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EDITED FROM THE OLD EDITIONS AND NUMEROUS MANUSCRIPTS,

WITH INTRODUCTIONS & COMMENTARY

BY

HERBERT J. C. GRIERSON M.A.

CHALMERS PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN

VOL. II

INTRODUCTION AND COMMENTARY

OXFORD

AT THE CLARENDON PRESS

1912

HENRY FROWDE, M.A.
PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
LONDON, EDINBURGH, NEW YORK
TORONTO AND MELBOURNE

[pg iii]

[pg v]

THE POETRY OF DONNE

Donne's position among English poets, regarded from the historical and what we like to call scientific point of view, has been defined with learning and discrimination by Mr. Courthope in his History of English Poetry. As a phenomenon of curious interest for the student of the history of thought and literary fashions, there it is. Mr. Courthope is far too well-informed and judicious a critic to explain Donne's subtle thought and erudite conceits by a reference to 'Marini and his followers'. Gongora and Du Bartas are alike passed over in silence. What we are shown is the connexion of 'metaphysical wit' with the complex and far-reaching changes in men's conception of Nature which make the seventeenth century perhaps the greatest epoch in human thought since human thinking began.

The only thing that such a criticism leaves unexplained and undefined is the interest which Donne's poetry still has for us, not as an historical phenomenon, but as poetry. Literary history has for the historian a quite distinct interest from that which it possesses for the student and lover of literature. For the historian it is a matter of positive interest to connect Donne's wit with the general disintegration of mediaeval thought, to recognize the influence on the Elizabethan drama of the doctrines of Machiavelli, or to find in Pope's achievement in poetry a counterpart to Walpole's in politics. For the lover of literature none of these facts has any positive interest whatsoever. Donne's wit attracts or repels him equally whatever be its source; Tamburlaine and Iago lose none of their interest for us though we know nothing of Machiavelli; [pg vi] Pope's poetry is not a whit more or less poetical by being a strange by-product of the Whig spirit in English life. For the lover of literature, literary history has an indirect value. He studies history that he may discount it. What he relishes in a poet of the past is exactly the same essential qualities as he enjoys in a poet of his own day—life and passion and art. But between us and every poet or thinker of the past hangs a thinner or thicker veil of outworn fashions and conventions. The same life has clothed itself in different garbs; the same passions have spoken in different images; the same art has adapted itself to different circumstances. To the historian these old clothes are in themselves a subject of interest. His enjoyment of Shakespeare is heightened by finding the explanation of Falstaff's hose, Pistol's hyperboles, and the poet's neglect of the Unities. To the lover of literature they are, until by understanding he can discount them, a disadvantage because they invest the work of the poet with an irrelevant air of strangeness. He studies them that he may grow familiar with them and forget them, that he may clear and intensify his sense of what alone has permanent value, the poet's individuality and the art in which it is expressed.

Donne's conceits, of which so much has been made and on whose historical significance Mr. Courthope has probably said the last word, are just like other examples of these old clothes. The question for literature is not whence they came, but how he used them. Is he a poet in virtue or in spite of them, or both? Are they fit only to be gathered into a museum of antiquated fashions such as Johnson prefixed to his study of the last poet who wore them in quite the old way (for Dryden, who pilfered more freely from Donne than from any of his predecessors, cut them to a new fashion), or are they the individual and still expressive dress of a true and great poet, commanding admiration in their own manner and degree as freshly and enduringly as the stiff and brocaded magnificence of Milton's no less individual, no less artificial style?

Donne's reputation as a poet has passed through many vicissitudes in the course of the last three centuries. With [pg vii] regard to his 'wit', its range and character, erudition and ingenuity, all generations of critics have been at one. It is as to the relation of this 'wit' to, and its effect on, his poetry that they have been at variance. To his contemporaries the 'wit' was identical with the poetry. Donne's 'wit' gave him the same supremacy among poets that learning and humour and art gave to Jonson among dramatists. To certain of his Dutch admirers the wit of The Flea seemed superhuman, and the epitaph with which Carew closes his Elegy expresses the almost universal English opinion of the seventeenth century:

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

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

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

Even to those critics with whom began a revived appreciation of Donne as a poet and preacher, his 'wit' still bulks largely. It is impossible to escape from it. 'Wonder-exciting vigour,' writes Coleridge, 'intenseness and peculiarity, using at will the almost boundless stores of a capacious memory, and exercised on subjects where we have no right [pg ix] to expect it—this is the wit of Donne.' And lastly De Quincey, who alone of these critics recognizes the essential quality which may, and in his best work does, make Donne's wit the instrument of a mind which is not only subtle and ingenious but profoundly poetical: 'Few writers have shown a more extraordinary compass of powers than Donne; for he combined what no other man has ever done—the last sublimation of dialectical subtlety and address with the most impassioned majesty. Massy diamonds compose the very substance of his poem on the Metempsychosis, thoughts and descriptions which have the fervent and gloomy sublimity of Ezekiel or Aeschylus, whilst a diamond dust of rhetorical brilliancies is strewed over the whole of his occasional verses and his prose.'

