—which is quite certainly right. Only three manuscripts have the, to my mind, most probably correct reading in Satyre I, l. 58, p. 147:

and only two, Q and the Dyce MS. which is its duplicate, the tempting and, I think, correct reading in Satyre IV, l. 38, p. 160:

Lastly, there are poems for which 1633 is not available. The authenticity of these will be discussed later. Their text is generally very corrupt, especially of those added in 1650 and 1669. 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 poems (e.g. The Flea, A Lecture upon the Shadow, The Good-Morrow, Elegie XI. The Bracelet) more than one distinct version was in circulation. Of the Satyres, 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 1633 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:

(1) To restore the text of 1633 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 1633 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 1635, 1649, 1650, and 1669.

(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 displaced or dropped, or the editor had misunderstood the poet; (b) when even though defensible the punctuation was misleading, 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 Punctuation. 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 1633, 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 lifetime, 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 1633, or can see what the pointing and use of capitals would have been had Donne himself supervised 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 the Anniversaries (printed in Donne's lifetime) 1633 shows a fondness for the semicolon,⁴⁵ not only within the sentence, [pg 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, where we should use semicolons, within the sentence, dividing co-ordinate clauses from one another. On the other hand this use of semicolons leads to occasional ambiguity when one which separates two sentences comes into close contact with another within the sentence. For example, in Satyre III, ll. 69-72, how should an editor, modernizing the punctuation, deal with the semicolons in ll. 70 and 71? Should he print thus?—

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

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

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 sparingly, amended the pointing where it seemed to me to disguise the subtler connexions of Donne's thought or to disturb the rhetoric and rhythm of his verse paragraphs. In doing so I have occasionally taken a hint from the manuscripts, especially D and W, 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 punctuation, 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 1633 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 I 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 commands to pause, and they frequently irritate and mislead.

¹ Englands Parnassus; or The Choysest Flowers of our Moderne Poets: with their Poetical Comparisons. Descriptions of Bewties, Personages, Castles, Pallaces, Mountaines, Groves, Seas, Springs, Rivers etc. Whereunto are annexed Other Various Discourses both Pleasaunt and Profitable. Imprinted at London, For N. L. C. B. And T. H. 1600.

² A Poetical Rhapsody Containing, Diuerse Sonnets, Odes, Elegies, Madrigalls, and other Poesies, both in Rime and Measured Verse. Never yet published. &c. 1602. The work was republished in 1608, 1611, 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 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 1614. 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 Amours 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.

³ e.g. Among Drummond of Hawthornden's miscellaneous papers; in Harleian MS. 3991; in a manuscript in Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

⁴ 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.'

⁵ '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 consists 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.

⁶ One or two copies seem to have got into circulation without the 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. Geoffrey Keynes, of St. Bartholomew's Hospital, who is preparing a detailed bibliography of Donne's works.

⁷ 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 in verse 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 O'Flaherty, show similar groupings; and in 1633, though there is no consistent sequence, the poems fall into irregularly recurring groups. The order of the poems within each of these groups in 1633 is generally retained in 1635. In the 1633 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 1650. 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 Songs and Sonets, Epithalamions, Elegies, and Divine 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 modifications: (1) In the Songs and Sonets, The Flea 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 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 Crudities after the Satyres; (4) two new groups have been inserted, 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. with six holy Sonnets has been placed before the Divine Poems. (6) The Hymne to the Saints, and to Marquesse Hamylton has been transferred to the Epicedes. (7) Some poems have been assigned to an Appendix as doubtful.

⁸ 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 1635 a letter in Latin verse, De libro cum mutuaretur (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.

⁹ 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 &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:

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.

¹⁰ 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.

¹¹ 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.

¹² 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 of 1669. 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, 1819. 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), the Grolier Club edition (1895), and Chambers's edition (1896), a full account will be given later.

¹³ 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 Korenbloemen (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, Atomi, Influentiae, 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, Sermones de Vita Propria, in which he recalls the impression that Donne had left upon his mind:

'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.

¹⁴ That is, many poems of his early years.

¹⁵ 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 Heeren ende 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.

