons.
The grandson of a great poet may well have written verses.*

But there is another consideration besides that of the letter To
E. of D. which seems to connect the La Corona sonnets with the
years 1607-9. That is the sonnet To the Lady Magdalen He7-bert :
of St. Mary Magdalen, which I have prefixed, with that To E. ofD., to
the group. This was sent with a prose letter which says, ' By this mes-
senger and on this good day, I commit the inclosed holy hymns and
sonnets (which for the matter not the workmanship, have yet escaped
the fire) to your judgment, and to your protection too, if you think
them worthy of it ; and I have appointed this enclosed sonnet to usher
them to your happy hand.' This letter is dated 'July 11, 1607',
which Mr. Gosse thinks must be a mistake, because another letter bears
the same date; but the date is certainly right, for July 11 is, making
allowance for the difference between the Julian and the Gregorian
Calendars, July 22, i.e. St. Mary Magdalen's day, 'this good day.'

What were the * holy hymns and sonnets ', of which Donne says :

and in some recompence
That they did harbour Christ himself, a Guest,
Harbour these Hymns, to his dear name addrest?

Walton says : ' These hymns are now lost ; but doubtless they were

^ Lord Dorset is thus described by his wife : ' He was in his own nature of a
just mind, of a sweet disposition, and very valiant in his own person : He had
a great advantage in his breeding by the wisdom and discretion of his grandfather,
Thomas, Earl of Dorset, Lord High Treasurer of England, who wns then held one
of the wisest men of that time ; by which means he was so good a scholar in all
manner of learning, that in his youth when he lived in the University of Oxford,
there was none of the young nobility then students there, that excelled him. He
was also a good patriot to his country . . . and so great a lover of scholars and
soldiers, as that with an excessive bounty towards them, or indeed any of worth
that were in distress, he did much diminish his estate ; As also, with excessive
prodigality in house-keeping and other noble ways at Court, as tilting, masking,
and the like ; Prince Henry being then alive, who was much addicted to these
noble exercises, and of whom he was much beloved.' CoUins's Peerage, ii. 194-5,
quoted in Zouch's edition of Walton's Lives, 1817.

Divine Poems. 229

such as they two now sing in heaven.' But Walton was writing long
afterwards and was probably misled by the name ' hymns '. By
' hymns and sonnets ' Donne possibly means the same things, as he
calls his love-lyrics 'songs and sonets'. The sonnets are hymns, i.e.
songs of praise. Mr. Chambers suggests — it is only a suggestion —
that they are the second set, the Holy Sonnets. But these are not
addressed to Christ. In them Donne addresses The Trinity, the
Father, Angels, Death, his own soul, the Jews — Christ only in one
(Sonnet XVIII, first published by Mr. Gosse). On the other hand,
' Hymns to his dear name addrest ' is an exact description of the La
Corona sonnets.

I venture to suggest, then, that the Holy Sonnets sent to
Mrs. Herbert and to the E. of D. were one and the same grouji, viz.
the La Corona sequence. Probably they were sent to Mrs. Herbert
first, and later to the E. of D. Donne admits their imperfection in
his letter to Mrs. Herbert. One of them seems to have been
criticized, and in sending the sequence to the E. of D. he held it back
for correction. If the E. of D. be the Earl of Dorset they may have
been sent to him before he assumed that title. Any later transcript
would adopt the title to which he succeeded in 1609. We need not,
however, take too literally Donne's statement that the E. of D.'s
poetical letter was ' the only-begetter ' of his sonnets.

My argument is conjectural, but the assumptions that they were
written about 161 7 and sent to Lord Doncaster are equally so. The
last is untenable ; the former does not harmonize so well as that of
an earlier date with the obvious fact, which I have emphasized in the
essay on Donne's poetry, that these sonnets are more in the
intellectual, tormented, wire-drawn style of his earlier religious verse
(excellent as that is in many ways) than the passionate and plangent
sonnets and hymns of the years which followed the death of his
wife.

Page 317. To E. of D.

11. 3-4. Ryme . . . their. . . have wrought. The concord here seems
to require the plural, the rhyme the singular. Donne, I fear, does
occasionally rhyme a word in the plural with one in the singular,
ignoring the ' s '. But possibly Donne intended ' Ryme ' to be taken
collectively for ' verses, poetry '. Even so the plural is the normal
use.

To THE Lady Magdalen Herbert, Cvrc

11. 1-2. whose faire inheritance

Bethina was, and jointure Magdalo.

* Mary Magdalene had her surname of magdalo a castell | and was
born of right noble lynage and parents | which were descended
of the lynage of kynges | And her fader was named Sinus and her
moder eucharye | She wyth her broder lazare and her suster martha

230 Co?nmentary.

possessed the castle of niagdalo : whiche is two myles fro nazareth
and bethanye the castel which is nygh to Iherusalem and also
a gret parte of Iherusalem whiche al thise thynges they departed
anionge them in suche wyse that marye had the castelle magdalo
whereof she had her name magdalene [ And lazare had the parte of
the cytee of Iherusalem : and martha had to her parte bethanye '
Legenda Aurea. See Ed. (1493), f. 184, ver. 80.

1. 4. viore than the Church did knoiv, i.e. the Resurrection. John
XX. 9 and 11 -18.

Page 318. La Corona.

The MSS. of these poems fall into three well-defined groups :
(i) That on which the 1633 text is based is represented by B, I/49 ;
Lee does not contain these poems. (2) Aversion different in several
details is presented by the group B, S, S96, IV, of which [Fis the
most important and correct. O'F has apparently belonged originally
to this group but been corrected from the first. (3) A18, A^, TC
agrees now with one, now with another of the two first groups.
When all the three groups unite against the printed text the case for
an emendation is a strong one.

Page 319. Annunciation.

1. 10. 7vho is thy Sonne a7id Brother.

' Maria ergo faciens voluntatem Dei,corporaliter Christi tantummodo
mater est, spiritualiter autem et soror et mater,' August. B>e Sanct.
Virg. i. 5. Migne 40. 399.

Nativitie.

1. 8. The effect of Herods jealous generall doonie : The singular
' effect ' has the support of most of the MSS. against the plural of the
editions and of Z>, /T^p, and there can be no doubt that it is right. All
the effects of Herod's doom were not prevented, but the one aimed
at, the death of Christ, was.

Page 320. Crucifying.

1. 8. selfe-lifes infiiiitytda span. The MSS. supply the *a' which
the editions here, as elsewhere (e. g. 'a retirednesse ', p. 185), have
dropped. In the present case the omission is so obvious that the
(Irolier Club editor supplies the article conjecturally. In the editions
after 16)) ' infinitie ' is the spelling adopted, leading to the misprint
' infinite " in i66<) and /7/p, a variant which I have omitted to note.

Page 321. Resurrection.

It will be seen there are some important differences between the
text of this sonnet- given in 16^), D, H41), on the one hand and that
of B, OF, S, S96, IV. The former has (1. 5) ' this death ' where the
latter gives ' thy death '. It may be noted that ' this ' is always spelt

Divi7ie Poems. 231

'thys' in D, which makes easy an error one way or the other. But
the most difficult reading in 16)} is (1. 8) ' thy little booke '. Oddly
enough this has the support not only of Z>, H4^ but also of A18, N,
TCy whose text seems to blend the two versions, adding some
features of its own. Certainly the ' life-booke ' of the second version
and the later editions seems preferable. Vet this too is an odd
expression, seeing that the line might have run :

If in thy Book of Life my name thou'enroule.

Was Donne thinking vaguely or with some symbolism of his own,
not of the 'book of life' (Rev. xiii. 8, and xx. 12) but of the 'little
book ' (Rev. x. 2) which John took and ate? Or does he say ' little
book ' thinking of the text, ' Strait is the gate and narrow is the way
which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it' (Matt. vii. 14)?
The grimmer aspects of the Christian creed were always in Donne's
mind :

And though thou beest, O mighty bird of prey,
So much reclaim'd by God, that thou must lay
All that thou kill'st at his feet, yet doth hee
Reserve but few, and leave the most to thee.

In 1. 9 ' last long ' is probably right. D, H4g had dropped both
adjectives, and 'long' was probably supplied by the editor inetri
causa, ' last "^disappearing. Between ' glorified ' and * purified ' in 1. 1 1
it is impossible to choose. The reading * deaths ' for ' death ' I have
adopted. Here A18, N, TC agree with B, OF, S, IF, and there
can be no doubt that 'sleepe' is intended to go with both 'sinne'
and ' death '.

Page 322. Holy Sonnets.

The MSS. of these sonnets evidently fall into two groups: (i) B,
O'F, S96, IV: of which IV is by far the fullest and most correct
representative. (2) A 18, D, H4g, N, TCC, TCD. I have kept the
order in which they are given in the editions 16)^ to 7669, but
indicated the order of the other groups, and added at the close the
three sonnets contained only in IV. I cannot find a definite signifi-
cance in any order, otherwise I should have followed that of /Fas the
fullest and presumably the most authoritative. Each sonnet is a
separate meditation or ejaculation.

Page 323, III. 7. Tliat sufferance ivas my situie ; nmv I repent:
I have followed the punctuation and order of B, JV, because it shows
a little more clearly what is (I think) the correct construction. As
printed in i6jj-6^,

That sufferance was my sinne I now repent,

the clar 2 ' That sufferance was ' &c. is a noun clause subject to
'repen. . But the two clauses are co-ordinates and 'That' is a
demonstrative pronoun. ' 2^/iaf suffering ' (of which he has spoken

232 Commentary.

in the six preceding lines) ' was my sin. Now 1 repent. Because I
did suffer the pains of love, I must now suffer those of remorse.'

Page 324, A'. 11. have bjirnt it heretofore. Donne uses ' hereto-
fore ' not infrequently in the sense of ' hitherto ', and this seems to be
implied in ' Let their flames retire '. I have therefore preferred the
perfect tense of the MSS. to the preterite of the editions. The ' hath '
of O'F'xs a change made in the supposed interests of grammar, if not
used as a plural form, for 'their flames' implies that the fires of lust
and of envy are distinguished. In speaking of the first Donne thinks
mainly of his youth, of the latter he has in memory hisyears of suitorship
at Court.

VI. 7, note. Orprese)ttl)\ I knoiv not^see that Face. This line, which
occurs in several independent MSS., is doubtless Donne's, but the
reading of the text is probably his own emendation. The first form
of the line suggested too distinctly a not approved, or even heretical,
doctrine to which Donne refers more than once in his sermons : 'So
Audivimi/s, et ab Antiquis, We have heard, and heard by them of old,
That in how good state soever they dye yet the souls of the departed
do not see the face of God, nor enjoy his presence, till the day of
Judgement ; This we have heard, and from so many of them of old,
as that the voyce of that part is louder, then of the other. And
amongst those reverend and blessed Fathers, which straied into these
errors, some were hearers and Disciples of the Apostles themselves,
as Papias was a disciple of S. John and yet Papias was a Millenarian,
and expected his thousand yeares prosperity upon the earth after the
Resurrection : some of them were Disciples of the Apostles, and some
of them were better men then the Apostles, for they were Bishops of
Rome ; Clement was so : and yet Cletnent was one of them, who
denied the fruition of the sight of God, by the Saints, till the Judge-
ment.' Sermons 80. 73. 739-40.

There are two not strictly orthodox opinions to which Donne seems
to have leant : (i) this, perhaps a remnant of his belief in Purgatory,
the theory of a state of preparation, in this doctrine applied even to
the saints; (2) a form of the doctrine now called 'Conditional Im-
mortality'. See note on Letter To the Countesse of Bedford, p. 196,

1.58.

Page 325, Vll. 6. dearth. This reading of the Westmoreland
MS. is surely right notwithstanding the consensus of the editions and
other MSS. in reading 'death'. The poet is enumerating various
modes in which death comes ; death itself cannot be one of these.
The 'death' in 1. 8 perhaps explains the error; it certainly makes
the error more obvious.

VIII. 7. in us, not immediately . I have interjected a comma after
' us ' in order to bring out distinctly the Scholastic doctrine of Angelic
knowledge on which this sonnet turns. See note on Tlie Dreaine with
the quotation from Aquinas. What Donne says here is : 'If our
minds or thoughts are known to the saints in heaven as to angels, not

Divine Poems. 233

immediately, but by circumstances and signs (such as blushing or
a quickened pulsation) which are apparent in us, how shall the
sincerity of my grief be known to them, since these signs are found
in lovers, conjurers and pharisees ? ' ' Deo tantum sunt naturaliter
cognitae cogitationes cordium.' 'Cod alone who put grief in my
heart knows its sincerity."

1. 10. vile blasphemous Conjurers. The 'vilde' of the MSS. is
obviously the right reading. The form too is that which Donne used
if we may judge by the MSS., and by the fact that in Elegie XIV :
Julia he rhymes thus :

and (which is worse than vilde)
Sticke jealousie in wedlock, her owne childe
Scapes not the showers of envie.

By printing ' vile ' the old and modern editions destroy the rhyme.
In the sonnet indeed the rhyme is not affected, and accordingly,
as I am not prepared to change every 'vile' to 'vilde' in the poems,
I have printed ' vile '. IV writes vile. Probably one might use
either form.

Page 326, IX. 9-10. I have followed here the punctuation of
]V, which takes ' O God ' in close connexion with the preceding
line ; the vocative case seems to be needed since God has not been
directly addressed until 1. 9. The punctuation of Z>, ZT-^p, which has
often determined that of /<^y, is not really different from that of W:

But who am I, that dare dispute with Thee?
Oh God ; Oh of thyne, &c.

Here, as so often, the question-mark is placed immediately after the
question, before the sentence is ended. But ' Oh God ' goes with
the question. A new strain begins with the second ' Oh '. The
editions, by punctuating

But who am I that dare dispute with thee?
O God, Oh I &c.

(which modern editors have followed), make ' O God, Oh ! ' a hurried
series of exclamations introducing the prayer which follows. This
suits the style of these abrupt, passionate poems. But it leaves the
question without an address to point it ; and to my own mind the
hurried, feverous effect of ' O God, Oh 1 ' is more than compensated
for by the weight which is thrown, by the punctuation adopted, upon
the second ' Oh ', — a sigh drawn from the very depths of the heart,

so piteous and profound
As it did seem to shatter all his bulk,
And end his being.