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

Before coming to close quarters with this difficult and debated question one may in the first place insist that there is in Donne's verse a great deal which, whether it be poetry in the full sense of the word or not, is arresting and of worth both historically and intrinsically. Whatever we may think of Donne's poetry, it is impossible not to recognize the extraordinary interest of his mind and character. In an age of great and fascinating men he is not the least so. The immortal and transcendent genius of Shakespeare leaves Donne, as every other contemporary, lost in the shadows and cross-lights of an age that is no longer ours, but from which Shakespeare emerges into the clear sunlight. Of Bacon's mind, 'deep and slow, exhausting thought,' and divining as none other the direction in which the road led through the débris of outworn learning to a renovated science and a new philosophy, [pg x] Donne could not boast. Alike in his poetry and in his soberest prose, treatise or sermon, Donne's mind seems to want the high seriousness which comes from a conviction that truth is, and is to be found. A spirit of scepticism and paradox plays through and disturbs almost everything he wrote, except at moments when an intense mood of feeling, whether love or devotion, begets faith, and silences the sceptical and destructive wit by the power of vision rather than of intellectual conviction. Poles apart as the two poets seem at a first glance to lie in feeling and in art, there is yet something of Tennyson in the conflict which wages perpetually in Donne's poetry between feeling and intellect.

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

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

It is not in the Satyres that this wit is to us most obvious. Nothing grows so soon out of date as contemporary satire. [pg xi] Even the brilliance and polish of Pope's satire—and Pope's art is nowhere more perfect than in The Dunciad and the Imitations of Horace—cannot interest us in Lord Hervey, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and the forgotten poets of an unpoetic age. How then should we be interested in Elizabeth's fantastic 'Presence', the streets of sixteenth-century London, and the knavery of pursuivants, presented with a satiric art which is wonderfully vivid and caustic but still tentative,—over-emphatic, rough in style and verse, though with a roughness which is obviously a studied and in a measure successful effect. The verses upon Coryats Crudities are in their way a masterpiece of insult veiled as compliment, but it is a rather boyish and barbarous way.

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

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

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

She will, like Proteus in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, have no dearth of sophistries—but why elaborate them?

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

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

But to amuse was by no means the sole aim of Donne's 'wit'; gay humour touched with fancy and feeling is not its only [pg xiii] quality. Donne's 'wit' has many strands, his humour many moods, and before considering how these are woven together into an effect that is entirely poetical, we may note one or two of the soberer strands which run through his Letters, Epicedes, and similar poems—descriptive, reflective, and complimentary.

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

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

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

[pg xiv]

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

In the first class, and the same is true of some of the Satyres, notably the third, and of the satirical Progresse of the Soule, especially at the beginning and the end, the reflective, moralizing strain predominates. Donne's 'wit' becomes the instrument of a criticism of life, grave or satiric, melancholy or stoical. Despite Matthew Arnold's definition, verse of this kind seldom is poetry in the full sense of the word; but, as Stevenson says in speaking of his own Scotch verses, talk not song. The first of English poets was a master of the art. Neither Horace nor Martial, whom Stevenson cites, is a more delightful talker in verse than Geoffrey Chaucer, and the archaism of his style seems only to lend the additional charm of a lisp to his babble. Since Donne's day English poetry has been rich in such verse talkers—Butler and Dryden, Pope and Swift, Cowper and Burns, Byron and Shelley, Browning and Landor. It did not come easy to the Elizabethans, whose natural accent was song. Donne's chief rivals were Daniel and Jonson, and I venture to think that he excels them both in the clear and pointed yet easy and conversational development of his thought, in the play of wit and wisdom, and, despite the pedantic cast of Elizabethan erudite moralizing, in the power to leave on the reader the impression of a potent and yet a winning personality. We seem to get nearer to the man himself in Donne's letters to Goodyere and Wotton than in Daniel's weighty, but also heavy, moralizing epistles to the Countess of Cumberland or Sir Thomas Egerton; and the personality whose voice sounds so distinct and human in our ear is a more attractive one than the harsh, censorious, burly [pg xv] but a little blustering Jonson of the epistles on country life and generous givers. Donne's style is less clumsy, his verse less stiff. His wit brings to a clear point whatever he has to say, while from his verse as from his prose letters there disengages itself a very distinct sense of what it was in the man, underlying his brilliant intellect, his almost superhuman cleverness, which won for him the devotion of friends like Wotton and Goodyere and Walton and King, the admiration of a stranger like Huyghens, who heard him talk as well as preach:—a serious and melancholy, a generous and chivalrous spirit.

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

This personal interest is very marked in the two satires which are connected by tone and temper with the letters, the third of the early, classical Satyres and the opening and closing stanzas of the Progresse of the Soule. Each is a vivid picture of the inner workings of Donne's soul at a critical period in his life. The first was doubtless written at the moment that he was passing from the Roman to the Anglican Church. It is one [pg xvi] of the earliest and most thoughtful appeals for toleration, for the candid scrutiny of religious differences, which was written perhaps in any country—one of the most striking symptoms of the new eddies produced in the stream of religious feeling by the meeting currents of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation.

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

From this dilemma Donne escaped, not by any opportune change of conviction, or by any insincere profession, but by the way of intellectual emancipation. He looks round in this satire and sees that whichever be the true Church it is not by [pg xvii] any painful quest of truth, and through the attainment of conviction, that most people have accepted the Church to which they may belong. Circumstances and whim have had more to do with their choice than reason and serious conviction. Yet it is only by search that truth is to be found:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[pg xx]

The fragment has some of the sombre power which De Quincey attributes to it, but on the whole one must confess it is a failure. The 'wit' of Donne did not apparently include invention, for many of the episodes seem pointless as well as disgusting, and indeed in no poem is the least attractive side of Donne's mind so clearly revealed, that aspect of his wit which to some readers is more repellent, more fatal to his claim to be a poet, than too subtle ingenuity or misplaced erudition—the vein of sheer ugliness which runs through his work, presenting details that seem merely and wantonly repulsive. The same vein is apparent in the work of Chapman, of Jonson, and even in places of Spenser, and the imagery of Hamlet and the tragedies owes some of its dramatic vividness and power to the same quality. The ugly has its place in art, and it would not be difficult to find it in every phase of Renaissance art, marked like the beautiful in that art by the same evidence of power. Decadence brought with it not ugliness but prettiness.

