Pages 75-8. Of the epigrams sixteen are given in all the editions, 1633-69. Of these, thirteen are in A18, N, TC, none in D, H49, Lec. Of the remaining three, two are in W, one in HN, both good authorities. I have added three of interest from W, of which one is in HN, and all three are in O'F. W 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 HN and 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 1633 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 Ovid's 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 O'F in Latin. Compare James's letter to Salisbury on the Dutch demands for assistance against Spain;—'Should I ruin myself for maintaining 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 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 and
Gentlemen. Very pleasant either to be read or songe, &c.,
1607.
Page 76. Sir John Wingefield. In that late Island. Mr. Gosse has inadvertently printed 'base' for 'late'. The 'Lady' island of O'F 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 with 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, l. 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 wall 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, l. 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 the class which Donne satirizes with most of anger and feeling, 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. Laing, 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 (1610), 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 1588 usque ad Martium anni praesentis 1594 gestarum, 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 Donne (1856-7), whence it is included by Chambers in his Appendix A. It is given the title 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.
l. 3. Like Nebuchadnezar. Compare: 'I am no great Nebuchadnezzar, sir; I have not much skill in grass.' Shakespeare, All's Well, IV. v.
