Pages 5, 6. The poems of Ben Jonson are here printed just as they stand in the 1650, 1654, 1669 editions of Donne's Poems. A comparison with the 1616 edition of Jonson's Works shows some errors. The poem To John Donne (p. 5) is xxiii of the Epigrammes. The sixth line runs

The absurd 'no'n' of 1650 seems to have arisen from the printing 'no'affection' of the 1640 edition of Jonson's Works. The 1719 editor of Donne's Poems corrected this mistake. A more serious mistake occurs in the ninth line, which in the Works (1616) runs:

The error 'mean' comes from the 1640 edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, which prints 'meane'.

To Lucy, &c., is xciii of the Epigrammes. The fourteenth line runs:

The comma makes the sense clearer. In l. 3, 1616 reads 'looke,' with comma.

To John Donne (p. 6) is xcvi. There are no errors; but 'punees' is in 1616 more correctly spelt 'pui'nees'.

Pages 7, 175, 369. I am indebted for the excellent copies of the engravings here reproduced to the kind services of Mr. Laurence Binyon. The portraits form a striking supplement to the poems along with which they are placed. The first is the young man of the Songs and Sonets, the Elegies and the Satyres, the counterpart of Biron and Benedick and the audacious and witty young men of Shakespeare's Comedies. 'Neither was it possible,' says Hacket in his Scrinia Reserata: a Memorial of John Williams ... Archbishop of York (1693), 'that a vulgar soul should dwell in such promising features.'

The engraving by Lombart is an even more lifelike portrait of the author of the Letters, Epicedes, Anniversaries and earlier Divine Poems, learned and witty, worldly and pious, melancholy yet ever and again 'kindling squibs about himself and flying into sportiveness', writing at one time the serious Pseudo-Martyr, at another the outrageous Ignatius his Conclave, and again the strangely-mooded, self-revealing Biathanatos: 'mee thinks I have the keyes of my prison in mine owne hand, and no remedy presents it selfe so soone to my heart, as mine own sword.'

After describing the circumstances attending the execution of the last portrait of Donne, Walton adds in the 1675 edition of the Lives (the passage is not in the earlier editions of the Life of Donne): 'And now, having brought him through the many labyrinths and perplexities of a various life: even to the gates of death and the grave; my desire is, he may rest till I have told my Reader, that I have seen many Pictures of him, in several habits, and at several ages, and in several postures: And I now mention this, because, I have seen one Picture of him, drawn by a curious hand at his age of eighteen; with his sword and what other adornments might then suit with the present fashions of youth, and the giddy gayeties of that age: and his Motto then was,

And, if that young, and his now dying Picture, were at this time set together, every beholder might say, Lord! How much is Dr. Donne already chang'd, before he is chang'd!' The change written in the portrait is the change from the poet of the Songs and Sonets to the poet of the Holy Sonnets and last Hymns.

The design of this last picture and of the marble monument made from it is not very clear. He was painted, Walton says, standing on the figure of the urn. But the painter brought with him also 'a board of the just height of his body'. What was this for? Walton does not explain. But Mr. Hamo Thornycroft has pointed out that the folds of the drapery show the statue was modelled from a recumbent figure. Can it be that Walton's account confuses two things? The incident of the picture is not in the 1640 Life, but was added in 1658. How could Donne, a dying man, stand on the urn, with his winding-sheet knotted 'at his head and feet'? Is it not probable that he was painted lying in his winding-sheet on the board referred to; but that the monument, as designed by himself, and executed by Nicholas Stone, was intended to represent him rising at the Last Day from the urn, habited as he had lain down—a symbolic rendering of the faith expressed in the closing words of the inscription

Page 37, l. 14. The textual note should have indicated that in most or all of the MSS. cited the whole line runs:

This is probably the original form of the line, corrected later to avoid the clashing of the 'but's.

Page 96, l. 6, note. The R212 cited here is Rawlinson Poetical MS. 212, a miscellaneous collection of seventeenth-century prose and poetry (e.g. Davies' Epigrams. See II. p. 101). I had cited it once or twice in my first draft. The present instance escaped my eye. It helps to show how general the reading 'tyde' was.

Page 115, l. 54. goeing on it fashions. The correct reading is probably 'growing on it fashions', which has the support of both JC, and 1650-69 where 'its' is a mere error. I had made my text before JC came into my hand. To 'grow on' for 'to increase' is an Elizabethan idiom: 'And this quarrel grew on so far,' North's Plutarch, Life of Coriolanus, ad fin. See also O.E.D.

I should like in closing to express my indebtedness throughout to the Oxford English Dictionary, an invaluable help and safeguard to the editor of an English text, and also to Franz's admirable Shakespeare-Grammatik (1909), which should be translated.

Page 133, l. 58. To what is said in the note on the taking of yellow amber as a drug add: 'Divers men may walke by the Sea side, and the same beames of the Sunne giving light to them all, one gathereth by the benefit of that light pebles, or speckled shells, for curious vanitie, and another gathers precious Pearle, or medicinall Ambar, by the same light.' Sermons 80. 36. 326.

Pages 156-7. Seeke true religion, &c. All this passage savours a little of Montaigne: 'Tout cela, c'est un signe tres-evident que nous ne recevons nostre religion qu'À nostre faÇon et par nos mains, et non autrement que comme les autres religions se reÇoyvent. Nous nous sommes rencontrez au paÏs oÙ elle estoit en usage; ou nous regardons son anciennetÉ ou l'authoritÉ des hommes qui l'ont maintenue; ou creignons les menaces qu'ell' attache aux mescreans, ou suyvons ses promesses. Ces considerations lÀ doivent estre employÉes À nostre creance, mais comme subsidiaires: ce sont liaisons humaines. Une autre region, d'autres tesmoings, pareilles promesses et menasses nous pourroyent imprimer par mesme voye une croyance contraire. Nous sommes chrestiens À mesme titre que nous sommes ou perigordins ou alemans.' Essais (1580), II. 12. Apologie de Raimond Sebond.