The reflective, philosophic, somewhat melancholy strain of the poems I have been touching on reappears in the letters addressed to noble ladies. Here, however, it is softened, less sardonic in tone, while it blends with or gives place to another strain, that of absurd and extravagant but fanciful and subtle compliment. Donne cannot write to a lady without his heart and fancy taking wing in their own passionate and erudite fashion. Scholastic theology is made the instrument of courtly compliment and pious flirtation. He blends in the same disturbing fashion as in some of the songs and elegies that depreciation of woman in general, which he owes less to classical poetry than to his over-acquaintance with the Fathers, with an adoration of her charms in the individual which passes into the transcendental. He tells the Countess of Huntingdon that active goodness in a woman is a miracle; but it is clear that she and the Countess of Bedford and Mrs. Herbert and Lady Carey and the Countess of Salisbury are all examples of such miracle—ladies whose beauty itself is virtue, while their virtues are a mystery revealable only to the initiated.

The highest place is held by Lady Bedford and Mrs. Herbert. [pg xxi] Nothing could surpass the strain of intellectual and etherealized compliment in which he addresses the Countess. If lines like the following are not pure poetry, they haunt some quaint borderland of poetry to which the polished felicities of Pope's compliments are a stranger. If not pure fancy, they are not mere ingenuity, being too intellectual and argumentative for the one, too winged and ardent for the other:

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

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

and the beautiful Elegie

are less transcendental in tone but bespeak an even warmer admiration. Indeed it is clear to any careful reader that in the poems addressed to both these ladies there is blended with the respectful flattery of the dependant not a little of the tone of warmer feeling permitted to the 'servant' by Troubadour [pg xxii] convention. And I suspect that some poems, the tone of which is still more frankly and ardently lover-like, were addressed to Lady Bedford and Mrs. Herbert, though they have come to us without positive indication.

The title of the subtle, passionate, sonorous lyric Twicknam Garden,

points to the person addressed, for Twickenham Park was the residence of Lady Bedford from 1607 to 1618, and Donne's intimacy with her seems to have begun in or about 1608. There can, I think, be little doubt that it is to her, and neither to his wife nor the mistresses of his earlier, wandering fancy, that these lines, conventional in theme but given an amazing timbre by the impulse of Donne's subtle and passionate mind, were addressed. But if Twicknam Garden was written to Lady Bedford, so also, one is tempted to think, must have been A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day, for Lucy was the Countess's name, and the thought, feeling, and rhythm of the two poems are strikingly similar.

But the Nocturnall is a sincerer and profounder poem than Twicknam Garden, and it is more difficult to imagine it the expression of a conventional sentiment. Mr. Gosse, and there is no higher authority when it comes to the interpretation of Donne's character and mind, rightly, I think, suggests that the death of the lady addressed is assumed, not actual, but he connects the poem with Donne's earlier and troubled loves. 'So also in a most curious ode, the Nocturnal ..., amid fireworks of conceit, he calls his mistress dead and protests that his hatred has grown cold at last.' But I can find no note of bitterness, active or spent, in the song. It might have been written to Ann More. It is a highly metaphysical yet sombre and sincere description of the emptiness of life without love. The critics have, I think, failed somewhat to reckon with this stratum in Donne's songs, of poems Petrarchian in convention but with a Petrarchianism coloured by Donne's realistic temper and impatient wit. Any interpretation of so [pg xxiii] enigmatical a poem must be conjectural, but before one denied too positively that its subject was Lady Bedford—perhaps her illness in 1612—one would need to answer two questions, how far could a conventional passion inspire a strain so sincere, and what was Donne's feeling for Lady Bedford and hers for him?

Poetry is the language of passion, but the passion which moves the poet most constantly is the delight of making poetry, and very little is sufficient to quicken the imagination to its congenial task. Our soberer minds are apt to think that there must be an actual, particular experience behind every sincere poem. But history refutes the idea of such a simple relation between experience and art. No poet will sing of love convincingly who has never loved, but that experience will suffice him for many and diverse webs of song and drama. Without pursuing the theme, it is sufficient for the moment to recall that in the fashion of the day Spenser's sonnets were addressed to Lady Carey, not to his wife; that it was to Idea or to Anne Goodere that Drayton wrote so passionate a poem as

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

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

[pg xxiv]

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

Woman needs no advantages to arbitrate the fate of man.

In exactly the same mood as The Primrose is The Blossome, possibly written in the same place and on the same day, for the poet is preparing to return to London. The Dampe is in an even more scornful tone, and one hesitates to connect it with Mrs. Herbert. But all these poems recur so repeatedly together in the manuscripts as to suggest that they have a common origin. [pg xxv] And with them go the beautiful poems The Funerall and The Relique. In the former the cruelty of the lady has killed her lover, but in the second the tone changes entirely, the relation between Donne and Mrs. Herbert (note the lines

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

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

Without some touch of passion, some vibration of the heart, Donne is only too apt to accumulate 'monstrous and disgusting hyperboles'. This is very obvious in the Epicedes—his complimentary laments for the young Lord Harington, Miss Boulstred, Lady Markham, Elizabeth Drury and the Marquis of Hamilton, poems in which it is difficult to find a line that moves. Indeed, seventeenth-century elegies are not as a rule [pg xxvi] pathetic. A poem in the simple, piercing strain and the Wordsworthian plainness of style of the Dutch poet Vondel's lament for his little daughter is hardly to be found in English. An occasional epitaph like Browne's

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

and some of his loveliest allusions:

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

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

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

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

In passages like these there is an earnest of the highest note of [pg xxviii] spiritual eloquence that Donne was to attain to in his sermons and last hymns.