¹⁶ This is not the only manuscript in which this poem appears among the Elegies following immediately on that entitled The Picture, 'Here take my picture, though I bid farewell.' It is thus placed in 1633. The adhesion of two poems in a number of otherwise distinct manuscripts may mean, I think, that they were written about the same time.

¹⁷ 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 Pseudomartyr, 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 1617 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 Epithalamion. To this the Divine Poems have been added.

¹⁸ With the grouping of 1635 I have adopted generally its order within the groups, but the reader will see quite easily what is the order of the Songs in 1633 and in D, H49, Lec, if he will turn to the Contents and, beginning at The Message (p. 43), will follow down to A Valediction: forbidding mourning (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 to A Valediction: forbidding mourning, were brought to the beginning, the order of the Songs and Sonets in 1635-69 would be the same as in 1633.

The editor of 1633 began a process, which was carried on in 1635, 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, H49, Lec remains unnamed in 1633.

¹⁹ There is one exception to this which I had overlooked. In D, H49, Lec, The Undertaking (p. 10) comes later, following The Extasie.

²⁰ When in 1614 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.

²¹ 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.'

²² In citing this collection I use TC for the two groups TCC, TCD.

²³ Additional lines to the Annuntiation 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', Song ('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', 'Greate Lord of Love how busy still thou art', 'To sue for all thy Love and thy whole hart'.

²⁴ 'Believe not him whom love hath made so wise', On the death of Mris Boulstred ('Stay view this stone'), Against Absence ('Absence, heare thou my protestation'), 'Thou send'st me prose and rhyme', Tempore Hen: 3 ('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, Ô Queene of Queenes').

²⁵ 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 lasse 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'), The 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 protestation'), '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. Bulstreed, '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. 462.

²⁶ The exceptions are one poor epigram:

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

²⁷ 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.

²⁸ 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 daies measurd, here I rest'; a poem headed Bash, beginning 'I 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 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 Sicknesse ('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.'

²⁹ 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 septima ('Deare Tom: Tell her'), To Mr. Ben: Jonson 9^o Novembris 1603 ('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 Ô 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').

³⁰ 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'.

³¹ Note the readings I. 58 'The Infanta of London', IV. 38 'He speaks no language'.

³² 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. and J. D. alternis 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.

³³ 'The Heavens rejoice in motion', 'Tell her if she to hired servants show', 'True love finds wit', 'Deare 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.

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.

³⁴ I refer to it occasionally as TCD (II), and (once it has been made plain that this is the collection referred to throughout) as simply TCD.

³⁵ Since Mr. Pearsall-Smith transcribed these poems, which I subsequently collated, the house at Burley-on-the-Hill has been burned down and the manuscript volume has perished.

³⁶ The Complete Poems of John Donne, D.D., Dean of St. Paul's. 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, 1872-3. Dr. Grosart's favourite manuscript was the Stephens (S). When that failed him he used Addl. MS. 18643 (A18), 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 Farmer-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 (H51); 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 the early and later printed editions'. He describes 1639, 1649, 1650, and 1654 as identical with one another, and declares that the younger Donne is responsible only for 1669, which appeared after his death.

³⁷ The Poems of John Donne From The Text of The Edition of 1633 Revised By James 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 1633, 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, I may refer to the textual notes on The Legacie (p. 20), The Dreame (p. 37), A nocturnall upon S. Lucies day (p. 44). But 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 I 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 interpretation 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 N 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.

³⁸ Poems of John Donne Edited By E. K. Chambers. With An Introduction By George Saintsbury. London and New York. 1896. Of the editions Mr. Chambers says: 'Nor can it be said that any one edition always gives the best text; even for a single poem, sometimes one, sometimes another is to be preferred, though, as a rule, the edition of 1633 is the most reliable, and the readings of 1669 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 1633 or 1633-35 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 to get back to the original text of which the stops as well as the words are a part.]

³⁹ It is very unlikely that Donne had in his possession when he died manuscript copies of his early poems. (1) Walton makes no mention of them when enumerating the works which Donne left behind in manuscript, 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 friends: '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.