Page 220, l. 46. Compare: 'One of the most convenient Hieroglyphicks of God, is a Circle; and a Circle is endlesse; whom God loves, hee loves to the end ... His hailestones and his thunderbolts, and his showres of blood (emblemes and instruments of his Judgements) fall downe in a direct line, and affect or strike some one person, or place: His Sun, and Moone, and Starres (Emblemes and Instruments of his Blessings) move circularly, and communicate themselves to all. His Church is his chariot; in that he moves more gloriously, then in the Sun; as much more, as his begotten Son exceeds his created Sun, and his Son of glory, and of his right hand, the Sun of the firmament; and this Church, his chariot, moves in that communicable motion, circularly; It began in the East, it came to us, and is passing now, shining out now, in the farthest West.' Sermons 80. 2. 13-4.

l. 47. Religious tipes, is the reading of 1633. The comma has been accidentally dropped. There is no comma in 1635-69, which print 'types'.

Page 241, ll. 343-4. As a compassionate Turcoyse, &c. Compare:

Page 251, ll. 9-18. The source of this simile is probably Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, III. 642-56.

'Piercing of substances,' the actual penetration of one substance by another, was the Stoic as opposed to the Aristotelian doctrine of mixture of substance (???s??), what is now called chemical combination. The Peripatetics held that, while the qualities of the two bodies combined to produce a new quality, the substances remained in juxtaposition. Plotinus devotes the seventh book of the Enneades to the subject; and one of the arguments of the Stoics which he cites resembles Donne's problem: 'Sweat comes out of the human body without dividing it and without the body being pierced with holes.' The pores were apparently unknown. See Bouillet's Enneades de Plotin, I. 243 f. and 488-9, for references.

Page 368. Hymne To God my God, in my sicknesse.

Professor Moore Smith has at the last moment reminded me of a fact, the significance of which should have been discussed in the note on the Divine Poems, that a copy of this poem found (Gosse, Life &c. ii. 279) among the papers of Sir Julius Caesar bears the statement that the verses were written in Donne's 'great sickness in December 1623'. Professor Moore Smith is of opinion that Sir Julius Caesar may have been right and Walton mistaken, and there is a good deal to be said for this view. 'It seems', he says, 'more likely that Walton should have attributed the poem wrongly to Donne's last illness, than that the MS. copy should antedate it by seven years.' In 1640 Walton simply referred it to his deathbed; the precise date was given in 1658. Moreover the date 1623 seems to Professor Moore Smith confirmed by a letter to Sir Robert Ker (later Lord Ancrum) in 1624 (Gosse, Life &c. ii. 191), in which Donne writes, 'If a flat map be but pasted upon a round globe the farthest east and the farthest west meet and are all one.'

On the other hand, Walton's final date is very precise, and was probably given to him by King. If the poem was written at the same time as that 'to God the Father', why did it not pass into wider circulation? Stowe MS. 961 is the only collection in which I have found it. The use of the simile in the letter to Ker is not so conclusive as it seems. In that same letter Donne says, 'Sir, I took up this paper to write a letter; but my imagination was full of a sermon before, for I write but a few hours before I am to preach.' Now I have in my note cited this simile from an undated sermon on one of the Penitentiary Psalms. This, not the poem, may have been the occasion of its repetition in this letter. Donne is very prone to repeat a favourite figure—inundation, the king's stamped face &c. It is quite likely that the poem was the last, not the first, occasion on which he used the flat map. Note that the other chief figure in the poem, the straits which lead to the Pacific Sea, was used in a sermon (see note) dated February 12, 1629.

The figure of the flat map is not used, as one might expect, in the section of the Devotions headed The Patient takes his bed, but the last line of the poem is recalled by some words there: 'and therefore am I cast downe, that I might not be cast away.'

Walton's dates are often inaccurate, but here the balance of the evidence seems to me in his favour. As Mr. Gosse says, Sir Julius Caesar may have confounded this hymn with 'Wilt thou forgive'. In re-reading the Devotions with Professor Moore Smith's statement in view I have come on two other points of interest. Donne's views on the immortality of the soul (see II. pp. 160-2) are very clearly stated: 'That light, which is the very emanation of the light of God ... only that bends not to this Center, to Ruine; that which was not made of Nothing, is not thretned with this annihilation. All other things are; even Angels, even our soules; they move upon the same Poles, they bend to the same Center; and if they were not made immortall by preservation, their Nature could not keep them from sinking to this center, Annihilation' (pp. 216-17).

The difficult line in the sonnet Resurrection (p. 321, l. 8) is perhaps illuminated by pp. 206-8, where Donne speaks of 'thy first booke, the booke of life', 'thy second book, the booke of Nature,' and closes a further list with 'to those, the booke with seven seals, which only the Lamb which was slain, was found worthy to open; which, I hope, it shal not disagree with the measure of thy blessed spirit, to interpret, the promulgation of their pardon, and righteousnes, who are washed in the blood of the Lamb'. This is possibly the 'little booke' of the sonnet, perhaps changed by Donne to 'life-book' to simplify the reference. But the two are not the same.

ADDENDUM.

Vol. I, p. 368, l. 6. Whilst my Physitions by their love are growne Cosmographers ... Sir Julius Caesar's MS. (Addl. MS. 34324) has Loer, scil. Lore. This is probably the true reading.

ERRATUM.

P. 274, l. 28. for figure-inundation read figure—inundation