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

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

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

With this welter of shifting theories and worthless facts he contrasts the vision of which religious faith is the earnest here:

It will seem to some readers hardly fair to compare a poem like In Memoriam, which, if in places the staple of its feeling and thought wears a little thin, is entirely serious throughout, with poems which have so much the character of an intellectual tour de force as Donne's Anniversaries, but it is easy to be unjust to the sincerity of Donne in these poems. Their extravagant eulogy did not argue any insincerity to Sir Robert and Lady Drury. It was in the manner of the time, and doubtless seemed to them as natural an expression of grief as the elaborate marble and alabaster tomb which they erected to the memory of their daughter. The Second Anniversarie was written in France when Donne was resident there with the Drurys. And it was on this occasion that Donne had the vision of his absent wife which Walton has related so graphically. [pg xxx] The spiritual sense in Donne was as real a thing as the restless and unruly wit, or the sensual, passionate temperament. The main thesis of the poem, the comparative worthlessness of this life, the transcendence of the spiritual, was as sincere in Donne's case as was in Tennyson the conviction of the futility of life if death closes all. It was to be the theme of the finest passages in his eloquent sermons, the burden of all that is most truly religious in the verse and prose of a passionate, intellectual, self-tormenting soul to whom the pure ecstasy of love of a Vondel, the tender raptures of a Crashaw, the chastened piety of a Herbert, the mystical perceptions of a Vaughan could never be quite congenial.

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

[pg xxxi]

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

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

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

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

But it is not true either that the thought and imagery of love-poetry must be of the simple, obvious kind which Steele supposes, that any display of dialectical subtlety, any scintillation of wit, must be fatal to the impression of sincerity and feeling, or on the other hand that love is always a beautiful emotion naturally expressing itself in delicate and beautiful language. To some natures love comes as above all things a force quickening the mind, intensifying its purely intellectual energy, opening new vistas of thought abstract and subtle, making the soul 'intensely, wondrously alive'. Of such were Donne and Browning. A love-poem like 'Come into the garden, Maud' suspends thought and fills the mind with a succession of picturesque and voluptuous images in harmony with the dominant mood. A poem such as The Anniversarie or The Extasie, The Last Ride Together or Too Late, is a record of intense, rapid thinking, expressed in the simplest, most appropriate language—and it is a no whit less natural utterance of passion. Even the abstractness of the thought, on which Mr. Courthope lays so much stress in speaking of Donne and the 'metaphysicals' generally, is no necessary implication of want of feeling. It has been said of St. Augustine 'that his most profound thoughts regarding the first and last things arose out of prayer ... concentration of his whole being in prayer led to the most abstract observation'. So it may be with love-poetry—so it was with Dante in the Vita Nuova, and so, on a lower scale, and allowing for the time that the passion [pg xxxiv] is a more earthly and sensual one, the thought more capricious and unruly, with Donne. The Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day is not less passionate because that passion finds expression in abstract and subtle thought. Nor is it true that all love-poetry is beautiful. Of none of the four poems I have mentioned in the last paragraph is pure beauty, beauty such as is the note of Mr. Bridges' song, the distinctive quality. It is rather vivid realism:

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

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

Donne's love-poetry is a very complex phenomenon, but the two dominant strains in it are just these: the strain of dialectic, subtle play of argument and wit, erudite and fantastic; and the strain of vivid realism, the record of a passion which is not ideal nor conventional, neither recollected in tranquillity nor a pure product of literary fashion, but love as an actual, immediate experience in all its moods, gay and angry, scornful and rapturous with joy, touched with tenderness and darkened with sorrow—though these last two moods, the commonest in love-poetry, [pg xxxv] are with Donne the rarest. The first of these strains comes to Donne from the Middle Ages, the dialectic of the Schools, which passed into mediaeval love-poetry almost from its inception; the second is the expression of the new temper of the Renaissance as Donne had assimilated it in Latin countries. Donne uses the method, the dialectic of the mediaeval love-poets, the poets of the dolce stil nuovo, Guinicelli, Cavalcanti, Dante, and their successors, the intellectual, argumentative evolution of their canzoni, but he uses it to express a temper of mind and a conception of love which are at the opposite pole from their lofty idealism. The result, however, is not so entirely disintegrating as Mr. Courthope seems to think: 'This fine Platonic edifice is ruthlessly demolished in the poetry of Donne. To him love, in its infinite variety and inconsistency, represented the principle of perpetual flux in nature.'¹ The truth is rather that, owing to the fullness of Donne's experience as a lover, the accident that made of the earlier libertine a devoted lover and husband, and from the play of his restless and subtle mind on the phenomenon of love conceived and realized in this less ideal fashion, there emerged in his poetry the suggestion of a new philosophy of love which, if less transcendental than that of Dante, rests on a juster, because a less dualistic and ascetic, conception of the nature of the love of man and woman.