Pace 327, XII. i. JVhy are wee by all creatures, ^-c. The 'am I'
of the IV is probably what Donne first wrote, and I am strongly
tempted to restore it. Donne's usual spelling of 'am' is 'ame'

2 34 Commentary,

in his letters. This might have been changed to 'are', which would
have brought the change of ' I ' to ' we ' in its wake. On the other
hand there are evidences in this sonnet of corrections made by Donne
himself (e.g. 1. 9), and he may have altered the first line as being too
egotistical in sound. I have therefore retained the text of the
editions.

1. 4. Simple^ and further from corruption ? The ' simple ' of 16})
and Z>, iV./9, W is preferable to the ' simpler ' of the later editions
and somewhat inferior MSS. which Chambers has adopted, inadver-
tently, I think, for he does not notice the earlier reading. The
dropping of an ' r ' would of course be very easy ; but the simplicity
of the element does not admit of comparison, and what Donne says
is, I think, ' The elements are purer than we are, and (being simple)
farther from corruption,'

Page 328, XIII. 4-6. Whether that countenance can thee affright,
Tenres in his eyes quench the amazing light,
lUood fills his froivnes, which from his pierc'd head fell.

Chambers alters the comma after ' affright ' to a full stop, the Grolier
Club editor to a semicolon. Both place a semicolon after ' fell '.
Any change of the old punctuation seems to me to disguise the close
relation in which the fifth and sixth lines stand to the third. It is
with the third line they must go, not with the seventh, with which a
slightly different thought is introduced. ' Mark the picture of Christ
in thy heart and ask, can that countenance affright thee in whose eyes
the light of anger is quenched in tears, the furrows of whose frowns
are filled with blood.' Then, from the countenance Donne's thought
turns to the tongue. The full stop, accidentally dropped after ' fell '
in the editions of i6)) and /6^/, was restored in i6)().

1. 14. assures. In this case the MSS. enable us to correct an
obvious error of all the printed editions.

Page 329, XVI. 9. Yet such are thy laws. I have adopted the
reading ' thy ' of the Westmoreland and some other MSS. because
the sense seems to require it. ' These ' and ' those ' referring to the
same antecedent make a harsh construction. ' Thy laws necessarily
transcend the limits of human capacity and therefore sqme doubt
whether these conditions of our salvation can be fulfilled by men.
They cannot, but grace and spirit revive what law and letter kill.'

1. II. None doth; but all-healing grace and spirit. I have dropped
the ' thy ' of the editions, following all the MSS. I have no doubt
that ' thy ' has been inserted : (i) It spoils the rhyme : 'spirit' has
to rhyme with 'yet', which is impossible unless the accent may fall
on the second syllable ; (2) 'thy ' has been inserted, as ' spirit ' has
been spelt with a capital letter, under the impression that ' spirit '
stands for the Divine Spirit, the Holy Ghost. But obviously ' spirit '
is opposed to ' letter ' as ' grace ' is to ' law '. \\\ W both ' grace '
and ' spirit ' are spelt with capitals. Either both or neither must

Georgii
Robert

WlLIELMI

Christopheri,

Divine Poems. 235

be so treated. ' Who also hath made us able ministers of the new
testament ; not of the letter, but of the spirit : for the letter killeth,
but the spirit giveth life.' 2 Cor. iii. 6.

If ' thy ' is to be retained, then ' spirit ' must be pronounced ' sprit'.
Commentators on Shakespeare declare that this happens, but it is
very difificult to prove it. When Donne needs a monosyllable he
uses ' spright ' ; ' spirit ' he rhymes as disyllable with ' merit '.

Page 330, XVII. i. she whom J lovd. This is the reference to
his wife's death which dates these poems. Anne More, Donne's
wife, died on August 15, 1617, on the seventh day after the birth of
her twelfth child. She was buried in the church of St. Clement
Danes. Her monument disappeared when the Church was rebuilt.
The inscription ran :

/ Annae \

More de /Filiae

•< Lothesley >- J Soror.

Equitum I 1 Nept.

^ Aurator / iPronept.

Foeminae lectissimae, dilectissimaeq'

Conjugi charissimae, castissimaeq'

Matri piissimae, indulgentissimaeq'

XV annis in conjugio transactis,

vii post xii partum (quorum vii superstant) dies

immani febre correptae

(quod hoc saxum fari jussit

Ipse prae dolore infans)

Maritus (miserrimum dictu) olim charae charus

cineribus cineres spondet suos,

novo matrimonio (annuat Deus) hoc loco sociandos,

JOHANNE DONNE

Sacr : Theol : Profess :

Secessit

An" xxxiii aetat. suae et sui Jesu

C 1 D. DC. XVII.

Aug. XV

XVIII. It is clear enough why this sonnet was not published.
It would have revealed Donne, already three years in orders, as still
conscious of all the difficulties involved in a choice between the three
divisions of Christianity — Rome, Geneva (made to include Germany),
and England. This is the theme of his earliest serious poem, the
Saiyre III, and the subject recurs in the letters and sermons. Donne
entered the Church of England not from a conviction that it, and it
alone, was the true Church, but because he had firs*^ reached the
position that there is salvation in each : ' You know I never fettered
nor imprisoned the word Religion ; not straitening it Frierly ad
Religiones factitias, (as the Romans call well their orders of Religion)

236 Commentary.

nor immuring it in a Rome, or a Wittenberg, or a Geneva ; they are
all virtuall beams of one Sun, and wheresoever they find clay hearts,
they harden them, and moulder them into dust ; and they entender
and mollifie waxen. They are not so contrary as the North and
South Poles ; and that they are connatural pieces of one circle.'
Letters, p. 29. From this position it was easy to pass to the view that,
this being so, the Church of England may have special claims on me,
as the Church of my Country, and to a recognition of its character
as primitive, and as offering a via media. As such it attracted
Casaubon and Grotius. But the Church of England never made the
appeal to Donne's heart and imagination it did to George Herbert :

Beautie in thee takes up her place

And dates her letters from thy face

W'hen she doth write. Herbert, The British Church.

Compare, however, the rest of Donne's poem with Herbert's description
of Rome and Geneva, and also : ' Trouble not thy selfe to know the
formes and fashions of forraine particular Churches ; neither of a
Church in the Lake, nor a Church upon seven hils '. Sermons 80.
76. 769.

Page 331. The Crosse.

Donne has evidently in view the aversion of the Puritan to the sign
of the cross used in baptism.

With, the latter part of the poem compare George Herbert's
The Crosse,

Page 332,1. 27. extracted chimique medicine. Compare:

Only in this one thing, be no Galenist ; To make
Courts hot ambitions wholesome, do not take
A dramme of Countries dulnesse ; do not adde
Correctives, but as chymiques, purge the bad.

Letters to, i^c, p. 182, 11. 59-62.

11 33-4. As perchance carvers do not faces make,

But that away, which hid them there, do take.

' To make representations of men, or of other creatures,^we finde two
wayes ; Statuaries have one way, and Painters have another : Statuaries
doe it by Substraction ; They take away, they pare off some parts of
that stone, or that timber, which they work upon, and then that which
they leave, becomes like that man, whom they would represent :
Painters doe it by Addition ; Whereas the cloth or table presented
nothing before, they adde colours, and lights^ and shadowes, and so
there arises a representation.' Sermons 80. 44. 440,

Norton compares Michelangelo's lines :

Non ha 1' ottimo artista alcun concetto
Ch' un marmo solo in se non circonscriva
Col suo soverchio, e solo a quelle arriva
La man che obbedisce all' intelletto.

Divine Poems. 237

Page 333, 1. 47. So ivith hank, C-y. Chambers, I do not know
why, punctuates this line :

So with harsh, hard, sour, stinking ; cross the rest ;

This disguises the connexion of ' cross ' with its adverbial qualifica-
tions. The meaning is that as we cross the eye by making it con-
template 'bad objects' so we must cross the rest, i.e. the other
senses, with harsh (the ear), hard (touch), sour (the taste), and
stinking (the sense of smell). The asceticism of Donne in his later
life is strikingly evidenced in such lines as these.

1. 48. I have made an emendation here which seems to me to
combine happily the text of i6jj and that of the later editions. It
seems to me that /6jj has dropped ' all ', i6jy-6^ have dropped ' call '.
I thought the line as I give it was in O'/^, but found on inquiry I had
misread the collation. I should withdraw it, but cannot find it in
my heart to do so.

1. 52. Poirits doivne'tVards. I think the MS. reading is probably
right, because (i) ' Pants ' is the same as "' hath palpitation ' > (2) Donne
alludes to the anatomy of the heart, in the same terms, in the Essaycs
in Divinity, p. 74 (ed. Jessop, 1855) : 'O Man, which art said to be
the epilogue, and compendium of all this world, and the Hymen and
matrimonial knot of eternal and mortal things . . . and was made by
God's hands, not His commandment ; and hast thy head erected to
heaven, and all others to the centre, that yet only thy heart of all
others points downward, and only trembles.'

The reference in each case is to the anatomy of the day : ' The
figure of it, as Hippocrates saith in his Booke de Corde is Pyramidall,
or rather turbinated and somewhat answering to the proportion of a
Pine Apple, because a man is broad and short chested. For the
Basis above is large and circular but not exactly round, and after it
by degrees endeth in a cone or dull and blunt round point . . . His
lower part is called the Vertex or top, Mucro or point, the Cone, the
heighth of the heart. Hippocrates calleth it the taile which Galen
saith . . is the basest part, as the Basis is the noblest.' Helkiah
Crooke: MIKPOKOSMOPPA^IA, A Description of the Body of
Man, c^v. (1631), Book I, chap, ii. Of the Heart.

' The heart therefore is called KapSt'a aith roi"' Kep^aiveo-Oai, {sie. i. e.
KpaSaLV€(rOai) which signifieth to beate because it is perpetually moved
from the ingate to the outgate of life." Ibid., Book ^TI, The Preface.

1. 53. dejections. Donne uses both the words given here : 'dejec-
tions of spirit,' Sermons 50. 13. 102; and 'these detorsions have
small force, but (as sunbeams striking obliquely, or arrows diverted
with a twig by the way) they lessen their strength, being turned upon
another mark than they were destined to,' Essays in Divinity
(Jessop), p. 42.

1. 6r. fruitfully. The improved sense, as well as the unammity
of the MSS., justifies the adoption of this reading. A preacher

238 Commentary,

may deal ' faithfully ' with his people. The adverb refers to his action,
not its result in them. The Cross of Christ, in Donne's view, must
always deal faithfully ; whether its action produces fruit depends on
our hearts.

Page 334. The Annuntiation and Passion.
The MSS. add 'falling upon one day Anno Dni 1608'; i.e.
March 25, i6o|. George Herbert wrote some Latin verses In
Natales et Pascha concurrentes, and Sir John Beaumont an English
poem ' Vpon the two great feasts of the Annuntiation and Resurrec-
tion falling on the same day, March 25, 1627 '.

Page 336. Good Friday.

1. 2. The intelligence : i. e. the angel. Each sphere has its angel or
intelligence that moves and directs it. Grosart quotes the arrange-
ment,— the Sun, Raphael ; the Moon, Gabriel ; Mercury, Michael ;
Mars, Chemuel ; Jupiter, Adahiel ; Venus, Haniel ; Saturn, Zaphiel.

1. 4. fnotions. Nothing is more easy and common than the drop-
ping of the final 's', which in writing was indicated by little more than
a stroke. The reference is to the doctrine of cycles and epicycles.

1. 13. But that Christ on this Crosse, did rise and fall. Grosart
and Chambers adopt the reading ' his Crosse ' of 16)^-69, the former
without any reference to the alternative reading. Professor Norton,
in the Grolier Club edition, prints this, but in a note at the end
remarks 'that all editions after that of 1633 give this verse, correctly.

But that Christ on his cross did rise and fall '.

The agreement of the later editions is of little importance. They too
often agree to go wrong. The balance of the MS. evidence is on the
side of i6j). To me ' this ' seems the more vivid and pointed reading.
The line must be taken in close connexion with what precedes. 'If
I turned to the East,' says Donne, ' I should see Christ lifted on to
his Cross to die, a Sun by rising set. And unless Christ had con-
sented to rise and set on this Crosse (this Crosse which I should
see in vision if I turned my head), which was raised this day, Sin
would have eternally benighted all.'

1. 22. turne all spheares. The 'tune all speares' of the editions
and some MSS. is tempting because of (as it is doubtless due to) the
Platonic doctrine of the music of the spheres. But Donne was more
of a Schoolman and Aristotelian than a Platonist, and I think there
can be little doubt that he is describing Christ as the ' first mover '.
On the other hand ' tune ' may include ' turne '. The Dutch poet
translates :

Die 't Noord en Zuyder-punt bereicken,

daer Sy 't spanden
Er geven met een' draeg elck Hemel-rond

sijn toon.

Divine Poems. 239

The idea that the note of each is due to the rate at which it is spun
is that of Plato, The Republic, x.

Page 338. THE LITANIE.

In a letter to Goodyere written apparently in 1609 or 16 10,
Donne says : ' Since my imprisonment in my bed, I have made
a meditation in verse, which I call a Litany \ the word you know
imports no other then supplication, but all Churches have one forme
of supplication, by that name. Amongst ancient annals I mean
some 800 years, I have met two Litanies in Latin verse, which
gave me not the reason of my meditations, for in good faith I
thought not upon them then, but they give me a defence, if any
man, to a Lay man, and a private, impute it as a fault, to take such
divine and publique names, to his own little thoughts. The first
of these was made by Ratpertus a Monk of Suevia ; and the other
by S. Notker, of whom I will give you this note by the way, that he
is a private Saint, for a few Parishes ; they were both but monks and
the Letanies poor and barbarous enough; yet Pope Nicolas the 5,
valued their devotion so much, that he canonized both their Poems,
and commanded them for publike service in their Churches : mine
is for lesser Chappels, which are my friends, and though a copy of
it were due to you, now, yet I am so unable to serve my self with
writing it for you at this time (being some 30 staves of 9 lines) that
I must intreat you to take a promise that you shall have the first,
for a testimony of that duty which I owe to your love, and to my
self, who am bound to cherish it by my best offices. That by which
it will deserve best acceptation, is, that neither the Roman Church
need call it defective, because it abhors not the particular mention
of the blessed Triumphers in heaven ; nor the Reformed can dis-
creetly accuse it, of attributing more then a rectified devotion
ought to doe.'

The Litanies referred to in Donne's letter to Goodyere may be read
in Migne's Patrologia Lattna, vol. Ixxxvii, col. 39 and 42. They are
certainly barbarous enough. That of Ratpertus is entitled Litania
Ratperti ad processionetn diebus Dominicis, and begins :

Ardua spes mundi, solidator et inclyte coeli

Christe, exaudi nos propitius famulos.
Virgo Dei Genetrix rutilans in honore perennis,

Ora pro famulis, sancta Maria, tuis.