⁴⁰ Contributions To The Textual Criticism of The Divina Commedia, &c. By the Rev. Edward Moore, D.D., &c. Cambridge, 1889. 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—(1) 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 1633 errors have crept in. The obsolete words 'lation' (p. 94, l. 47), 'crosse' (p. 43, l. 14) 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 (a) the consistency of the reading with sentiments expressed by the author elsewhere. I have used the Sermons 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 often lurks behind Donne's wit, ignorance of which has led to corruption of the text. See The Dreame, p. 37, ll. 7, 16; To Sr Henry Wotton, p. 180, ll. 17-18. (c) The relation of a reading to historical fact. In the letter To Sr Henry Wotton, p. 187, the editors, forgetting the facts, have confused Cadiz with Calais, and the Azores with St. Michael's Mount.

⁴¹ It is worth while to compare the kind of mistakes in which a manuscript 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, 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 emendation. The kind of errors he made were easily detected when 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.

⁴² Take a few instances where the latest editor, very naturally and explicably, securing at places a reading more obvious and euphonious, has departed from 1633 and followed 1635 or 1669. I shall take them somewhat at random and include a few that may seem still open to discussion. In The Undertaking (p. 10, l. 18), for 'Vertue attir'd in woman see', 1633, Mr. Chambers reads, with 1635-69, 'Vertue in woman see.' So:

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 1633 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.

⁴³ e.g. 'their nothing' p. 31, l. 53; 'reclaim'd' p. 56, l. 25; 'sport' p. 56, l. 27.]

⁴⁴ The 1633 text of these letters, which is generally that of A18, 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, l. 58, where 1633 and A18, N, TC read 'not naturally free', while 1635-69 and O'F read 'borne naturally free', at first sight an easier and more natural text, and adopted by both Chambers and Grosart. But consideration of the passage, and of what Donne says elsewhere, shows that the 1633 reading is certainly right.

⁴⁵ The 1650 printer delighted in colons, which he generally substituted for semicolons indiscriminately.

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 1633, one, Basse's An Epitaph upon Shakespeare, was withdrawn at once; another, the metrical Psalme 137, has been discredited and Chambers drops it.¹ Of those which were added in 1635, one To Ben Ionson. 6 Ian. 1603, has been dropped by Grosart, the Grolier Club edition, and Chambers on the strength of a statement made to Drummond by Ben Jonson.² 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. Ionson. 9 Novembris, 1603. and To Sir Tho. Roe. 1603. They are inserted together in 1635, 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 1635, 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 D, H49, Lec, and the manuscript group 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 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.³

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 137, both already mentioned—for the genuineness of which there is not strong evidence, internal and external. But these two poems are the only ones not contained in D, H49, Lec or in A18, N, TC. In D, H49, Lec, on the other hand, there are no poems which are not, on the same evidence, genuine. There are, however, some which are not in 1633, seven in all. But of these, five are the Elegies which, we have seen above, the editor of 1633 was prohibited from printing. The others are the Lecture upon the Shadow (why omitted in 1633 I cannot say) and the lines 'My fortune and my choice'. There are poems in 1633 which are not in D, H49, Lec. These, with the exception of poems previously printed, as the Anniversaries and the Elegie on Prince Henry, are all in A18, 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 TCD), and two of these, with some poems by Overbury and Beaumont, are not part of the Donne collection 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 N and TCD. Neither is in D, H49, Lec, or 1633. 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 [pg 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 1633, 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 1633 (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 1635, or later editions, which are also in D, H49, Lec and A18, N, TC.⁴ These last (to which I prefix the date of first publication) are—

• 1635. A Lecture upon the Shadow.
• 1635. Elegie XI. The Bracelet.
• 1635. Elegie XVI. On his Mistris.
• 1669. Elegie XVIII. Love's Progresse.
• 1669. Elegie XIX. Going to Bed.
• 1802.⁵ Elegie XX. Love's Warr.

[pg cxxviii]

(These are the five Elegies suppressed in 1633—at such long intervals did they find their way into print.)

• 1635. On himselfe.

We may add to these, without lengthy investigation, the four Holy Sonnets added in 1635:—

• I. 'Thou hast made me.'
• III. 'O might those sighs and tears.'
• V. 'I am a little world.'
• VIII. 'If faithfull soules.'