The fundamental weakness of the mediaeval doctrine of love, despite its refining influence and its exaltation of woman, was that it proved unable to justify love ethically against the claims of the counter-ideal of asceticism. Taking its rise in a relationship which excluded the thought of marriage as the end and justification of love, which presumed in theory that the relation of the 'servant' to his lady must always be one of reverent and unrewarded service, this poetry found itself involved from the beginning in a dualism from which there was no escape. On the one hand the love of woman is the great ennobler of the [pg xxxvi] human heart, the influence which elicits its latent virtue as the sun converts clay to gold and precious stones. On the other hand, love is a passion which in the end is to be repented of in sackcloth and ashes. Lancelot is the knight whom love has made perfect in all the virtues of manhood and chivalry; but the vision of the Holy Grail is not for him, but for the virgin and stainless Sir Galahad.

In the high philosophy of the Tuscan poets of the 'sweet new style' that dualism was apparently transcended, but it was by making love identical with religion, by emptying it of earthly passion, making woman an Angel, a pure Intelligence, love of whom is the first awakening of the love of God. 'For Dante and the poets of the learned school love and virtue were one and the same thing; love was religion, the lady beloved the way to heaven, symbol of philosophy and finally of theology.'² The culminating moment in Dante's love for Beatrice arrives when he has overcome even the desire that she should return his salutation and he finds his full beatitude in 'those words that do praise my lady'. The love that begins in the Vita Nuova is completed in the Paradiso.

The dualism thus in appearance transcended by Dante reappears sharply and distinctly in Petrarch. 'Petrarch', says Gaspary, 'adores not the idea but the person of his lady; he feels that in his affections there is an earthly element, he cannot separate it from the desire of the senses; this is the earthly tegument which draws us down. If not as, according to the ascetic doctrine, sin, if he could not be ashamed of his passion, yet he could repent of it as a vain and frivolous thing, regret his wasted hopes and griefs.'³ Laura is for Petrarch the flower of all perfection herself and the source of every virtue in her lover. Yet his love for Laura is a long and weary aberration of the soul from her true goal, which is the love of God. This is the contradiction from which flow some of the most lyrical [pg xxxvii] strains in Petrarch's poetry, as the fine canzone 'I'vo pensando', where he cries:

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

And in the end both Sidney and Spenser turn from earthly to heavenly love:

And so Spenser:

But two things had come over this idealist and courtly love-poetry by the end of the sixteenth century. It had become a literary artifice, a refining upon outworn and extravagant conceits, losing itself at times in the fantastic and absurd. A more important fact was that this poetry had begun to absorb a new warmth and spirit, not from Petrarch and mediaeval chivalry, but from classical love-poetry with its simpler, less metaphysical strain, its equally intense but more realistic [pg xxxviii] description of passion, its radically different conception of the relation between the lovers and of the influence of love in a man's life. The courtly, idealistic strain was crossed by an Epicurean and sensuous one that tends to treat with scorn the worship of woman, and echoes again and again the Pagan cry, never heard in Dante or Petrarch, of the fleetingness of beauty and love:

Now if we turn from Elizabethan love-poetry to the Songs and Sonets and the Elegies of Donne, we find at once two distinguishing features. In the first place his poetry is in one respect less classical than theirs. There is far less in it of the superficial evidence of classical learning with which the poetry of the 'University Wits' abounds, pastoral and mythological imagery. The texture of his poetry is more mediaeval than theirs in as far as it is more dialectical, though a dialectical evolution is not infrequent in the Elizabethan sonnet, and the imagery is less picturesque, more scientific, philosophic, realistic, and homely. The place of the

is taken by images drawn from all the sciences of the day, from the definitions and distinctions of the Schoolmen, from the travels and speculations of the new age, and (as in Shakespeare's tragedies or Browning's poems) from the experiences of everyday life. Maps and sea discoveries, latitude and longitude, the phoenix and the mandrake's root, the Scholastic theories of Angelic bodies and Angelic knowledge, Alchemy [pg xxxix] and Astrology, legal contracts and non obstantes, 'late schoolboys and sour prentices,' 'the king's real and his stamped face'—these are the kind of images, erudite, fanciful, and homely, which give to Donne's poems a texture so different at a first glance from the florid and diffuse Elizabethan poetry, whether romantic epic, mythological idyll, sonnet, or song; while by their presence and their abundance they distinguish it equally (as Mr. Gosse has justly insisted) from the studiously moderate and plain style of 'well-languaged Daniel'.

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

with the famous thirteenth Elegy of the first book,

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

But if the difference between Donne's metaphysical conceits and Ovid's naturalness and simplicity is palpable it is not less clear that the emotions which they express, with some important [pg xl] exceptions to which I shall recur, are identical. The love which is the main burden of their song is something very different from the ideal passion of Dante or of Petrarch, of Sidney or Spenser. It is a more sensual passion. The same tone of witty depravity runs through the work of the two poets. There is in Donne a purer strain which, we shall see directly, is of the greatest importance, but such a rapid reader as I am contemplating might be forgiven if for the moment he overlooked it, and declared that the modern poet was as sensual and depraved as the ancient, that there was little to choose between the social morality reflected in the Elizabethan and in the Augustan poet.