The other is headed Notkeri Magisiri cognomento Balbuli Litania
rhythmica, and opens thus :

Votis supplicibus voces super astra feramus,

Trinus ut et simplex nos regat omnipotens.
Sancte Pater, adiuva nos, Sancte Fili, adiuva nos,

Compar his et Spiritus, ungue nos intrinsecus.

240 Commentary,

Michael, John the Baptist, Peter, Paul, and Stephen, martyrs and
virgins, are appealed to in both. There are some differences in respect
of particular saints invoked.

It is interesting also to compare Donne's series of petitions with
those in a Middle English Litany preserved in the P>alliol Coll. MS. 354
(published by Edward Fliigel in Anglia xxv. 220). The poetry is very
poor and I need not cjuote. The interesting feature is the list of
petitions ' Vnto the ffader ', ' ye sonne ', ' ye holy gost ', ' the trinite ',
' our lady ', ' ye angelles ', ' ye propre angell ', ' John baptist ', ' ye
appostiles', 'ye martires', 'the confessours ', 'ye virgins', ' unto all
sayntes '. Donne, it will be observed, includes the patriarchs and the
prophets, but omits any reference to a guardian angel and to the
saints. Other references in his poems and sermons show that he
had the thought of a guardian angel often in his mind : ' As that Angel,
which God hath given to protect thee, is not weary of his ofifice,
for all thy perversenesses, so, howsoever God deale with thee, be not
thou weary of bearing thy part, in his Quire here in the Militant
Church.' Sermons 80. 44. 440.

Page 339, I. 34. a such selfe different instinct
Of these ;

' As the three persons of the Trinity are distinguished as Power
(The Father), Knowledge (The Son), Love (The Holy Ghost), and
are yet identical, not three but one, may in me power, love, and
knowledge be thus at once distinct and identical.' The comma after
' these " in D, H4g, Lee was accidentally dropped. In i6)j-6g
a comma was then interpolated after ' instinct ' and ' Of these ' was
connected with what follows : ' Of these let all mee elemented bee,'
' these ' being made to point forward to the next line. Chambers and
the Grolier Club editor both read thus. But D, H4g, Lee show
what was the original punctuation. Without ' Of these ' it is difficult
to give a precise meaning to ' instinct '. It would be easy to change
' a such ' to ' such a ' with most of the MSS., but Donne seems to
have affected this order. Compare Elegie X : The Dreatne, p. 95,
1.17:

After a such fruition I shall wake.

Page 341, 1. 86. Ln Abel dye. Abel was to the early Church
a type of Christ, as being the first martyr.

Page 343, 11. 122-4. 0"e might omit the brackets in these lines
and substitute a semicolon after 'hearken too' and a comma after
' and do ', and make the sense clearer. The MSS. bear evidence to
their difficulty. There is certainly no call for brackets as we use
them, and the 1633 edition is more sparing of them in this poem
than the later editions. What Donne says is : ' While this quire '
(enumerated in the previous stanzas) 'prays for us and thou heark-
enest to them, let not us whose duty is to pray, to endure patiently,

Divine Poems. 241

and to do thy will, trust in their prayers so far as to forget our
duty of obedience and service.'

Page 347, 1. 231. Which 7vell, if we starve, dine: 'well' has the
support of all the MSS. and may be the adverb placed before its
verb. ' If we starve they dine well.' In this wire-drawn and
tormented poem it is hard to say what Donne may not have written.
Most of the editors read ' will ', and this appears in some copies
of 16)).

1. 243. Heare us, iveake ecchoes, O thou eare, and cry. The 'cry'
of the editions is surely right. God is at once the source of our
prayers and their answerer. Our prayers are echoes of what His
grace inspires in our hearts. The ' eye ' of .S and other MSS., which
also read ' wretches ' for ' ecchoes ', is due to a misapprehension of the
condensed thought, and ' eye ' with ' ecchoes ' is entirely irrelevant.
JC tries another emendation : ' Oh thou heare our cry,'

' Every man who prostrates himselfe in his chamber, and poures
out his soule in prayer to God ; . . . though his faith assure him,
that God hath granted all that he asked upon the first petition of
his prayer, yea before he made it, (for God put that petition in to
his heart and mouth, and moved him to askc it, that thereby he
might be moved to grant it), yet as long as the Spirit enables him
he continues his prayer,' &c. Sermons 80. 77. 786.

But indeed we do not need to go to the Sermons to see that this
is Donne's meaning. He has emphasized it already in this poem :
e. g. in Stanza xxiii :

Heare us, for till thou heare us, Lord

We know not what to say :
Thine eare to'our sighes, teares, thoughts gives voice and word.
O Thou who Satan heard'st in Jobs sicke day,
Heare thy selfe now, for thou in us dost pray.

' But in things of this kind (i. e. sermons), that soul that inanimates
them never departs from them. The Spirit of God that dictates them
in the speaker or writer, and is present in his tongue or hand, meets
him again (as we meet ourselves in a glass) in the eyes and ears and
hearts of the hearers and readers." Gosse, Life, Cs^c, i. 123 : To
. . . the Countess of Montgomery.

' God cannot be called a cry ', Grosart says ; but St. Paul so describes
the work of the SjMrit : ' Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmi-
ties, for we know not what we should pray for as we ought : but the Spirit
itself maketh intercession for us with groa'nings which cannot be
uttered. And he that searcheth the heart knoweth what is the mind
of the Spirit, becau.se he maketh intercession for the saints according
to the will of God.' Calvin thus closes his note on the passage :
'Atque ita locutus est Paulus quo significantius id totum tribueret
Spiritus gratiae. lubemur quidem pulsare, sed nemo sponte prae-

II 917 3 u

242 Commentary,

meditari vel unam syllabam poterit, nisi arcano Spiritus sui instinctu
nos Deus pulsct, adeoque sibi corda nostra aperiat.'

Page 348, 1. 246. Gaine to thy self, or us allotv. If we perish
neither Christ nor we have gained anything. Both have died in vain.
If 'and' is substituted for 'or' in this Hne {i())S~^^9 ^■nd Chambers)
then the next Une becomes otiose.

P.\GE 348. Upon the translation ok the Psalmes, &c.

^^'e do not know what was the occasion of these Hnes. The
Countess was the mother of WilHam Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, and
Philip Herbert, Earl of Montgomery, and of Pembroke after his
brother's death. Poems by the former are frequently found- with
Donne's, e.g. in the Hawthornden MS. which is made from a collec-
tion in Donne's own possession. Doubtless they were known to one
another, but there is no evidence of intimacy, such as letters. To
the Countess of Montgomery Donne in 16 19 sent a copy of one of
his sermons which she had asked for (Gosse, Life, a^c, ii. 123). It
may have been for her that he composed this poem.

An elaborate copy of the Psalms was prepared by John Davis of
Hereford. From this they were published in 1822.

From 1. 53 it is evident that Donne's poem was written after the
death of the Countess of Pembroke in 1621.

Page 349, 1. 38. So well attyr'd abroad, so ill at home. Donne
has probably in mind the French versions of Clement Marot, which
were the war-songs of the Huguenots.

Page 351. To Mr. Tilman.

Of Mr. Tilman I can find no trace in printed Oxford or Cambridge
registers. The poem is a strange comment on the seventeenth
century's estimate of the clergy :

Why do they think unfit
That Gentry should joyne families with it ?

In his Life of George Herbert Walton tells us of Herbert's resolution
to enter the Church, and the opposition he met with : ' He did, at his
return to London, acquaint a Court-friend with his resolution to enter
into Sacred Orders, who perswaded him to alter it, as too mean an
employment, and too much below his birth, and the excellent abilities
and endowments of his mind. To whom he replied, // hath been
formerly Jiidg'd that the Domestick Servants of the King of Heaven, should
be of the noblest Families on Earth : and, though the Iniquity of the late
Times have made Clergy-men meanly valued, and the sacred name of
Priest contemptible ; yet, I will labour to make it honourable, by
consecrating all my learning, and all my poor abilities, to advance the
Glory of that God that gave them.' This estimate of the clergy must
not be overlooked when considering the struggle that went on in
Donne's mind too before he crossed the Rubicon.

Page 352, 1. 43. As Angels out of clouds, d^v. Walton doubtless

Divine Poems. 243

had this Hne in his mind when he described Donne's own preaching :
' A Preacher in earnest, weeping sometimes for his Auditory, some-
times with them, ahvayes preaching to himselfe, Hkc an Angel from
a cloud, though in none : carrying some (as S, Paul was) to heaven,
in holy raptures ; enticing others, by a sacred art and courtship,
to amend their lives ; and all this with a most particular grace, and
un-imitable fashion of speaking.'

Page 352. A Hvmne to Christ.

Page 353, 11. 9-12. Perhaps the rhetoric of these lines would be
improved by shifting the semicolon from 1. 10 to 1. 11. *In putting,
at thy behest, the seas between my friends and me, I sacrifice them
unto thee : Do thou put thy,' &c. As the verse stands the con-
nexion between the first two lines and the next is a little vague.

1. 12. thy sea. I have adopted 'sea' from the MSS. in place of
* seas ' 16)). It was easy for the printer to take over ' seas ' from the
preceding line, but ' sea ' is the more pointed word. The sea is the
blood of Christ. The 1635-69 editions indeed read ' blood ', which is
as though a gloss had crept in from the margin. More probably
' blood ' was a first version, changed by a bold metaphor to a more
striking antithesis.

Miss Spearing has drawn my attention, since writing this note, to
the peroration of A Sermon of Valedidion at my going into Germany,
at Lincoins-Inne, April 18, i6ig, which I had overlooked. It con-
firms the lightness of ' sea '. The whole passage is of interest in
connexion with this poem : ' Now to make up a circle, by returning
to our first word, remember : As we remember God, so for his sake,
let us remember one another. In my long absence, and far distance
from hence, remember me, as I shall do you in the ears of that God,
to whom the farthest East, and the farthest ^Vest are but as the right
and left ear in one of us ; we hear with both at once, and he hears in
both at once ; remember me, not my abilities ; for when I consider
my Apostleship that I was sent to you, I am in St. Pauls quorum,
quorum ego simi minimus, the least of them that have been sent ; and
when I consider my infirmities, I am in his quorum, in another
commission, another way, Quorum ego maximus ; the greatest of
them ; but remember my labors, and endeavors, at least my desire,
to make sure your salvation. And I shall remember your religious
cheerfulness in hearing the word, and your christianly respect towards
all them that bring that word unto you, and towards myself in
particular far bove my merit. And so as your eyes that stay here,
and mine that must be far of, for all that distance shall meet every
morning, in looking upon that same Sun, and meet every night, in
looking upon the same Moon ; so our hearts may meet morning and
evening in that God, which sees and hears everywhere ; that you
may come thither to him with your prayers, that I, (if I may be of
use for his glory, and your edification in this place) may be restored

R 2

244 Commentary.

to you again ; and may come to him with my prayer that what Paul
soever plant amongst you, or what Apollos soever water, God himself
will give us the increase : That if I never meet you again till we
have all passed the gate of death, yet in the gates of heaven, I may
meet you all, and there say to my Saviour and your Saviour, that
which he said to his Father and our Father, Of tliose tvhom thou hast
given me, have I not lost one. Remember me thus, you that stay in
this Kingdome of peace, where no sword is drawn, but the sword of
Justice, as I shal remember you in those Kingdomes, where ambition
on one side, and a necessary defence from unjust persecution on the
other side hath drawn many swords ; and Christ Jesus remember us
all in his Kingdome, to which, though we must sail through a sea, it
is the sea of his blood, where no soul suffers shipwrack ; though we
must be blown with strange winds, with sighs and groans for our sins,
yet it is the Spirit of God that blows all this wind, and shall blow
away all contrary winds of diffidence or distrust in God's mercy;
where we shall be all Souldiers of one army, the Lord of Hostes, and
Children of one Quire, the God of Harmony and consent : where al!
Clients shall retain but one Counsellor, our Advocate Christ Jesus,
nor present him any other fee but his own blood, and yet every
Client have a Judgment on his side, not only in a not guilty, in the
remission of his sins, but in a Venite benedidi, in being called to the
participation of an immortal Crown of glory : where there shall be no
difference in affection, nor in mind, but we shall agree as fully and
perfectly in our Allelujah, and gloria in excelsis, as God the Father,
Son, and Holy Ghost agreed in \\\&faciamus hominetn at first; where
we shall end, and yet begin but then ; where we shall have continuall
rest, and yet never grow lazie ; where we shall be stronger to resist,
and yet have no enemy ; where we shall live and never die, where
we shall meet and never part,' Sermons 26. 19. 280.

1. 28. Fame, Wit, Hopes, cr-e. Compare : 'How ill husbands then
of this dignity are we by sinne, to forfeit it by submitting our selves
to inferior things ? either to gold, then which every worme, (because
a worme hath life, and gold hath none) is in nature more estimable,
and more precious ; Or, to that which is lesse than gold, to Beauty ;
for there went neither labour, nor study, nor cost to the making of
that ; (the Father cannot diet himselfe so, nor the mother so, as to be
sure of a faire child) but it is a thing that hapned by chance, v^-here-
soever it is ; and, as there are Diamonds of divers waters, so men
enthrall themselves in one clime to a black, in another to a white
beauty. To that which is lesse then gold or Beauty, voice, opinion,
fame, honour, we sell our selves.' Sermons 50. 38. 352.

Page 354. The Lamentations of Jeremy.

Immanuel Tremellius was born in the Ghetto of Ferrara in 15 10
His father was apparently a Jewish surgeon, a man of distinction in

Divine Poems. 245

the Jewish community. Educated as a Jew, Tremellius became a
Christian about the age of twenty, and, under the influence of the
Protestant movement which was agitating Italy as well as other
countries, a Calvinist. When persecution began Tremellius fled from
Lucca, where he had taught Hebrew under the reformer Vermigli, to
Strasburg, and thereafter his life was that of the wandering, often
fugitive, scholar and reformer. He was invited to England by
Cranmer in 1548, and held the Professorship of Hebrew at
Cambridge until 1553. The accession of Mary drove him back to
the Continent, and he was tutor to the children of the Duke of
Zweibriichen from 1554 to 1558, and rector of the Gymnasium at
Hornbach from 1558 to 1560. The Duke became a Lutheran, and
Tremellius was exiled, but found after a year or two a haven in the
University of Heidelberg, where Duke Frederick HI had rallied to
the Calvinist cause. Tremellius was Professor of Theology here
from 1562-77, and it was here that he issued most of his works. He
had already published a Hebrew version of the Genevan Catechism
intended for his Jewish brethren. The works issued at Heidelberg
include a Chaldaic and Syriac Grammar, an edition of the Peschito
(an old Syrian version of the New Testament), and the Latin
translation of the Old Testament which Donne utilized for his
paraphrase. In this work he was assisted by his son-in-law Francis
Junius (father of the Anglo-Saxon and Antiquarian scholar), a native
of Bourges, who had served as a field-preacher under William the
Silent. Junius was responsible only for the Apocrypha, so that Donne
rightly mentions Tremellius alone. The work was published at
Frankfort in 1575-9 ; in London in 1580, 1581, and 1585 ; at Geneva
in 1590 and 16 17. In the Genevan editions it was coupled with
Beza's translation of the New Testament. The whole was re-issued
at Hanover as late as 17 15.