For these (though in none of the three collections) we have, besides internal probability, the evidence of W, clearly an unexceptionable manuscript witness. Walton, too, vouches for the authenticity of the Hymne to God my God, in my sicknesse, which indeed no one but Donne could have written.This leaves for investigation, of poems inserted in 1635, 1649, 1650, or 1669, 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 1635). 'Come, Fates; I feare you not.'
• 7. Elegie XII (XIIII in 1635). His parting from her.
  'Since she must goe, and I must mourne.'
• 8. Elegie XIII (XV in 1635). Julia.
  'Harke newes, Ô envy.'
• 9. Elegie XIV (XVI in 1635). A Tale of a Citizen and his Wife. 'I sing no harme.'
• 10. Elegie XVII. Variety. 'The heavens rejoice.'
• 11. Satyre (VI in 1635, VII in 1669).
  'Men write that love and reason disagree.'
• 12. Satyre (VI in 1669).
  '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.'
• 15. To Ben Iohnson, 6. Jan. 1603.
  'The state and mens affaires.'
• 16. To Ben Iohnson, 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, Ô 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 which⁶ was printed in Le Prince d'Amour, 1660, and reprinted by Simeon, 1856, and Grosart, 1872), as the work not of Donne but of Sir John Roe. The reasons which have 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 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.' (Drummond's Conversations with 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, 1603 (p. 410), is in the same way found in all the manuscripts (except two, which are one, H40 and RP31) 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 L74 a much later hand has added 'J. D.'

Of the other poems, the first—the poem which was in 1669 printed as Donne's seventh Satyre, was dropped in 1719 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. 412) and 'Shall I goe force an Elegie?' (p. 410) are actually initialled in any of the manuscripts 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 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 (H40, RP31) 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 RP31 give in immediate sequence 'The State and mens affairs,' 'If great men wrong me,' 'True Love finds witt,' 'Shall I goe force an elegie,' 'Come Fates; I fear you not.' L74, 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 A10, 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 common origin.⁷ And as one is ascribed to Roe on indisputable [pg cxxxii] (and) 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, Italian 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 Satyres. 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 Vatum 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.

[pg cxxxiii]

It is a quaint picture we thus get of the famous ambassador'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.⁸ 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.⁹ William Roe was the third son of the first Lord Mayor of the name Roe.¹⁰ He had two sons, John and William, the latter of whom is probably the person addressed in Jonson's Epigrammes, cxxviii. John was born, according to a statement in Morant's History of Essex (1768), 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) maie 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.¹¹ [pg cxxxiv] 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.¹² 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.'¹³

Such in brief outline 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 IOHN ROE.

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 20lb., 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. 1 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,

is ascribed to Donne only in 1635-69, and is there inaccurately [pg cxxxvi] 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. 777, which Mr. Chambers justly calls 'a very good authority'.¹⁴ The latter, however, believes the poem to be Donne's because the central idea—the inseparableness of souls—is his, and so is the contemptuous tone of

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

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 Farewell to love, the second in the list of poems added in 1635, is found only in O'F and S96. There is therefore 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 1635 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, His parting from her, is so fine a poem that it [pg 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,¹⁵ and in this sincerer note, the absence of witty paradox, it differs from poems like The Bracelet and The Perfume and resembles the fine elegy called His Picture and two other pieces that stand somewhat apart from the general tenor of the Elegies, namely, the famous elegy On his Mistris, in which he dissuades her from travelling with him as a page:

and that rather enigmatical poem The Expostulation, which found its way into Jonson's Underwoods:

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 manuscripts, 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: Wryothlesse.' Who is intended by this I do not know. The ascriptions 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, Julia, 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 [pg cxxxviii] 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 1610, 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 perhaps 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 wrote 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, 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.¹⁶ The reasons which led me to doubt Donne's authorship are these:

(1) The poem was not included in the 1633 edition, nor is it [pg cxxxix] found in either of the groups D, H49, Lec and A18, N, TCC, TCD. It was added in 1635 with four other spurious poems, the dialogue ascribed to Donne and Wotton 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 Ashton (or Aston) to the Countesse of Huntingtone, and 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 Tichbourne. Editors have occasionally taken these too seriously. Drayton's Heroicall 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:

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, 1615, when Donne was on the eve of taking Orders, and was approaching his noble patronesses for help in clearing himself of debt. But Mr. Chambers points to the closing reference to 'a Christning at Peckam', and dates the 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 1615 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. 77) seems to be almost a continuation of another (Letters, 1651, p. 26; Gosse, Life, 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. 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 compatible with so late a date as 1615), '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 1615 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 metaphysical 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, ll. 21-36, or the next paragraph, ll. 37-76? One could imagine the Earl of Pembroke, 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 (1) the peculiar use of 'young', e.g. l. 84 'youngest flatteries', l. 13 'younger formes'. With which compare in the Letter to Wotton, here added, at p. 188:

(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, l. 65.

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. ll. 1 to 16, Elegie IV. ll. 13 to 26, Elegie V. l. 5 to the end, Elegie VIII. ll. 1 to 34. Excellent examples are also the letter To the Countesse of Salisbury and the Hymn to the Saints and the Marquesse Hamylton. 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. ll. 1 to 10, ll. 11 to 16, and [pg cxliii] ll. 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 Boulstred (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.

and another, entitled Death, beginning

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 D, H49, Lec. 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, H40, O'F, P, RP31. Of these H40 and RP31 are really one, and in them the poem is not ascribed to Donne. In two others, O'F and 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 hyperboles. 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 H40, viz. 'By C. L. of B.' This indicated no one whom I knew; but in RP31 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. 67) he speaks of some verses written to himself: '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 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 attributes it to 'F. B.', i.e. Francis Beaumont. It is right, on the other hand, to point out that Donne opens one of the Holy Sonnets with the exclamation used here:

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 1635 and in B, O'F, S, S96. 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. MS. 7553, f. 41, which were first published by T. Park in Heliconia, 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 Anniversarie:

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 1635. Against its authenticity are the following considerations: (1) It is not at all in the style of Donne's other specifically religious poems. The 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 appears, B, Cy, H40, RP31, O'F, P, S, the best, RP31, assigns it, not to Donne, but to 'Sir Edward Herbert', i.e. Lord Herbert of Cherbury.¹⁷ 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 forthcoming I have let it stand, because (1) 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 1610. 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):

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 Countess 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 considers, I think justly, that the 'wit' of the opening lines,

[pg cxlvii]

is above Davies' level, and indeed the whole poem is. The lines To Mr. Tilman 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.

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 1649 the lines Upon Mr. Thomas Coryats Crudities 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 1650 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 A10, 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 XIX, which are Donne's, as we have seen, and the Satyre 'Sleep next Society', which is [pg cxlviii] not Donne's, the edition of 1669 prefixed to the song Breake of Day a fresh stanza:

It appears in the same position in S96, but is given as a separate poem in A25, 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 Parts: apt for Viols and Voices. Newly composed by Orlando Gibbons. Here it begins

In the same year it was printed in A Pilgrimes Solace. Wherein is contained Musicall Harmonie of 3, 4 and 5 parts, to be sung and plaid with the Lute and Viols. By John Dowland. The stanza begins

Mr. Chambers conjectures that the affixing of Dowland's 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 Academy of Complements, Wherein Ladies, Gentlewomen, Schollers, and Strangers may accomodate their Courtly practice with gentile Ceremonies, Complemental amorous high expressions, and Formes of speaking or writing 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:

It was probably some such combination as this which suggested to the editor of 1669 to prefix the stanza to Donne's poem. The poem in The Academy of Compliments was repeated in Wits Interpreter, the English Parnassus, a sure guide to those Admirable Accomplishments that compleat our English Gentry in the most acceptable Qualifications of Discourse or Writing (1655). But the first stanza is given again in this collection as a separate poem.