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

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

[pg xli]

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

But however we may explain or palliate the tone of these poems it is impossible to deny their power, the vivid and packed force with which they portray a variously mooded passion working through a swift and subtle brain. If there is little of the elegant and accomplished art which Milton admired in the Latin Elegiasts while he 'deplored' their immorality, there is more strength and sincerity both of thought and imagination. The brutal cynicism of

the witty anger of The Apparition, the mordant and paradoxical wit of The Perfume and The Bracelet, the passionate dignity and strength of His Picture,

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

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

But neither sensual passion, nor gay and cynical wit, nor scorn and anger, is the dominant note in Donne's love-poetry. Of the last quality there is, despite the sardonic emphasis of some of the poems, less than in either Shakespeare or Catullus. There is nothing in his poetry which speaks so poignantly of an outraged heart, a love lavished upon one who was worthless, as some of Shakespeare's sonnets and of Catullus's poems. The finest note in Donne's love-poetry is the note of joy, the joy of mutual and contented passion. His heart might be subtle to plague itself; its capacity for joy is even more obvious. Other poets have done many things which Donne could not do. They have invested their feelings with a garb of richer and sweeter poetry. They have felt more deeply and finely the reverence which is in the heart of love. But it is only in the fragments of Sappho, the lyrics of Catullus, and [pg xliii] the songs of Burns that one will find the sheer joy of loving and being loved expressed in the same direct and simple language as in some of Donne's songs, only in Browning that one will find the same simplicity of feeling combined with a like swift and subtle dialectic.

Lines like these have the same direct, passionate quality as

or

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

is of the same quality as

or

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

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

[pg xliv] and the Valedictions which he wrote on different occasions of parting from his wife, combine with the peculiar élan of all Donne's passionate poetry and its intellectual content a tenderness as perfect as anything in Burns or in Browning:

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

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

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

but a clearer consciousness of the eternal significance of love, not the love that aspires after the unattainable, but the love that unites contented hearts. The method of the poet is, I suppose, too dialectical to be popular, for the poem is in few Anthologies. It may be that the Pagan and Christian strains which the poet unites are not perfectly blended—if it is possible to do so—but to me it seems that the joy of love has never been expressed at once with such intensity and such elevation.

And it is with sorrow as with joy. There is the same difference of manner in the expression between Donne and these poets, and the deepest thought is the same. The Nocturnall on S. Lucies Day is at the opposite pole of Donne's thought from the Anniversarie, and compared with

or

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

What, then, is the philosophy which disengages itself from Donne's love-poetry studied in its whole compass? It seems to me that it is more than a purely negative one, that consciously or unconsciously he sets over against the abstract idealism, the sharp dualism of the Middle Ages, a justification of love as a natural passion in the human heart the meaning and end of which is marriage. The sensuality and exaggerated cynicism of so much of the poetry of the [pg xlvi] Renaissance was a reaction from courtly idealism and mediaeval asceticism. But a mere reaction could lead no-whither. There are no steps which lead only backward in the history of human thought and feeling. Poems like Donne's Elegies, like Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, like Marlowe's Hero and Leander could only end in penitent outcries like those of Sidney and Spenser and of Donne himself. The true escape from courtly or ascetic idealism was a poetry which should do justice to love as a passion in which body and soul alike have their part, and of which there is no reason to repent.

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

This justification of natural love as fullness of joy and life is the deepest thought in Donne's love-poems, far deeper and sincerer than the Platonic conceptions of the affinity and identity of souls with which he plays in some of the verses addressed to Mrs. Herbert. The nearest approach that he makes to anything like a reasoned statement of the thought latent rather than expressed in The Anniversarie is in The Extasie, a poem which, like the Nocturnall, only Donne could have written. Here with the same intensity of feeling, and in [pg xlvii] the same abstract, dialectical, erudite strain he emphasizes the interdependence of soul and body:

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

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

certainly in Rochester's songs, in

or the unequalled:

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

But there was one poet who meditated on the same problem as Donne, who felt like him the power and greatness of love, and like him could not accept a doctrine of love which seemed to exclude or depreciate marriage. In 1640, just before his marriage, as rash in its way as Donne's but less happy in the issue, Milton, defending his character against accusations of immorality, traced the development of his thought about love. The passage, in An Apology against a Pamphlet called 'A Modest Confutation', &c., has been taken as having a reference to the Paradise Lost. But Milton rather seems at the time to have been meditating a work like the Vita Nuova or a romance like that of Tasso in which love was to be [pg xlix] a motive as well as religion, for the whole theme of his thought is love, true love and its mysterious link with chastity, of which, however, 'marriage is no defilement'. In the arrogance of his youthful purity Milton would doubtless have looked with scorn or loathing on the Elegies and the more careless of Donne's songs. But perhaps pride is a greater enemy of love than such faults of sense as Donne in his passionate youth was guilty of, and from which Dante by his own evidence was not exempt. Whatever be the cause—pride, and the disappointment of his marriage, and political polemic—Milton never wrote any English love-poetry, except it be the one sonnet on the death of the wife who might have opened the sealed wells of his heart; and some want of the experience which love brought to Dante has dimmed the splendour of the great poem in which he undertook to justify the ways of God to men. Donne is not a Milton, but he sounded some notes which touch the soul and quicken the intellect in a way that Milton's magnificent and intense but somewhat hard and objective art fails to achieve.

That the simpler and purer, the more ideal and tender of Donne's love-poems were the expression of his love for Ann More cannot of course be proved in the case of each individual poem, for all Donne's verses have come to us (with a few unimportant exceptions) undated and unarranged. But the general thesis, that it was a great experience which purified and elevated Donne's poetry, receives a striking confirmation from the better-known history of his devotional poetry. Here too wit, often tortured wit, fancy, and the heat which Donne's wit was always able to generate, would have been all his verse had to show but for the great sorrow which struck him down in 1617 and gave to his subsequent sonnets and hymns a sincerer and profounder note, his imagery a more magnificent quality, his rhythms a more sonorous music.