Duke Frederick Ill's successor was a Lutheran, and Tremellius
was driven into exile once more in 1577. His last years were spent
as teacher in the Academy instituted by Henri de la Tour d'Auvergne,
Vicomte de Turenne, in Sedan, Here he died in 1580.

I have compared Donne's version throughout with both Tremellius'
translation and the Vulgate, and wherever the collation helps to fix
the text I have quoted their readings in the textual notes. I add
here one or two more quotations from the originals. Tremellius'
version was accompanied, it must be remembered, with an elaborate
commentary.

Page 356, 1. 58. acciie, the reading of B, GF as well as i6jj-6g,
I have not yet found elsewhere in Donne's works, but doubtless it
occurs. Shakespeare uses it once :

He by the Senate is accited home

From weary wars against the barbarous Goths.

Tit. Andr. i. i. 27-8.

2^6 Commepttary.

11. 75-6. /or they sought for meat

Which should refresh their souks' they could not get.

Chambers has printed this poem from i6jg, noting occasionally the
readings of i6^j and i6jo, but ignoring consistently those of 16)^.
Here 16)) has the support of N, TCD ; B reads ' they none could
get ' ; and O'F, if I may trust my collation, agrees with 16)^-69 ;
Grolier follows 16^^ but conjectures ' the sought-for meat '. This is
unnecessary. It is quite in Donne's style to close with an abrupt
' they could not get '. Modern punctuation would change the comma
to a semicolon. The version of Tremellius runs : ' Expirarunt quum
quaererent escam sibi, qua reficerent se ipsos.' The Vulgate,
'consumpti sunt, quia quaesierunt cibum sibi ut refocillarent
animum.'

Page 357, 1. 81, Of all which heare I viourne: i.e. 'which hear
that I mourn.' The construction is harsh, and I was tempted for a
moment to adopt the ' me ' of N, but Donne is translating Tre-
mellius, and ' me in gemitu esse ' is not quite the same thing as ' me
gementem'. Grosart and Chambers and the Grolier Club editor
would not have followed i6)g in changing ' heare ' to ' here ' had they
consulted the original poem which Donne is paraphrasing in any
version. The Vulgate runs : ' Audierunt quia ingemisco ego, et non
est qui consoletur me.'

Page 359, 1. 161. poure, for thy sinnes. The 'poure out thy
sinnes ' of i6)j-6^ which Grosart and Chambers follow is obviously
wrong. The words ' for thy sinnes ' have no counterpart in the Latin
of Tremellius or the Vulgate. The latter runs : ' Effunde sicut
aquam cor tuum ante conspectum Domini.'

Page 360, 11. 182-3. hath girt mee in

With hemlocke, and with labour.

Cingit cicuta et molestia, Tremellius : circumdedit me felle et labore,
Vulgate. Donne combines the two versions. He is fond of using
'hemlock' as the typical poison : and he tells Wotton in one of his
letters that to him labour or business is the worst of evils : ' I professe
that I hate businesse so much, as I am sometimes glad to remember,
that the Roman Church reads that verse A negotio perambulante in
tenehris, which we reade from the pestilence walking by night, so
equall to me do the plague and businesse deserve avoiding.' Letters,
p. 142. To Goodyere in like manner he writes, 'we who have been
accustomed to one another are like in this, that we love not busi
nesse.' Letters, p. 94.

Page 361, 1. 193. the children of his quiver. Donne found this phrase
in the Vulgate or in the margin of Tremellius. In the text of the
latter the verse runs, ' Immitit in renes meos tela pharetrae suae.'
The marginal note says, '■ Heb. filios, id est, prodeuntes a pharetra.'
The Vulgate reads, ' filias pharetrae suae.'

Divine Poems, 247

1. 197. drunke withwormewood: ' inebriavit me absinthio,' Tremel-
Uus and Vulgate.

Page 362, 11. 226-30. I have changed the full stop in 1. 229,
' him ', to a comma, for all these clauses are objective to ' the Lord
allowes not this '. The construction is modelled on the original :
' Non enim affligit ex animo suo, moestitiaque afificit filios viri. 34,
Conterere sub pedibus suis omnes vinctos terrae, 35. Detorquere
ius viri coram facie superioris, 36. Pervertere hominem in causa
sua, Dominus non probat.' The version of the Vulgate is similar :
' 33. Non enim humiliavit ex corde suo, et abiecit filios hominum,
34. Ut contereret sub pedibus suis omnes vinctos terrae ; 35. Ut
declinaret iudicium viri in conspectu vultus Altissimi ; 36. Ut
perverteret hominem in iudicio suo ; Dominus ignoravit.'

Pagf: 364, 1. 299. their bone. The reading of the editions is
probably right: 'Concreta est cutis eorum cum osse ipsorum,'
Tremellius.

\. 302. better through pierc'd thefi through penury. I have no
doubt that the 'through penury' of the 1635-69 editions and the
MSS. is what Donne wrote. The 1633 editor changed it to 'by
penury '. Donne is echoing the parallelism of ' confossi gladio quam
confossi fame '. The Vulgate has simply ' Melius fuit occisio gladio
quam interfectio fame '.

Page 366, 1. 337. The annointed Lord, d^r. Chambers, to judge
from his use of capital letters, evidently reads this verse as applying to
God, — ' Th'Annointed Lord ', ' under His shadow '. It is rather the
King of Israel. Tremellius's note runs : ' Id est, Rex noster e posteri-
tate Davidis, quo freti saltem nobis dabitur aliqua interspirandi
occasio in quibuslibet angustiis : nam praefidebant Judaei dignitati
illius regni, tamquam si pure et per seipsum fuisset stabile ; non autem
spectabant Christum, qui finis est et complementum illius typi, neque
conditiones sibi imperatas.' ' The anointed of the Lord ' is the
translation of the Revised Version. The Vulgate version seems to
indicate a prophetic reference, which may be what Chambers had in
view : ' Spiritus oris nostri, Christus Dominus, captus est in peccatis
nostris : In umbra tua vivemus in gentibus.' Donne took this verse
as the text of a Gunpowder Plot sermon in 1622. He points out
there that some commentators have applied the verse to Josiah, a
good king \ others to Zedekiah, a bad king : ' We argue not, we dis-
pute not ; we embrace that which arises from both. That both good
Kings and bad Kings . . are the anointed of the Lord, and the breath
of the nostrils, that is, the life of the people,' &c. James is ' the
Josiah of our times '. James had good reasons for preferring bishops
to Andrew Melville and other turbulent presbyters. But Donne, who
was steeped in the Vulgate, notes a possible reference to Christ : ' Or
if he lamented the future devastation of that Nation, occasioned by
the death of the King of Kings, Christ Jesus, when he came into the
world, this was their cd^.^^ prophetically.' Sermons 50. 43. 402.

24^ Commentary,

1. 355. wee drunke, and pay : ' pecunia bibimus' Tremellius and Vul-
;^ate : the Latin may be present or past tense, but the verse goes on
in the Vulgate, ' ligna nostra pretio comparavimus,' which shows that
' bibimus ' is ' we drunk ' or ' we have drunk '. The Authorized Ver-
sion reads ' we have drunken '.

Pack 367, 1. 374. children fall. 'Juvenesad molendum portant,
et pucri ad Hgna corruunt,' Tremellius \ *et pueri in ligno corruerunt,'
Vulgate. But the latter translates the first half of the line quite
differently.

Page 368. Hymn to God my God, in my sicknesse.

The date which Walton gives for this poem, March 23, 1630, is of
course March 23, 1631, i.e. eight days before the writer'sdeath. (Donne's
tense and torturing will never relaxed its hold before the final
^ moment : ( ' Being speechlesse, he did (as Saint Stephen) look stead-
fastly towards heaven, till he saw the Sonne of God standing at the
right hand of his Father ; And being satisfied with this blessed sight,
(as his soule ascended, and his last breath departed from him) he
closed his owne eyes, and then disposed his hands and body into such
a posture, as required no alteration by those that came to shroud
him.' Walton (1670).

Donne's monument had been designed by himself and shows him
thus shrouded. The epitaph too is his own composition and is the
natural supplement to this hymn :

JOHANNES DONNE

SAC. THEOL. PROFESS.

POST VARIA STVDIA QVIBVS AP. ANNIS

TENERRIMIS FIDELITER, NEC INFELICITER

INCVP.ViT ;
INSTINCTV ET IMPVLSV SP. SANCTI, MONITV

ET HORTATV

REGIS JACOBI, ORDINES SACROS AMPLEXVS

ANNO SVI JESV MDCXIV. ET SV.*: /ETATIS XI.II

DECANATV HVJVS ECCLESIA: INDVTVS

XXVII NOVEMBRIS, MDCXXI.

EXVTVS MORTE VLTIMO DIE MARTIl MDCXXXl.

HIC LICET IN OCCIDVO CINERE ASPICIT EVM

CVJVS NOMEN EST ORIENS.

The reference in the last line of the epitaph, and the figure of the
map with which he plays in the second and third stanzas of the
Hytnne are both illustrated by a passage in a sermon on Psalm vi.
8-10: 'In a flat Map, there goes no more, to make West East,
though they be distant in an extremity, but to paste that flat Map
upon a round body, and then West and East are all one. In a flat

Divine Poems. 249

soule, in a dejected conscience, in a troubled spirit, there goes no
more to the making of that trouble, peace, then to apply that trouble
to the body of the Merits, to the body of the Gospel of Christ Jesus,
and conforme thee to him, and thy West is East, thy Trouble of
spirit is Tranquillity of spirit. The name of Christ is Orietis, The
East; And yet Lucifer himself is called Filius Orienfis, The Son of
the East. If thou beest fallen by Lucifer, fallen to Lucifer, and n(A
fallen as Lucifer, to a senselessnesse of thy fall, and an impenitiblenesse
therein, but to a troubled spirit, still thy prospect is the East, still thy
Climate is heaven, still thy Haven is Jerusalem ; for, in our lowest
dejection of all, even in the dust of the grave, we are so composed, so
layed down, as that we look to the East : If I could beleeve that
Trajan, or Tecla, could look Eastward, that is, towards Christ, in
Hell, I could beleeve with them of Rome, that Trajan and Tecla
were redeemed by prayer out of hell.' Sermons 80. 55. 558.

For 'the name of Christ is Oriens '. Donne refers in the margin
to Zachariae vi. 12 : ' Et loqueris ad eum dicens : Haec ait Dominus
exercituum, dicens : ecce vir oriens nomen ejus ; et subter eum
orietur, et aedificabit templum Domino.' In the English versions,
Genevan and Authorized, the words run ' whose name is the Branch ',
but to Donne the Vulgate was the form in which he knew the Scrip-
tures most intimately. At the same time he consulted and refers to
the English versions frequently : ' that which we call the Bishops
Bible, nor that which we call the Getieva Bible, and that which we
may call the Kings.'' Sermons 80. 50, 506.

The difference between the two versions is due, I understand, to
the fact that the Hebrew participle ' rising ' and the Hebrew word for
' branch ' contain the same consonants. In unpointed Hebrew it
was, therefore, possible to confound them. The Septuagint version
is AvaroXr/ ovofia avTOv.

In describing the preparations for making Donne's tomb Walton
says : ' Upon this urn he thus stood, with his eyes shut, and with so
much of the sheet turned aside, as might show his lean, pale, and
deathlike face, which was purposely turned towards the east, from
whence he expected the second coming of his and our Saviour
Jesus.' Walton says that he stood, but Mr. Hamo Thornycroft has
pointed out that the drapery by its folds reveals that it was modelled
from a recumbent figure. Cosse, Life, is-r., ii. 288.

11. 18-20. Anyan, and Magellan, and Gibraltare,

All sireights, and none but streights, are zvayes to thevi.

Grosart and Chambers have boggled unnecessarily at these lines.
The former inserts an unnecessary and unmetrical ' are ' after
' Gibraltare '. The latter interpolates a mark of interrogation after
' Gibraltare ', putting ' Anyan, and Magellan and Gibraltare ' on a level
with the Pacific, the 'eastern riches ' and Jerusalem, i.e. six possible
homes instead of three. \\'hat the poet says is simply, * Be my home

250 Commentary,

in the Pacific, or in the rich east, or in Jerusalem, to each I must
sail through a strait, viz. Anyan (i.e. Behring Strait) if I go west by
the North-West passage, or Magellan, or Gibraltar. These, all of
which are straits, are ways to them, and none but straits are ways to
them.' A condensed construction makes ' are ways to them '
predicate to two subjects. For ' the straight of Anian ' see Hakluyt's
Principal Navigations., vol. vii, Glasgow, 1904, esp. the map at p. 256,
which shows very distinctly how the ' Straight of Anian ' was
conceived to separate America from ' Cathaia in Asia ' and to lead
right on to Japan and the ' Ilandes of Moluccae ', 'the eastern riches.'
The Mare Pacificum lies further to the south and east, entered by the
' Straight of Magellanes ' between Peru and the ' Terra del Fuego ',
which latter is not an island but part of the great ' Terra Australis '.
Thus 'none but straights' lead to the 'eastern riches ' or the Pacific.
' Outre ce que les navigations des modernes ont des-ja presque
descouvert que ce n'est point une isle, ains terre ferme et continente
avec rinde orientale d'un coste, et avec les terres qui sont soubs les
deux poles d'autre part ; ou, si elle en est separee, que c'est d'un si
petit destroit et intervalle, qu'elle ne merite pas d'estre nomme isle
pour cela.' Montaigne, Essais, i. 3 1 : Des Cannibales.