The translation of the Psalme 137, which was inserted in 1633 and never withdrawn (as the Epitaph on Shakespeare was) is pretty certainly not by Donne. The only manuscript which ascribes it to him is A25 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, unsigned 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 'Eureka' 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 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 A25. I have added some more in my Appendix C, because they are interesting ?d?sp?ta 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 W, the Westmoreland MS. now in the possession 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 Life 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 1633 and in all the best manuscript collections. In their arrangement I have followed W in preference to 1633, which is based on A18, 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 name was yearly growing a more popular hostel for wandering, unclaimed poems.¹⁸ It was not printed in any edition of his poems from 1633 to 1719. It is not found in either of the most trustworthy manuscript collections, D, H49, Lec, or A18, N, TC. It is found in B, Cy, L74, O'F, P, S96, but none of these can be counted an authority. In 1711 it was for the first time ascribed to Donne in The 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, HN, it is transcribed by William Drummond of Hawthornden from what he describes as a collection of poems 'belonging to John Don' (not 'by Donne'), and, with another poem, is initialled 'J. H.' That other poem called

His Melancholy.

Love is a foolish melancholy, &c.,

is by a Manchester manuscript (Farmer-Chetham MS., ed. Grosart, Chetham Society Publications, lxxxix, xc) assigned to 'Mr. Hoskins', and in another manuscript (A10) 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 Soules Joy, but here as there (though there is more feeling in Absence, the closing line has a very Donne-like note of sudden anguish, 'and so miss her') the tone is airier, the prosody more tripping. The stressed syllables are less weighted emotionally and vocally. Compare

or

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

There are more of Hoskins' poems extant, but the manuscript 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 (A25), 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. A25 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 Elizabethan secretary's hand, and seems to me identical with the writing in which the same poems are copied in C, the Cambridge 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^r H: G: and J. D. alternis vicibus, is copied by D, and the same hand adds immediately An Elegie on the Death of my never enough Lamented 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 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 Epithalamion of the Princess Mariage, by S^r H. G., and a little earlier the Good Friday poem by Donne is headed Mr J. Dun goeing from Sir H. G. on good friday sent him back this Meditacon on the waye. 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 not Pilgrims to thy body come,' in a fifth hand, is signed J. D., but P assigns it to F. B., and it is more in Beaumont's style. Poems by and on Beaumont occupy a considerable space in A25. 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 Hazlitt's Handbook, &c., 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.

¹ 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 A25, 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.

² All three editors have also dropped the song 'Deare 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 Sacrament.

³ 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.

⁴ To these must of course be added poems already published in Donne's name. See II. lvi.

⁵ In F. G. Waldron's A Collection of Miscellaneous Poetry. 1802.

⁶ Chambers includes it in his Appendix A, Doubtful Poems, 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.

⁷ In O'F and S, where they also occur, they are more dispersed; but these manuscripts have, like 1635, adopted a classification of the poems they contain which involves their distribution as songs, elegies, letters and satires. A10 is the most significant witness. This manuscript contains very few poems by Donne. Why should it select just this suspicious group?

⁸ Among the marriage licences granted by the Bishop of London in 1601 (Harleian Society Publications) 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. decd (i.e. deceas'd) about 9 years since,' &c.

⁹ See the genealogies given in the Harleian Society Publications, vol. xiii, 1878, from the Visitation of Essex 1612 (pp. 282-3) and the Visitation of Essex 1634 (p. 479).

¹⁰ 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 Elizabeth, who married William Garret of Dorney, co. Bucks. The son of the latter couple was Donne's intimate friend George Gerrard or Garrard.

¹¹ Row, John, of Essex. arm. matric. 14 Oct., 1597, aged 16. (Joseph Foster, Alumni 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. 2, 1597. There can be no doubt, I think, that this is our Roe. 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.'

¹² Hist. MSS. Com.: Buccleugh MSS. (Montague House), vol. i, pp. 56, 58. The letters are dated May 13, Nov. 7.

¹³ Calendar of State Papers. Ireland, 1606-8, p. 538. I owe this and the last reference to Mr. Murray L. R. Beavan, University Assistant in History, Aberdeen University.

¹⁴ Other poems by Pembroke are found in the manuscript collections of Donne's poems. A scholarly edition of 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.

¹⁵ It is one of the worst printed in 1635 and 1669 (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,

all the three modern editions are content still to read,

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

¹⁶ In forming this Appendix it was not my intention to remove these poems dogmatically from under the aegis 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.

¹⁷ 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.

¹⁸ Absence is printed, again unsigned, in Wit Restored in severall Select Poems not formerly published. (1658.)