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

The simple way of describing Donne's difficulty is Walton's, according to whom Donne shrank from entering the ministry for fear the notorious irregularities of his early years should bring discredit on the sacred calling. But there was more in Donne's life than a youth of pleasure, an old age of prayers. It is not the case that all which was best and most serious in Donne's nature led him towards Holy Orders. In his earliest satires and even in his 'love-song weeds' there is evidence enough of an earnest, candid soul underneath the extravagances of wit and youthful sensuality. Donne's mind was naturally serious and religious; it was not naturally devout or ascetic, but worldly and ambitious. But to enter the ministry was, for Donne and for all the serious minds of his age, to enter a profession for which the essential qualifications were a devotional and an ascetic life. The country clergy of the Anglican Church were often careless and scandalous livers before Laud took in hand the discipline of the Church; but her bishops and most eminent divines, though they might be courtly and sycophantic, were with few exceptions men of devout and [pg li] ascetic life. When Donne finally crossed the Rubicon, convinced that from the King no promotion was to be hoped for in any other line of life, it was rather with the deliberate resolution that he would make his life a model of devotion and ascetic self-denial than as one drawn by an irresistible attraction or impelled by a controlling sense of duty to such a life. Donne was no St. Augustine whose transition from libertinism to saintliness came entirely from within. The noblest feature of Donne's earlier clerical life was the steadfast spirit in which he set himself to realize the highest ideals of the calling he had chosen, and the candour with which he accepted the contrast between his present position and his earlier life, leaving to whosoever wished to judge while he followed the path of duty and penitence.

But such a spirit will not easily produce great devotional poetry. There are qualities in the religious poetry of simpler and purer souls to which Donne seldom or never attains. The natural love of God which overflows the pages of the great mystics, which dilates the heart and the verses of a poet like the Dutchman Vondel, the ardour and tenderness of Crashaw, the chaste, pure piety and penitence of Herbert, the love from which devotion and ascetic self-denial come unbidden—to these Donne never attained. The high and passionate joy of The Anniversary is not heard in his sonnets or hymns. Effort is the note which predominates—the effort to realize the majesty of God, the heinousness of sin, the terrors of Hell, the mercy of Christ. Some of the very worst traits in Donne's mind are brought out in his religious writing. The Essays on Divinity are an extraordinary revelation of his accumulations of useless Scholastic erudition, and his capacity to perform feats of ingenious deduction from traditional and accepted premises. To compare these freakish deductions from the theory of verbal inspiration with the luminous sense of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus is to realize how much rationalism was doing in the course of the century for the emancipation and healing of the human intellect. Some of the poems, and those the earliest written, before Donne had actually taken Orders, [pg lii] are not much more than exercises in these theological subtleties, poems such as that On the Annunciation and Passion falling in the same year (1608), The Litany (1610), Good-Friday (1613), and The Cross (c. 1615) are characteristic examples of Donne's intense and imaginative wit employed on traditional topics of Catholic devotion to which no change of Church ever made him indifferent. Donne never ignored in his sermons the gulf that separated the Anglican from the Roman Church, or the link that bound her to the Protestant Churches of the Continent. 'Our great protestant divines' are one of his courts of appeal, and included Luther and Calvin of whom he never speaks but with the deepest respect. But he was unwilling to sacrifice to a fanatical puritanism any element of Catholic devotion which was capable of an innocent interpretation. His language is guarded and perhaps not always consistent, but it would not be difficult to show from his sermons and prose-writings that many of the most distinctively Catholic tenets were treated by him with the utmost tenderness.

But, as Mr. Gosse has pointed out, the sincerest and profoundest of Donne's devotional poetry dates from the death of his wife. The loss of her who had purified and sweetened his earliest love songs lent a new and deeper timbre to the sonnets and lyrics in which he contemplates the great topics of personal religion,—sin, death, the Judgement, and throws himself on the mercy of God as revealed in Christ. The seven sonnets entitled La Corona have been generally attributed to this period, but it is probable that they were composed earlier, and their treatment of the subject of Christ's life and death is more intellectual and theological than spiritual and poetical. It is when the tone becomes personal, as in the Holy Sonnets, when he is alone with his own soul in the prospect of death and the Judgement, that Donne's religious poetry acquires something of the same unique character as his love songs and elegies by a similar combination of qualities, intensity of feeling, subtle turns of thought, and occasional Miltonic splendour of phrase. Here again we meet the magnificent openings of the Songs and Sonets:—

[pg liii]

or,

and again—

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

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

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

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

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

¹ History of English Poetry, iii. 154. Mr. Courthope qualifies this statement somewhat on the next page: 'From this spirit of cynical lawlessness he was perhaps reclaimed by genuine love,' &c. But he has, I think, insufficiently analysed the diverse strains in Donne's love-poetry.

² Gaspary: History of Italian Literature (Oelsner's translation), 1904. Consult also Karl Vossler: Die philosophischen Grundlagen des 'süssen neuen Stils', Heidelberg, 1904, and La Poesia giovanile &c. di Guido Cavalcanti: Studi di Giulio Salvadori, Roma, 1895.

³ Gaspary: Op. Cit.