The conceit about the ' straits ' Donne had already used : ' a
narrower way but to a better Land ; thorow Straits ; 'tis true ; but to
the Pacifique Sea, The consideration of the treasure of the Godly
Man in this World, and God's treasure towards him, both in this, and
the next.' Sermons 26. 5. 71.

' Who ever amongst our Fathers thought of any other way to the
Moluccaes, or to China, then by the Promontory of Good Hope}
Yet another way opened itself to Magellan ; a Straite ; it is true ; but
yet a way thither ; and who knows yet, whether there may not be
a North-East, and a North-West way thither, besides?' Sermons 80.
24. 241.

Nevertheless by the time Donne wrote his hymn the sea to the
south of Terra del Fuego had recently been discovered. He is using
the language of a slightly earlier date, of his own youth, when travels
and far countries were much in his imagination. In 1617 George,
Lord Carew, writing to Sir Thomas Roe, Ambassador at the Court of
the Mogul, says : ' The Hollanders have discovered to the southward
of the Strayghts of Magellen an open sea and free passage to the
south sea.' Letters of George, Lord Carew to Sir Thotnas Roe,
Camden Society, i860. For the ' Straight of Anyan ' compare also :

This makes the foisting traveller to sweare,
And face out many a lie within the yeere.
And if he have beene an howre or two aboarde
To spew a little gall : then by the Lord,
He hath beene in both th'Indias, East and West,
Talks of Guiana, China, and the rest,

Divine Poems. 251

The straights of Gibraltare, and ^nian
Are but hard by ; no, nor the Magellane :
Mandeville, Candish, sea-experienst Drake
Came never neere him, if he truly crake.

Gilpin, Skin/eiheia, Satyre I.

For '^-Enian ' in this passage Grosart conjectures 'Aegean ' ! I have
put a semicolon for a comma in the third last line quoted. I take it
and the preceding to be a quotation from the traveller's talk.

Page 369. A Hymnk to God the Father.

The text of the 1633 edition, which is, with one trifling exception,
that of the other printed editions, is followed by Walton in the first
short life of Donne prefixed to the LXXX Sermons (1640). Walton
probably took it from one of the 1633, 1635, or 1639 editions ; but he
may have had a copy of the poem. The MSS. which contain the
hymn have some important differences, and instead of noting these as
variants or making a patchwork text I have thought it best to print
the poem as given in Ai8,N, aF,S96, TCC, TCD. The six MSS.
represent three or perhaps two different sources if CF and Sg6
are derived from a common original — (i) Ai8,N, TC, .(2) Sg6, (3)
O'F. It is not likely, therefore, that their variants are simply editorial
emendations. In some respects their text seems to me to improve
on that of the printed editions.

S6g and 0'Fd\^er from the third group in reading, at 1. 5, 'I have
not done.' On the other hand, A18 and TC at 1. 4 read ' do them ',
and at 1. 15 'this sunne ' (probably a misreading of 'thie'). It
seems to me that the readings of 1. 2 ('is'), 1. 3 ('those sinnes'),
1. 7 ('by which I won'), and 1. 15 ('Sweare by thyself) are un-
doubtedly improvements, and in a text constructed on the principle
adopted by Mr. Bullen in his anthologies I should adopt them.
Some of the other readings, e.g. 1. 18 (' I have no more '), probably
belong to a first version of the poem and were altered by the poet
himself. O'F, which was prepared in 1632, strikes out ' have ' and
writes ' fear ' above. But in a seventeenth-century poem, circulating
in MS. and transcribed in commonplace-books, who can say which
emendations are due to the author, which to transcribers ? Moreover,
the line ' I have no more ', i.e. no more to ask, emphasizes the play
upon his own name which runs through the poem. ' I have no more '
is equivalent to ' I am Donne '.

Walton in citing this hymn adds : ' I have the rather mentioned
this Hymn for that he caused it to be set to a most grave and solemn
tune and to be often sung to the Organ by the Choristers of St. Pauls
Church, in his own hearing, especially at the Evening Service ; and
at his Customary Devotions in that place, did occasionally say to
a friend, The words of this Hymne have restored me to the same
thoughts of joy that possest my Soul in my sicknesse when I
composed it. And, O the power of Church-music ! that Harmony

252

Commentary,

added to it has raised the Affections of my heart, and quickened my
graces of zeal and gratitude ; and I observe, that I always return
from paying this publick duty of Prayer and Praise to God, with an
unexpressible tranquillity of mind, and a willingness to leave the world.'

Walton does not tell us who composed the music he refers to, but
the following setting has been preserved in Egerton MS. 2013. The
composer is John Hillton (d. 1657), organist to St. Margaret's Church,
AVestminster. See Grove's Dictionary of Music.

As given here it has been corrected by Mr. Barclay Squire :

p^^^^^::ai^:^fhf-^-^

Wilt thou for-give the finnes where I be-gunne, w<'h is my finnethougli

SiS

'\ *f ti J ' \\ rf

t

$

p-^Yt

^^^

it weare done be - fore, wilt thou for-give thofe finnes through \v'"h I

^^

^rTT^

-e-

m

±=t

m

m

t

ninne.

& doe them dill, though flill 1 doe de-plore

i

Sr-f — f

;^

^^g

3=^

ii^

2fe

when thou haft done, thou haft not done, for I have more.

i^

^^^

^

D

ivine roems.

253

2 Wilt thou forgive y' finne by w'^*' I won

Others to finne & made my finne their dore
Wilt thou forgive that finne w'^^ I did fhun

A yeare or two, but wallowed in a fcore
When thou haft done, thou haft not done
For I have more.

5 I have a finne of feare y* when I 'ave fpun
My laft thred 1 fhall perish one y^ ftiore
Sweare by thy felfe y* att my death thy fon
Shall ftiine as he fhines now & heartofore
And havinge done, thou haft done
I need noe more.

John: Hillton.

The music has been thus harmonized for four voices by Professor
C. San ford Terry :

J J J. /J J

^^mi

ss

^^m

i

^-i-U-

-LLU

ss

^

m

i

T=^=M

1
I

^^

W

r f 'p ■' i I

s^

^-w

i

:i

P 1

J

y

254

Commentary,

Verses
I &^ 2

^mPW^

Verse 3.

LDJ.

^1

as

-:|fef-

$

-#-«-#-

ru

T

^

Hf

=^r-

^

men.

3^^

Page 370, 11. 7-8. thai sinne ivhich I have wonne
Others to siim ? c^c.

In a powerful sermon on Matthew xxi. 44, Donne enumerates this
among the curses that will overwhelm the sinner : ' There shall fall
upon him those sinnes which he hath done after anothers dehortation,
and those, which others have done after his provocation.' Sermons

50- 35- 319-

ELEGIES UPON THE AUTHOR.

The first and third of these Elegies, those by King and Hyde, were
affixed, without any signature, to Deaths Duell, or A Consolation to
the Soule, against the dying Life, and living Death of the Body. . . .
By that late learned and Reverend Divine John Donne, D' in Divinity,
and Deane of S. Pauls, London. Being his last Sermon, and called by
his Maiesties houshold The Doctors owne Fvnerall Sermon.
London, Printed fry Thomas Harper, for Richard Redmer and Beniamin
Fisher, and are to be sold at the signe of the Talbot in Alders-gate
street. 1632. The book was entered in the Stationers' Register to
Beniamin Fisher and Richard Redmer on the 30th of September,
163 1, and was issued with a dedicatory letter by Redmer to his

Elegies upon the Author, 255

sister ' M'" Elizabeth Francis of Brumsted in Norff' and a note
' To the Reader ' signed ' R '. Now we know from his own statement
that King was Donne's executor and had been entrusted with his
sermons which at King's ' restless importunity ' Donne had prepared
for the press. (Letter, dated 1664, prefixed to Walton's Lives, 1670.)
The sermons and papers thus consigned to King were taken from
him later at the instance apparently of Donne's son. But the presence
of King's epitaph in this edition of Deaths Duell seems to show that
he was responsible for, or at any rate permitted, the issue of the
sermon by Redmer and Fisher. The reappearance of these Elegies
signed, and accompanied by a number of others, suggests in like
manner that King may have been the editor behind Harriot of the
Poems in 1633. This would help to account for the general excellence
of the text of that edition, for King, a poet himself as well as an
intimate friend, was better fitted to edit Donne's poems than the
gentle and pious Walton, who was less in sympathy with the side of
Donne which his poetry reveals.

Of Henry King (1591-1669) poet, 'florid preacher', canon of
Christ Church, dean of Rochester, and in 1641 Bishop of Chichester
it is unnecessary to say more here. A fresh edition of his poems by
Professor Saintsbury is in preparation and will show how worthy a
disciple he was of Donne as love-poet, eulogist, and religious poet.
Probably the finest of his poems is The Surrender.

It was to King also that Redmer was indebted for the frontispiece
to Deaths Duell, the picture of Donne in his shroud, reproduced in the
first volume. 'It was given ', Walton says, ' to his dearest friend and
Executor D' King, who caused him to be thus carved in one entire piece
of white Marble, as it now stands in the Cathedral Church of St. Pauls.'

The second of the Elegies in 1633 was apparently by the author of
the Religio Medici and must be his earliest published work, written
probably just after his return from the Continent. The lines were
withdrawn after the first edition.

The Edvv. Hyde responsible for the third Elegy, ' On the death of
Dr. Donne,' is said by Professor Norton to be Edward Hyde, D.D.
(1607-59), son of Sir Lawrence Hyde of Salisbury. Educated at
Westminster School and Cambridge he became a notable Royalist
divine ; had trouble with Parliament ; and wrote various sermons
and treatises (see D.N.B.). ' A Latin poem by Hyde is prefixed to
Dean Duport's translation of Job into Greek verse (1637) and he con-
tributed to the " Cambridge Poems " some verses in celebration of the
birth of Princess Elizabeth.'

It would be interesting to think that the author of the lines on
Donne was not the divine but his kinsman the subsequent Lord
Chancellor. There is this to be said for the hypothesis, that among
those who contribute to the collection of complimentary verses are
some of Clarendon's most intimate friends about this time, viz.
Thomas Carew, Sir Lucius Carie or Lord Falkland, and (but his elegy

256 Commentary,

appears first in 1635) Sidney Godolphin. The John Vaughan also,
whose MS. lines to Donne I have printed in the introduction ( Text and
Canon, v>r., p. l.xiv, note), is enrolled byClarendon among his intimates
ut this time. If his friends, legal and literary, were thus eulogizing
1 )onne, why should Hyde not have tried his hand too ? However,
we know of no other poetical effusions by the historian, and as
these verses were first affixed with King's to Deaths Duell it is most
probable that their author was a divine.

The author of the fourth elegy. Dr. C. B. of O., is Dr. Corbet,
Bishop of Oxford (1582- 1 635). Walton reprinted the poem in the
Lives (1670) as ' by Dr. Corbet ... on his Friend Dr. Donne'. We
have no particulars regarding this friendship, but they were both
' wits ' and their poems figure together in MS. collections. Ben Jonson
was an intimate of Corbet's, who was on familiar terms with all the
Jacobean wits and poets. For Corbet's life see D. N. B. His poems
are in Chalmers' collection.

The Hen. Valentine of the next Elegy matriculated at Christ's
College, Cambridge, in December, 1616, and proceeded B.A. in 1629,
M.A. 1624. He was incorporated at Oxford in 1628, where he took
the degree of D.D. in 1636. On the 8th of December, 1630, he was
appointed Rector of Deptford. He was either ejected under the
Commonwealth or died, for Mallory, his successor, was deprived in
1662. For this information I am indebted to the Biographical
Register of Christ's College, 1505- 1905, <s;'c., compiled by John Peile . .
Master of the College, 19 10. Of works by him the British Museum
Catalogue contains Foure Sea-Sermons preached at the amiual meeting
of the Trinitie Companie in the Parish Church of Deptford, London,
1635, and Private devotions, digested into six litanies . . . Se7.>en and
tivetitieth edition, London, 1 706. The last was first published in 165 r.

Izaak ^Valton's Elegie underwent a good deal of revision. Besides
the variants which I have noted, i6)j-6g add the following lines :

Which as a free-will-offring, I here give

Fame, and the world, and parting with it grieve,

I want abilities, fit to set forth

A monument great, as Donnes matchlesse worth.

In 1658 and 1670, when the Elegie was transferred to the enlarged
Life of Donne, it was again revised, and opens :

Our Donne is dead : and we may sighing say,
We had that man where language chose to stay
And shew her utmost power. I would not praise
That, and his great Wit, which in our vaine dayes
Makes others proud ; but as these serv'd to unlocke
That Cabinet, his mind, where such a stock
Of knowledge was repos'd, that I lament
Our just and generall cause of discontent.

Elegies upon the Author, 257

But the poem in its final form is included in the many reprints of
Walton's Lives, and it is unnecessary to note the numerous verbal
variations. The most interesting is in 11. 25-6.

Did his youth scatter Poetry, wherein
Lay Loves Philosophy ?

Professor Norton notes that ' the name of the author of this ' (the
seventh) ' Elegy is given as Carie or Gary in all the early editions,
by mistake for Carew '. But the spelling (common in the MSS.)
simply represents the way in which the name was pronounced.
Thomas Carew (1598 ?-i639 ?) was sewer-in- ordinary to King Charles
in 1633, and in February 163I his most elaborate work, the Coelum
Briiannicum, was performed at Whitehall, on Shrove Tuesday. It
was published immediately afterwards, 1634. His collected Poems
were issued in 1 640 and contained this Elegie. I note the following
variants from the text of 1640 as reproduced by Arthur Vincent
{Muses Library, 1899) :

3. dare we not trust 16)) : did we not trust 1640 ; 5. Churchman
16)^ : lecturer 1640 ; 8. thy Ashes i6j) : the ashes 1640 ; 9. no
voice, no tune? 16)): nor tune, nor voice? 1640; 17. our Will,
16)) : the will, 1640 ; 44. dust i6jj : dung 1640 ; rak'd i6jj : search'd
1640 ; 50. stubborne language 16)) : troublesome language 1640 ;
58. is purely thine 16)) : was only thine 1640 ; 59. thy smallest
worke i6jj : their smallest work 1640 ; 63. repeale i6jj : recall
2640; 65. Were banish'd /^jj : Was banish'd /6^o ; 66. o'th'Meta-
morphoses i6jj : i'th'Metamorphoses 1640 ;

68-9. Till verse refin'd by thee, in this last Age,
Turne ballad rime i6jj :

Till verse, refin'd by thee in this last age,
Turn ballad-rhyme 1640 ( Vincent) :

Surely ' in this last Age ' goes with ' Turne ballad rime ' ; 73. awfuU
solemne i6jj : solemn awful 1640 ; 74. faint Hnes i6jj : rude lines
1640; 81. maintaine i6jj : retain 1640; 88. our losse i6j)\ the
loss 1640 ; 89. an Elegie, 16}} : one Elegy, 1640 ;

91-2. Though every pen should share a distinct part.
Yet art thou Theme enough to tyre all Art ;

16^) : omit 1640.

Some of these differences are trifling, but in several instances (3, 8,
50* 59> 66, 91-2) the 1633 text is so much better that it seems
probable that the poem was printed in 1640 from an early,
unrevised version. In 87. ' the ' 16)}, 1640 should be ' thee '.

Sir Lucius Cary, second Viscount Falkland (16 10- 1643), was
a young man of twenty-one when Donne died, and succeeded his
father in the year in which this poem was published. He had been
educated at Trinity College, Dublin. ' His first years of reason ',

II «17.3 c

258 Comme7itary,

Wood says, ' were spent in poetry and polite learning, into the first of
which he made divers plausible sallies, which caused him therefore
to be admired by the poets of those times, particularly by Ben Jonson
... by Edm. Waller of Beaconsfield . . . and by Sir John Suckling,
who afterwards brought him into his poem called The Session of Poets
thus,

He was of late so gone with divinity,

That he had almost forgot his poetry,

Though to say the truth (and Apollo did know it)

He might have been both his priest and his poet.'

But Falkland is best known through his friendship with Clarendon,
whose account of him is classical : ' With these advantages ' (of birth
and fortune) 'he had one great disadvantage (which in the first entrance
into the world is attended with too much prejudice) in his person and
presence, which was in no degree attractive or promising. His stature
was low, and smaller than most men ; his motion not graceful ; and his
aspect so far from inviting, that it had somewhat in it of simplicity ;
and his voice the worst of the three, and so untuned, that instead of
reconciling, it offended the ear, so that nobody would have expected
music from that tongue ; and sure no man was less beholden to
nature for its recommendation into the world: but then no man sooner
or more disappointed this general and customary prejudice : that little
person and small stature was quickly found to contain a great heart,
a courage so keen, and a nature so fearless, that no composition of
the strongest limbs, and most harmonious and proportioned presence
and strength, ever more disposed any man to the greatest enterprise ;
it being his greatest weakness to be too solicitous for such adventures :
and that untuned voice and tongue easily discovered itself to be
supplied and governed by a mind and understanding so excellent that
the wit and weight of all he said carried another kind of lustre and
admiration in it, and even another kind of acceptation from the
persons present, than any ornament of delivery could reasonably
promise itself, or is usually attended with ; and his disposition and
nature was so gentle and obliging, so much delighted in courtesy,
kindness, and generosity, that all mankind could not but admire and
love him." The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon (Oxford, 1827)
i. 42-50. Coming from him, Falkland's poem is an interesting testi-
mony to the influence of Donne's poetry, presence, and character.

Jaspar Mayne (1604-72), author of The City Match, was a student
and graduate of Christ Church, Oxford, a poet, dramatist, and divine.
He wrote complimentary verses on the Earl of Pembroke, Charles I,
Queen Henrietta, Cartwright, and Ben Jonson — all, like those on
Donne, very bad. He was the translator of the Epigrams ascribed to
Donne and published with some of his Paradoxes^ Froblenies, Essays,
Characters in 165 1.

Arthur Wilson (1595-1652), historian and dramatist, author of The

E/egies up07i the Author, 259

Inconstant Lady and The Swisser, had in 1633 just completed a rather
belated course at Trinity College, Oxford, whither he had gone after
leaving the service of the third Earl of Essex. For Wilson's Li/e see
D.N.B. and Feuillerat : The Swisser . . . avec une Introduction et des
Notes, Paris, 1904.

The * Mr. R. B.' who wrote these lines is said by Mr. Gosse to be
the voluminous versifier Richard Brathwaite (1588-16 73), author of
A Strappado for the Dive II and other works, satirical and pious. He
is perhaps the most likely candidate for the initials, which are all we
have to go by. At the same time it is a little surprising that a poet
whose name was so well known should have concealed himself under
initials, the device generally of a young man venturing among more
experienced poets. If he had not been too young in 1633, I should
have ventured to suggest that the author was Ralph Brideoak, who
proceeded B.A. at Oxford 1634, and in 1638 contributed lines to
Jonsonus Virbius. He was afterwards chaplain to Speaker Lenthall,
and died Bishop of Chichester. In the lines on Jonson, Brideoak
describes the reception of Jonson's plays with something of the vivid-
ness with which the poet here describes the reception of Donne's
sermons. He also refers to Donne ;

Had learned Donne, Beaumont, and Randolph, all
Surviv'd thy fate, and sung thy funeral,
Their notes had been too low : take this from me
None but thyself could write a verse for thee.

This last line echoes Donne (p. 204, 1. 24). Most of Donne's eulo-
gists were young men.

Brathwaite's wife died in 1633, and, perhaps following Donne, he
for some years wrote Anniversaries upon his Panarete. W. C. Hazlitt
suggests Brome as the author of the lines on Donne, which is not
likely.

The Epitaph which follows R. B.'s poem is presumably by him also.

Endymion Porter (1587-1649) may have had a common interest
with Donne in the Spanish language and literature, for the former owed
his early success as an ambassador and courtier to his Spanish descent
and upbringing. He owes his reputation now mainly to his patronage
of art and poetry and to the songs of Herrick. For his life see D.N.B.
and E. B. de Fonblanque's Lives of the Lords Strangford, 1877.

Daniel Darnelly, the author of the long Latin elegy added to the
collection in 1635, was, according to Foster {Alumni Oxonienses, vol.
i. 1891), the son of a Londoner, and matriculated at Oxford on
Nov. 14, 1623, at the age of nineteen. He proceeded B.A. in 1627,
M.A. i6|§, and was incorporated at Cambridge in 1634. He is
described in Musgrave's Obituary as of Trinity Hall. In 1632 he
was appointed rector of Curry Mallet, Somersetshire, and of Walden
St. Paul, Herts., 1634. This would bring him into closer touch with
London, and probably explains his writing an elegy for the forth-

11 m-3 S 2

2 6o Commentafy,

coming second edition of Donne's Poems. He was rector of Tever-
sham, Cambridgeshire, from 1635 to 1645, when his living was
sequestered. He died on the 23rd of November, 1659.

The heading of this poem shows that it was written at the request
of some one, probably King. In 1. 35 Nilusque ininus strepuisset the
reference is to the great cataract. See Macrobius, Somn. Scip. ii. 4.

Of Sidney Godolphin (1610-43) Clarendon says, ' There was never
so great a mind and spirit contained in so little room ; so large an
understanding and so unrestrained a fancy in so very small a body :
so that the Lord Falkland used to say merrily, that he was pleased to
be found in his company, where he was the properer man ; and it
may be the very remarkableness of his little person made the sharj)-
ness of his wit, and the composed quickness of his judgement and
understanding the more notable.' The Life of Edward Earl of
Clarendon, i, 51-2. He was killed at Chagford in the civil war.
Professor Saintsbury has not included this poem in his collection of
Godolphin's poems, Caroline Poets, ii. pp. 227-61.

John Chudleigh's name appears in MSS. occasionally at the end of
different poems. In the second collection in the Trinity College,
Dublin MS. G. 2. 21 {TCD Second Collection) he is credited with
the authorship of Donne's lyric A Feaver, but two other poems are
also ascribed to him. He is the author of another in Addl. MS.
33998. f. 62 b. Who he was, I am not sure, but probably he may be
identified with John Chudleigh described in 1620 {Visitation of
Devonshire) as son and heir of George Chudley of Asheriston, or
Ashton, in the county of Devon, and then aged fourteen. On the
ist of June, 1621, aged 15, he matriculated at Wadham College,
Oxford. He proceeded B.A. 1623-4, being described as 'equ. aur.
fil.' for his father, a member of Parliament, had been created a baronet
on the ist of August, 1622. He took his M.A. in 1626, and was
incorporated at Cambridge in 1629 (Foster, Alumni Oxonienses, i.
276). Just before taking his M.A. he was elected to represent East
Looe. He died, however, before May 10, 1634, which is difficult to
reconcile with his being the author of these verses in 1635, unless
they were written some time before.

APPENDIX A.

LATIN POEMS AND TRANSLATIONS.

Who the Dr. Andrews referred to was we do not know. Dr. Grosart
identifies him with the Andrews whose poems are transcribed in H49,
but this is purely conjectural.

The lines which I have taken out and made into a separate
Epigram are printed in the old editions as the third and fourth lines
of the letter. As Professor Norton pointed out, they have no
connexion with it. They seem to be addressed to some one who had

Latin Poems and T^^aitslations. 261

travelled to Paris from Frankfort, on an Embassy to the King of
France, and had returned. ' The Maine passed to the Seine, into
the house of the Victor, and with your return comes to Frankfort.'

If Grosart's conjecture be correct, the author of the epigram may
be the Francis Andrews whose poems appear along with Donne's
in H4()y for among these are some political poems in somewhat the
same vein :

Though Ister have put down the Rhene

And from his channel thrust him quite ;
Though Prage again repayre her losses,
And Idol-berge doth set up crosses,
Yet we a change shall shortly feele

When English smiths work Spanish Steele ;
Then Tage a nymph shall send to Thames,

The Eagle then shall be in flames,
Then Rhene shall reigne, and Boeme burne.
And Neccar shall to Nectar turne.

And of Henri IV :

Henrie the greate, great both in peace and war
Whom none could teach or imitate aright,
Findes peace above, from which he here was far ;
A victor without insolence or spite,
A Prince that reigned, without a Favorite.
Of course, Andrews may be only the transcriber of these poems.

Page 398. To Mr. George Herbert, &c.

Walton has described the incident of the seals : ' Not long before
his death he caused to be drawn the figure of the Body of Christ,
extended upon an Anchor, like those which Painters draw when they
would present us with the picture of Christ crucified on the Cross ;
his varying no otherwise than to affix him not to a Cross, but to an
Anchor (the Emblem of hope) ; this he caused to be drawn in little,
and then many of those figures thus drawn to be ingraven very small
in Helitropian Stones, and set in gold, and of these he sent to many
of his dearest friends, to be used as Seals or Rings, and kept as
memorials of him, and of his affection to them.'

These seals have been figured and described in The Gentleman's
Magazine^ vol. Ixxvii, p. 313 (1807); and Notes and Queries, 2nd
Series, viii. 170, 216; 6th Series, x. 426, 473.

Herbert's epistle to Donne is given in 16^0. In Walton's Life the
first two and a half lines of Donne's Latin poem and the whole of the
English one are given, and so with Herbert's reply. As printed in
16^0 Herbert's reply is apparently interrupted by the insertion between
the eighth and ninth lines of two disconnected stanzas, which may or
may not be by Herbert. The first of these (' When Love ' &c.) with
some variants is given in the 1658 edition of the Life of Donne ; but

s 3

262 Commentary,

in the collected Lives (1670, 1675) it is withdrawn. The second
I have not found elsewhere.

Although the Crosse could not Christ here detain,
Though nail'd unto't, but he ascends again,
Nor yet thy eloquence here keep him still,
But onely while thou speak'st ; This Anchor will.
Nor canst thou be content, unlesse thou to
, This certain Anchor adde a Seal, and so
The Water, and the Earth both unto thee
Doe owe the symbole of their certainty.
Let the world reel, we and all ours stand sure,
This holy Cable's of all storms secure.

AA' hen Love being weary made an end
Of kinde Expressions to his friend.
He writ ; when's hand could write no more,
He gave the Seale, and so left o're.

How sweet a friend was he, who being griev'd
His letters were broke rudely up, believ'd
' Twas more secure in great Loves Common-weal
(Where nothing should be broke) to adde a Seal.

2 Though i6jo : When Walton 10 of 16^0 : from Walton

In the Life of Herbert Walton refers again to the seals and adds,
* At Mr. Herbert's death these verses were found wrapped up with
that seal which was by the Doctor given to him.
When my dear Friend could write no more,
He gave this Seal, and, so gave ore.

When winds and waves rise highest, I am sure.
This Anchor keeps my faith, that, me secure.'

Page 400, 1. 22. < Wishes) I have ventured to change 'Works'
to ' Wishes '. It corrects the metre and corresponds to the Latin.

Page 400. Translated out of Gazaeus, &c.
The original runs as follows :

Tibi quod optas et quod opto, dent Divi,

(Sol optimorum in optimis Amicorum)

Vt anima semper laeta nesciat curas,

Vt vita semper viva nesciat canos,

Vt dextra semper larga nesciat sordes,

Vt bursa semper plena nesciat rugas,

Vt lingua semper vera nesciat lapsum,

Vt verba semper blanda nesciant rixas,

Vt facta semper aequa nesciant fucum,

Vt fama semper pura nesciat probrum, j

Vt vota semper alta nesciant terras, ^

Tibi quod optas et quod opto, dent Divi.

Latin Poems and Translations. 263

I have taken it from :

PIA

H I L A R I A

VARIAQVE

CARMINA

ANGELINI GAZ/lil
e Societate lesUy Airebatis.

[An ornament in original.]

DILINGAE

Formis Academicis

Cum auctoritate Superiorum.

Apud Vdalricum Rem

CIO. IDC. XXIII.

The folios of this edition do not correspond to those of that which
Donne seems to have used.

APPENDIX B.
POEMS WHICH HAVE BEEN ATTRIBUTED TO DONNE.

For a full discussion of the authorship of these poems see Text
and Canon of Donne's Poems, pp. cxxix et seq.

Page 401. To S' Nicholas Sntyth.

Chambers points out that a Nicholas Smyth has a set of verses in
Cory at s Crudities, 161 1.

In the Visitation of the County of Devon, 1620, a long genealogy
is given, the closing portion of which shows who this Nicholas Smith
or Smyth of Exeter (1. 15) and his father were :

Joan, d. of James Walkers Sir Geo. Smith of Exeter,

who was descended of the
Mathewes of Wales who
were descended of Flewellyns
and Herberts.

Knt, ob. 1 61 9.

i i \ 1

Divers children Elizabeth, &c. Sir Nicholas Smith ^.Dorothea, d. of James, &c.
d. without issue. of Larkbeare in Sir Raphe

com. Devon, Kt. Horsey de com.
Dorsett.

Seven children of Sir Nicholas are given, including another Nicholas
(aet. 14), and the whole is signed ' Nich Smith '.

This is doubtless Roe's friend. With Roe as a Falstaff he had

264 Commentary,

probably ' heard the chimes at midnight ' in London before he settled 'i
down to raise a family in Devonshire. ^\

I. 7. s/eep House, dr'c. Ovid xi ; Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, Canto }
xiv ; Spenser, Faerie Queene, i. i. *

Page 402, 1. 26. Epps. 'This afternoon a servingman of the
Earl of Northumberland fought with swaggering Eps, and ran him
through the ear.' Man?iinghams Diary, 8th April, 1603 (Camden
Club, p. 165). This is the only certain reference to Epps I have been
able to find, but Grosart declares he is the soldier described in
Dekker's Knights Conjuring as behaving with great courage at the
siege of Ostend (160 1-4), where he was killed. I can find no name
in Dekker's work.

II. 2 7-3 1 . As printed in 166^ these lines are not very intelligible,
and neither Grosart nor Chambers has corrected them. As given in
the MSS. (e.g. TCD) they are a little clearer :

For his Body and State
The Physick and Counsel (which came too late)
'Gainst whores and dice, hee nowe on mee bestowes
Most superficially : hee speakes of those,
(I found by him) least soundly whoe most knows :

The purpose of bracketing ' which came too late ' is obviously to
keep it from being taken with ' 'Gainst whores and dice ' — the very
mistake that i66() has fallen into and Grosart and Chambers have
preserved. The drawback to this use of the bracket is that it
disguises, at least to modern readers, that 'which came too late'
must be taken with ' For his Body and State '. I have therefore
dropped it and placed a comma after ' late '. The meaning I take to
be as follows : ' The physic and counsel against whores and dice,
which came too late for his own body and estate, he now bestows on
me in a superficial fashion ; for I found by him that of whores and
dice those speak least soundly who know most from personal ex-
perience.' A rather shrewd remark. There are some spheres where
experience does not teach, but corrupt.

1. 40. in that or those : ' that ' the Duello, ' those ' the laws of
the Duello. There is not much to choose between ' these ' and ' those '.

11.41-3. Thoj(gh sober ; but so ?iever fought. I know

What made his Valour, undubb'd, Windmill go.

Within a Pint at most : X

The MSS. improve both the metre and the sense of the first of
these lines, which in 1669 and Chambers runs :

Though sober ; but nere fought. I know . . .

It is when he is sober that he never fights, though he may quarrel.
Roe knows exactly how much drink it would take to make this
undubb'd Don Quixote charge a windmill, or like a windmill. But
the poem is too early for an actual reference to Don Quixote.

l\

Poems attributed to Donne. 265

Page 403, 11. 67-8. atid he is braver ti07v
Than his captain.

By ' bra\"er ' the poet means, not more courageous, but more
splendidly attired, more ' braw '.

Page 404,1.88. Abraham France — who wrote English hexameters.
His chief works are The Countess of Pembrokes Ivy Church (1591) and
The Countess of Pembrokes Emmanuel (1591). He was alive in 1633.

Page 405, 1. 113. So they their weakness hide, and greatness show.
Grosart refused the reading ' weakness ', which he found in his
favourite MS. 6", and Chambers ignored it. It has, however, the
support of B, OF, and L']4 (which is strong in Roe's poetry), and
seems to me to give the right edge to the sarcasm. ' By giving to
flatterers what they owe to worth, Kings and Lords think to hide
their weakness of character, and to display the greatness of their
wealth and station.' They make a double revelation of their weakness
in their credulity and their love of display.

1. 128. Cuff. Henry Cuff (1563-1601), secretary to Essex and
an abettor of the conspiracy.

1. 131. that Scot. It is incredible that Donne wrote these lines.
He found some of his best friends among the Scotch — Hay, Sir
Robert Ker, Essex, and Hamilton, to say nothing of the King.

Page 406. Satvre.

Page 407, 11. 32-3. A time to come, cr^^. I have adopted Grosart's
punctuation and think his interpretation of ' beg ' must be the right one
— 'beg thee as an idiot or natural.' The O.E.D. gives : ' t5a. To beg
a person : to petition the Court of Wards (established by Henry VIII
and suppressed under Charles 11) for the custody of a minor, an
heiress, or an idiot, as feudal superior or as having interest in the
matter : hence also fig. To beg (any one) for a fool or idiot : to take
him for, set him down as, Obs.' Among other examples is, ' He proved
a wiser man by much than he that begged him. Harington, Met.
AJax 46.' What the satirist says is, ' The time will come when she
will beg to have wardship of thee as an idiot. If you continue she
will take you for one now.'

1. 35. Besides, her{s). My reading combines the variants. I think
' here ' must be wrong.

Page 407. An Elegie.

Page 408, 1. 5. Else, if you 7vere, and just, in equitie 6^^. This is
the punctuation of H}i), and is obviously right,' in equitie ' going with
what follows. He has denied the existence or, at least, the influence
of the Fates, and now continues, ' For if you existed or had power,
and if you were just, then, according to all equity I should have
vanquish'd her as you did me.' Grosart and the Grolier Club
editor follow i6j^-y4, and read :

Else, if you were, and just in equity, &c.

2 66 Commentary,

Chambers accepts the attempt of i66g to amend this, and prints :

True if you were, and just in equity, &:c.
But 'just in equity' is not a phrase to which any meaning can be
attached.

Page 412. An Elegie.

Grosart prints this very incorrectly. He does not even reproduce
correctly the MS. S, which he professes to follow. Chambers follows
Grosart, adopting some of the variants of the Haslewood-Kings-
borough MS. reported by Grosart. They both have the strange
reading 'cut in bands ' in 1. 11, which as a fact is not even in 5, from
which Grosart professes to derive it. The reading of all the MSS.,
' but in his handes,' makes quite good sense. The Scot wants matter,
except in his hands, i.e. dirt, which is 'matter out of place'. The
reading, ' writ in his hands ', which Chambers reports after Grosart, is
probably a mistake of the latter's. Indeed his own note suggests that
the reading of H-K is ' but in's hands '.

Page 417. To the Countesse of Huntington.

It looks as if some lines of this poem had been lost. The first
sentence has no subject unless 'That' in the second line be a
demonstrative — a very awkward construction.

If written by Donne this poem must have been composed about
the same time as The Storme and The Calme. He is writing apparently
from the New World, from the Azores. But it is as impossible to
recover the circumstances in which the poem was written as to be
sure who wrote it.

Page 422. Elegie.

11. 5-6. denounce . . . pronotince. The reading of the MSS. seems
to me plainly the correct one. ' In others, terror, anguish and grief
announce the approach of death. Her courage, ease and joy in
dying pronounce the happiness of her state.' The reading of the
printed texts is due to the error by which 16)^ and i6^q took
' comming ' as an epithet to ' terror ' as ' happy ' is to ' state '.
Some MSS. read ' terrors ' and ' joyes '.

1. 22. Their spoyles, &"€. I have adopted the MS. reading here,
though with some hesitation, because (i) it is the more difficult
reading : ' Soules to thy cbnquest beare ' seems more like a conject-
ural emendation than the other reading, (2) The construction of the
line in the printed texts is harsh — one does not bear anything ' to
a conquest ', (3) the meaning suits the context better. It is not
souls that are spoken of, but bodies. The bodies of the wicked
become the spoil of death, trophies of his victory over Adam ; not so
those of the good, which shall rise again. See i Cor. xv. 54-5.

Page 424. Psalme 137.

This Psalm is found in a MS. collection of metrical psalms
(Rawlinson Poetical 161), in the Bodleian Library, transcribed
by a certain R. Crane. The list of authors is Fr. Da v., Jos. Be.,

I

Poems attributed to Domie, 267

Rich. Cripps, Chr. Dav., Ih. Carry. That Davison is the author of
this particular Psalm is strongly suggested by the poetical Induction
which in style and verse resembles the psalm. The induction is
signed ' Fr. Dav.' The first verse runs :

Come Urania, heavenly Muse,

and infuse
Sacred flame to my invention ;
Sing so loud that Angells may

heare thy lay,
Lending to thy note attention.

Page 429. Song.

Souks joy, now I am gone, c^c. George Herbert, in the Temple,
gives A Parodie of this poem, opening :

Soul's joy, when thou art gone.
And I alone,
Which cannot be,
Because Thou dost abide with me,
And I depend on Thee.

The parody does not extend beyond the first verse.

It was one of the aims of Herbert to turn the Muse from profane
love verses to sacred purposes. Mr. Chambers points to another
reference to this poem in some very bad verses by Sir Kenelm Digby
in Bright's edition of Digb/s Poems (p. 8), The Roxhirghe Club.

APPENDIX C.

I. POEMS FROM ADDITIONAL MS. 25707. Page 433-
The authorship of the four poems here printed from A2^ has been
discussed in the Text and Canon, <2'c. There is not much reason to
doubt that the first is what it professes to be. The order of the
names in the heading, and the character of the verses both suggest
that the second and corresponding verses are Donne's contribution.
There is a characteristic touch in each one. I cannot find anything
eminently characteristic in any of the rest of the group. The third
poem refers to the poetical controversy on Love and Reason carried
on with much spirit between the Earl of Pembroke and Sir Benjamin
Rudyerd in their Poems as printed by the younger Donne in i66o.
A much finer fragment of the debate, beginning —

And why should Love a footbo/s place despise ?
is attributed to Donne by the Bridgewater MS. and the MS. in the
library of the Marquess of Crewe. It is part of a poem by Rudyerd in
the debate in the volume referred to.

II. POEMS FROM THE BURLEY MS. Page 437.

Of the poems here printed from the Burley-on-the-Hill MS., none
I think is Donne's. The chief interest of the collection is that it

2 68 Comme?itary.

comes from a commonplace-book of Sir Henry Wotton, and there-
fore presumably represents the work of the group of wits to which
Donne, Bacon, and Wotton belonged. I have found only one of h^

them in other MSS., viz. that which I have called Life a Flay. This
occurs in quite a number of MSS. in the British Museum, and has
been published in Hannah's Courtly Poets. It is generally ascribed
to Sir Walter Raleigh ; and Harleian MS. 733 entitles it Verses
made by Sir Walter Raleigh made the same morning he was executed.
I have printed it because with the first, and another in the Reliquiae
Wottonianae, it illustrates Wotton's taste for this comparison of life to
a stage, a comparison probably derived from an epigram in the Greek
Anthology, which may be the source of Shakespeare's famous lines in
As You Like It. The epitaph by Jonson on Hemmings, Shakespeare's
fellow-actor and executor, is interesting. A similar epitaph on Burbage
is found in Sloane MS. 1786 :

An Epitaph on Mr Richard Burbage the Player.

This life's a play groaned out by natures Arte
Where every man hath his alloted parte.
This man hath now as many men can tell
Ended his part, and he hath done it well.
The Play now ended, think his grave to bee
The retiring house of his sad Tragedie.
Where to give his fame this, be not afraid :
Here lies the best Tragedian ever plaid.

III. POEMS FROxM VARIOUS MSS. Page 443.

Of the miscellaneous poems here collected there is very little to be
said. The first eight or nine come from the O'Flaherty MS. {0'F\
which professes to be a collection of Donne's poems, and may,
Mr. Warwick Bond thinks, have been made by the younger Donne,
as it contains a poem by him. It is careless enough to be his work.
They illustrate well the kind of poem attributed to Donne in the
seventeenth century, some on the ground of their wit, others because
of their subject-matter. Donne had written some improper poems as
a young man ; it was tempting therefore to assign any wandering poem
of this kind to the famous Dean of St. Paul's. The first poem, The
Annuntiation, has nothing to do with Donne's poem 2%e Annun-
tiation and Passion, but has been attached to it in a manner which is
common enough in the MSS. The poem Love's Exchange is obvi-
ously an imitation of Donne's Lovers infinitenesse (p. 17). A Paradoxe
of a Painted Face was attributed to Donne because he had written
a prose Paradox entitled That Women ought to paint. The poem was
not published till 1660, In Harleian MS. it is said to be 'By my
Lo : of Cant, follower Mr. Baker '. The lines on Black Hayre and
Eyes (p. 460) are found in fifteen or more different MSB. in the
British Museum alone, and were printed in Parnassus Biceps (1656)

Poems from various MSS, 269

and Pembroke and Ruddier's Poems (1660). Two of the MSS.
attribute the poem to Ben Jonson, but others assign it to VV. P. or
Walton Poole. Mr. Chambers points out that a Walton Poole has
verses in Annalia Dubrensia (1636), and also cites from Foster's
Alumni Oxonienses : 'Walton Poole of AVilts arm. matr. 9. i. 1580
at Trinity Coll. aged 15.' These may be the same person. The
signature A. P, or VV. P. at the foot of several pages suggests that the
Stowe MS. 961 of Donne's poems had belonged to some member of
this family. The fragment of an Elegy at p. 462 occurs only in /*,
where it forms part of an Heroicall Epistle with which it has obviously
nothing to do. 1 have thought it worih preserving because of its
intense though mannered style. The line, ' Fortune now do thy
worst' recalls Elegie XII, 1. 67. The closing poem, ' Farewell ye guilded
follies,' comes from Walton's Complete A?igler (1658), where it is thus
introduced : * I will requite you with a very good copy of verses : it is a
farewell to the vanities of the world, and some say written by Dr, D.
But let they be written by whom they will, he that writ them had a
brave soul, and must needs be possest with happy thoughts of their
composure.' In the third edition (1661) the words were changed to
' And some say written by Sir Harry Wotton, who I told you was an
excellent Angler.' In one MS. they are attributed to Henry King,
Donne's friend and literary executor, and in two others they are
assigned to Sir Kenelm Digby, as by whom they are printed in Wits
Interpreter (1655). Mr. Chambers points out that ' The closing lines
of King's The Farewell zxt curiously similar to those of this poem.'
He quotes :

My woeful Monument shall be a cell.
The murmur of the purling brook my knell ;
My lasting Epitaph the Rock shall groan ;
Thus when sad lovers ask the weeping stone.
What wretched thing does in that centre lie.
The hollow echo will reply, 'twas I.

I cannot understand why Mr. Chambers, to whom I am indebted
for most of this information, was content to print so inadequate
a text when Walton was in his hand. Two of his lines completely
puzzled me :

Welcome pure thoughts ! welcome, ye careless groans !
These are my guests, this is that courtage tones.

' Groans 'are generally the sign of care, not of its absence. However,
I find that Ashmole MS. 38, in the Bodleian, and some others read :

Welcome pure thoughts ! welcome ye careless groves !

These are my guests, this is that court age loves.
This explains the mystery. But Mr. Chambers followed Grosart ;
and Grosart was inclined to prefer the version of a bad MS. which
he had found to a good printed version.

270 Commentar^y,

SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES.

Pages 5, 6. The poems of Ben Jonson are here printed just as
they stand in the 1650, 1654, 1669 editions of Donne's Poems.
A comparison with the 16 16 edition of Jonson's Works shows some
errors. The poem To John Dotiue (p. 5) is xxiii of the Epigravimes.
The sixth line runs

I

And which no affection praise enough can give !

The absurd 'no'n' of 1650 seems to have arisen from the printing
' no'affection ' of the 1640 edition of Jonson's Works. The 1719
editor of Donne's Poems corrected this mistake. A more serious
mistake occurs in the ninth line, which in the Works (16 16) runs :

All which I meant to praise, and, yet I would. f

The error * mean ' comes from the 1640 edition of the Works of Ben
/onson, which prints ' meane '.

To Lucy, c^c, is xciii of the Epigrammes. The fourteenth line
runs :

Be of the best ; and 'mongst those, best are you.

The comma makes the sense clearer. In 1. 3, 1616 reads ' looke,'
with comma.

To John Bonne (p. 6) is xcvi. There are no errors ; but ' punees '
is in 1616 more correctly spelt ' pui'nees '.

Pages 7, 175, 369. I am indebted for the excellent copies of the
engravings here reproduced to the kind services of Mr. Laurence
Binyon. The portraits form a striking supplement to the poems
along with which they are placed. The first is the young man of
the Songs and Sonets, the Elegies and the Satyres, the counterpart of
Biron and Benedick and the audacious and witty young men of
Shakespeare's Comedies. ' Neither was it possible,' says Hacket in
his Scrinia Reserata: a Memorial of John Williams . . . Archbishop
of York (1693), 'that a vulgar soul should dwell in such promising
features.'

The engraving by Lombart is an even more lifelike portrait of the
author of the Letters, Epicedes, Anniversaries and earlier Divine
Poems, learned and witty, worldly and pious, melancholy yet ever
and again 'kindling squibs about himself and flying into sportive-
ness', writing at one time the serious Pseudo- Martyr, at another
the outrageous Ignatius his Conclave, and again the strangely-mooded,
self-revealing Biathanatos: *mee thinks I have the keyes of my
prison in mine owne hand, and no remedy presents it selfe so soone
to my heart, as mine own sword.'

I

Supplemefitary Notes. 271

After describing the circumstances attending the execution of the
last portrait of Donne, Walton adds in the 1675 edition of the Lives
(the passage is not in the earlier editions of the Life of Domie) :
'And now, having brought him through the many labyrinths and
perplexities of a various life : even to the gates of death and the
grave; my desire is, he may rest till I have told my Reader, that
I have seen many Pictures of him, in several habits, and at several
ages, and in several postures : And I now mention this, because, I have
seen one Picture of him, drawn by a curious hand at his age of eighteen;
with his sword and what other adornments might then suit with the
present fashions of youth, and the giddy gayeties of that age : and
his Motto then was,

How much shall I be chang'd,
Before I am chang'd.

And, if that young, and his now dying Picture, were at this time set
together, every beholder might say, Lord! How viuch is Dr. Donne
already c/iang'd, before he is chang'd !' The change written in the
portrait is the change from the poet of the Songs and Sonets to the
poet of the Holy Sonnets and last Hymns.

The design of this last picture and of the marble monument made
from it is not very clear. He was painted, Walton says, standing on
the figure of the urn. But the painter brought with him also
'a board of the just height of his body'. What was this for?
Walton does not explain. But Mr. Hamo Thornycroft has pointed
out that the folds of the drapery show the statue was modelled from
a recumbent figure. Can it be that Walton's account confuses two
things ? The incident of the picture is not in the 1640 Life, but was
added in 1 658. How could Donne, a dying man, stand on the urn, with
his winding-sheet knotted 'at his head and feet' ? Is it not probable
That he was painted lying in his winding-sheet on the board referred
to ; but that the monument, as designed by himself, and executed by
Nicholas Stone, was intended to represent him rising at the Last Day
from the urn, habited as he had lain down — a symbolic rendering
of the faith expressed in the closing words of the inscription

Hie licet in Occiduo Cinere

Aspicit Eum

Cuius nomen est Oriens.

Page 37, I. 14. The textual note should have indicated that in
most or all of the MSS. cited the whole line runs :

(Thou lovest Truth) but an Angell at first sight.

This is probably the original form of the line, corrected later to
avoid the clashing of the ' but 's.

Page 96, 1. 6, note. The 1^212 cited here is Rawlinson Poetical
MS. 2 1 2, a miscellaneous collection of seventeenth-century prose and

272 Commenta7y.

poetry (e.g. Da.\'\es' Ep'grams. See II. p. loi). I had cited it once
or twice in my first draft. The present in.stance escaped my eye.
It helps to show how general the reading ' tyde ' was.

Page 115, 1. 54. .c^m?;'' o/i it fashions. The correct reading is
probably ' growing on it fashions ", which has the support of both
JC^ and i6^o-6g where ' its ' is a mere error. I had made my text
before JC came into my hand. To ' grow on ' for ' to increase ' is
an Elizabethan idiom : ' And this quarrel grew on so far,' North's
Plutarch, Life of Corio/anus, ad fin. See also O.E.D.

I should like in closing to express my indebtedness throughout to
the Oxford English Dictionary, an invaluable help and safeguard to
the editor of an English text, and also to Franz's admirable Shake-
speare-Grammatik (1909), which should be translated.

Page 133, 1. 58. To what is said in the note on the taking of
yellow amber as a drug add : ' Divers men may walke by the Sea
side, and the same beanies of the Sunne giving light to them all,
one gathereth by the benefit of that light pebles, or speckled shells,
for curious vanitie, and another gathers precious Pearle, or medicinal!
Ambar, by the same light.' Sermons 80. 36. 326.

Pages 156-7. Seeke tnie religion, e^r. All this passage savours
a little of Montaigne : * Tout cela, c'est un signe tres-evident que
nous ne recevons nostre religion qu'a nostre fagon at par nos mains,
et non autrement que comme les autres religions se regoyvent. Nous
nous sommes rencontrez au pais ou elle estoit en usage ; ou nous
regardons son anciennete ou I'authorite des hommes qui I'ont main-
tenue ; ou creignons les menaces qu'ell' attache aux mescreans, ou
suyvons ses promesses. Ces considerations la doivent estre employees
a nostre creance, mais comme subsidiaires : ce sont liaisons humaines.
Une autre region, d'autres tesmoings, pareilles promesses et menasses
nous pourroyent imprimer par mesme voye une croyance contraire.
Nous sommes chrestiens a mesme titre que nous sommes ou peri-
gordins ou alemans.' Essais {I'^^o), II. 12. Apologie de Raimond
Sebond.

Page 220, 1. 46. Compare : ' One of the most convenient Hiero-
glyphicks of God, is a Circle ; and a Circle is endlesse ; whom God
loves, hee loves to the end . . . His hailestones and his thunderbolts,
and his showres of blood (emblemes and instruments of his Judge-
ments) fall downe in a direct line, and affect or strike some one
person, or place : His Sun, and Moone, and Starres (Emblemes and
Instruments of his Blessings) move circularly, and communicate
themselves to all. His Church is his chariot ; in that he moves
more gloriously, then in the Sun ; as much more, as his begotten
Son exceeds his created Sun, and his Son of glory, and of his right
hand, the Sun of the firmament ; and this Church, his chariot, moves

SuppUfneiitajy Notes. 273

in that communicable motion, circularly ; It began in the East, it

came to us, and is passing now, shining out now, in the farthest West.'

Sermons 80. 2. 13-4.

1. 47. Religious tipes, is the reading of 16}}. The comma has

been accidentally dropped. There is no comma in i6}^-6<)^ which

print ' types '.

Page 241, 11. 343-4. As a covipassionate Turcoyse, Csr-'c. Compare :
And therefore Cynthia, as a turquoise bought,
Or stol'n, or found, is virtueless, and nought,
It must be freely given by a friend.
Whose love and bounty doth such virtue lend,
As makes it to compassionate, and tell
By looking pale, the wearer is not well.

Sir Francis Kynaston. To Cynthia. Saintsbury,
Caroline Poets, ii. i6t.

Page 251, 11. 9-18. The source of this simile is probably Lucretius,
De Reruni Nattira, III. 642-56.

Falciferos memorant currus abscidere membra

Saepe ita de subito permixta caede calentis,

Ut tremere in terra videatur ab artubus id quod

Decidit abscisum, cum mens tamen atque hominis vis

Mobilitate mali non quit sentire dolorem ;

Et semel in pugnae studio quod dedita mens est,

Corpore reliquo pugnam caedesque petessit,

Nee tenet amissam laevam cum tegmine saepe

Inter equos abstraxe rotas falcesque rapaces.

Nee cecidisse alius dextram, cum scandit et instat.

Inde alius conatur adempto surgere crure.

Cum digitos agitat propter moribundus humi pes.

Et caput abscisum calido viventeque trunco

Servat humi voltum vitalem oculosque patentis,

Donee reliquias animai reddidit omnes.

Page 259, 11. 275-6. so that there is

[Por aught thou know'st) piercing of substances.

' Piercing of substances,' the actual penetration of one substance
by another, was the Stoic as opposed to the Aristotelian doctrine
of mixture of substance («puo-is), what is now called chemical
combination. The Peripatetics held that, while the qualities of the
two bodies combined to produce a new quality, the substances
remained in juxtaposition. Plotinus devotes the seventh book of
the Enneades to the subject ; and one of the arguments of the Stoics
which he cites resembles Donne's problem : ' Sweat comes out of the
human body without dividing it and without the body being pierced
with holes.' The pores were apparently unknown. See Bouillet's
Enneades de Fiotin, I. 243 f. and 488-9, for references.

2 74 Commentary.

Page 368. Hymne to God my God, in my sicknesse

Professor Moore S mith has at the last moment reminded me of a
fact, the significance of which should have been discussed in the note
on the Divine Poems, that a copy of this poem found (Gosse, Life <s^c.
ii, 279) among the papers of Sir Julius Caesar bears the statement
that the verses were written in Donne's ' great sickness in December
1623'. Professor Moore Smith is of opinion that Sir Julius Caesar
may have been right and Walton mistaken, and there is a good deal
to be said for this view. ' It seems ', he says, * more likely that
Walton should have attributed the poem wrongly to Donne's last
illness, than that the MS. copy should antedate it by seven years.'
In 1640 Walton simply referred it to his deathbed ; the precise date
was given in 1658. Moreover the date 1623 seems to Professor Moore
Smith confirmed by a letter to Sir Robert Ker (later Lord Ancrum)
in 1624 (Gosse, Life <s^c. ii. 191), in which Donne writes, ' If a flat map
be but pasted upon a round globe the farthest east and the farthest
west meet and are all one.'

On the other hand, Walton's final date is very precise, and was
probably given to him by King. If the poem was written at the
same time as that *to God the Father', why did it not pass into wider
circulation? Stowe MS. 961 is the only collection in which I have
found it. The use of the simile in the letter to Ker is not so
conclusive as it seems. In that same letter Donne says, ' Sir, I took
up this paper to write a letter ; but my imagination was full of a sermon
before, for I write but a few hours before I am to preach.' Now
I have in my note cited this simile from an undated sermon on one
of the Penitentiary Psalms. This, not the poem, may have been the
occasion of its repetition in this letter. Donne is very prone to repeat
a favourite figure-inundation, the king's stamped face &c. It is quite
likely that the poem was the last, not the first, occasion on which he
used the flat map. Note that the other chief figure in the poem, the
straits which lead to the Pacific Sea, was used in a sermon (see
note) dated February 12, 1629.

The figure of the flat map is not used, as one might expect, in the
section of the Devotions headed The Patient takes his bed, but the last
line of the poem is recalled by some words there : ' and therefore am
I cast downe, that I might not be cast atvayJ

Walton's dates are often inaccurate, but here the balance of the
evidence seems to me in his favour. As Mr. Gosse says, Sir Julius
Caesar may have confounded this hymn with ' AVilt thou forgive '.
In re-reading the Devotions with Professor Moore Smith's statement
in view I have come on two other points of interest. Donne's views on
the immortality of the soul (see II. pp. 160-2) are very clearly stated :
' That light, which is the very emanation of the light of God . . . only
that bends not to this Center, to Ruine ; that which was not made of
Nothing, is not thretned with this annihilation. All other things are ;
even Angels, even our soules ; they move upon the same Poles, they

(

Supplementary Notes. 275

bend to the same Center; and if they were not made immortall by
preservation, their Nature could not keep them from sinking to this
tenter, Annihilation'' (pp. 216-17).

The difficult hne in the sonnet Resurrection (p. 321, 1. 8) is perhaps
illuminated by pp. 206-8, where Donne speaks of 'thy first bookc, the
booke of life\ 'thy second book, the booke of Nature,' and closes a
further list with ' to those, the booke zvithseven seals, which only the Lamb
which was slain, was found ivorthy to open ; which, I hope, it shal not
disagree with the measure of thy blessed spirit, to interpret, the
promulgation of their pardon, and righteousnes, who are washed in the
blood of the Lamb '. This is possibly the ' little booke ' of the sonnet,
perhaps changed by Donne to ' life-book ' to simplify the reference.
But the two arc not the same.

ADDENDUM

Vol. I, p. 368, 1. 6. Whilftmy Phyfitions by their love are growne
ofmographers ... Sir Julius Caesar's MS. (Addl. MS. 34324) has
^' Loer^ scil. Lore. This is probably the true reading

ERRATUM

P. 274, 1 2&. ^/??r figure-inundation r^o^ figure —inundation

INDEX OF FIRST LINES.

(VOL. II.)

A learned Bishop of this Land ....

Amongst the Poets Dacus numbered is

An ill year of a Goodyere us bereft .

As in tymes past the rusticke shepheards sceant

Esteemed knight take triumph over death

Goe catch a star that's falling from the sky

Henrie the greate, greate both in peace and war
How olten hath my pen (mine hearts Solicitor)

Loe her's a man worthy indeede to travell

No want of duty did my mind possess

Stay, view this Stone, and if thou beest not such

This Lifes a play groaned out by natures Arte .
Thou send'st me prose and rimes, I send for those
Though Ister have put down the Rhene .
'Tis not a coate of gray or Shepheardes Life
Titus the brave and valorous young gallant

Whoso termes love a fire, may like a poet
Wolton the country and the country swaine

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