[pg lvi]

TEXT

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

Three of Donne's poems were printed in his lifetime—the Anniversaries (i.e. The Anatomy of the World with A Funerall Elegie and The Progresse of the Soule) in 1611 and 1612, with later editions in 1621 and 1625; the Elegie upon the untimely death of the incomparable Prince Henry, in Sylvester's Lachrymae Lachrymarum, 1613; and the lines prefixed to Coryats Crudities in 1611. We know nothing of any other poem by Donne being printed prior to 1633. It is noteworthy, as Mr. Gosse has pointed out, that none of the Miscellanies which appeared towards the end of the sixteenth century, as Englands Parnassus¹ (1600), or at the beginning of the seventeenth century, as Davison's Poetical Rhapsody,² contained poems [pg lvii] by Donne. The first of these is a collection of witty and elegant passages from different authors on various general themes (Dissimulation, Faith, Learning, &c.) and is just the kind of book for which Donne's poems would have been made abundant use of at a somewhat later period. There are in our libraries manuscript collections of 'Donne's choicest conceits', and extracts long or short from his poems, dating from the second quarter of the seventeenth century.³ The editor of the second of the anthologies mentioned, Francis Davison, became later much interested in Donne's poems. In notes which he made at some date after 1608, we find him inquiring for 'Satyres, Elegies, Epigrams etc., by John Don', and querying whether they might be obtained 'from Eleaz. Hodgson and Ben Johnson'. Among the books again which he has lent to his brother at a later date are 'John Duns Satyres'. This interest on the part of Davison in Donne's poems makes it seem to me very unlikely that if he had known them earlier he would not have included some of them in his Rhapsody, or that if he had done so he would not have told us. It has been the custom of late to assign to Donne the authorship of one charming lyric in the Rhapsody, 'Absence hear thou my protestation.' I hope to show elsewhere that this is the work, not of Donne, but of another young wit of the day, John Hoskins, whose few extant poems are a not uninteresting link between the manner of Sidney and the Elizabethans and of Donne and the 'Metaphysicals'.

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

[pg lviii]

By J. D.

WITH

ELEGIES

ON THE AUTHORS

DEATH.

LONDON.

Printed by M. F. for Iohn Marriot,
and are to be sold at his shop in S^t 'Dunstans
Church-yard in Fleet-street. 1633.

Title Page

[pg lix]

The first eight pages (Sheet A) are numbered, and contain (1) The Printer to the Understanders,⁴ (2) the Hexastichon Bibliopolae, (3) the dedication of, and introductory epistle to, The Progresse of the Soule, with which poem the volume opens. The poems themselves, with some prose letters and the Elegies upon the Author, fill pages 1-406. The numbers on some of the pages are misprinted. The order of the poems is generally chaotic, but in batches the poems follow the order preserved in the later editions. Of the significance of this, and of the source and character of this edition, I shall speak later. As regards text and canon it is the most trustworthy of all the old editions. The publisher, John Marriot, was a well-known bookseller at the sign of the Flower de Luce, and issued the poems of Breton, Drayton, Massinger, Quarles, and Wither. The printer was probably Miles Fletcher, or Flesher, a printer of considerable importance in Little Britain from 1611 to 1664. It would almost seem, from the heading of the introductory letter, that the printer was more responsible for the issue than the bookseller Marriot, and it is perhaps noteworthy that when in 1650 the younger Donne succeeded in getting the publication of the poems into his own hand, John Marriot's name remained on the title-page (1650) as publisher, but the printer's initials disappeared, and his prefatory letter made way for a dedication by the younger Donne. (See page 4.) It should be added that copies of the 1633 edition differ considerably from one another. In some a portrait has been inserted. Occasionally The Printer to the Understanders is omitted, the Infinitati Sacrum &c. following immediately on the title-page. In some poems, notably The Progresse of the Soule, and certain of the Letters to noble ladies, the text underwent considerable alteration as the volume passed through the press. Some copies are more correct than others. A few of the errors of the 1635 edition [pg lx] are traceable to the use by the printer of a comparatively imperfect copy of the 1633 edition.

By J. D.

WITH

ELEGIES

ON

THE AUTHORS

DEATH.

LONDON.

Printed by M. F. for John Marriot,
and are to be sold at his Shop in S^t Dunstans
Church-yard in Fleet-street.
1635.

Title Page

The Poems by J. D. with Elegies on the Authors Death were reprinted by M. F. for John Harriot in 1635 (the title-page is here reproduced), but with very considerable [pg lxi] alterations. The introductory material remained unchanged except that to the Hexastichon Bibliopolae was added a Hexastichon ad Bibliopolam. Incerti. (See p. 3.) To the title-page was prefixed a portrait in an oval frame. Outside the frame is engraved, to the left top, ANNO DNI. 1591. ÆTATIS SVÆ. 18.; to the right top, on a band ending in a coat of arms, ANTES MVERTO QUE MVDADO. Underneath the engraved portrait and background is the following poem:

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

Errata.⁶

Cvrteous Reader, know, that that Epistle intituled, Infinitati Sacrum, 16. of August, 1601. which is printed in [pg lxii] the beginning of the Booke, is misplaced; it should have beene printed before the Progresse of the Soule, in Page 301. before which it was written by the Author; if any other in the Impression doe fall out, which I know not of, hold me excused for I have endeavoured thy satisfaction.

Thine, I. M.

The closing lines of Walton's poem show that it must have been written for this edition, as they refer to what is the chief feature in the new issue of the poems (pp. 1-388, including some prose letters in Latin and English, pp. 275-300, but not including the Elegies upon the Author which in this edition and those of 1639, 1649, 1650, and 1654 are added in unnumbered pages). This new feature is their arrangement in a series of groups:⁷—

[pg lxiii]

While the poems were thus rearranged, the canon also underwent some alteration. One poem, viz. Basse's Epitaph on Shakespeare ('Renowned Chaucer lie a thought more nigh To rare Beaumont'), which had found its way into 1633, was dropped; but quite a number were added, twenty-eight, or twenty-nine if the epitaph On Himselfe be reckoned (as it appears) twice. Professor Norton, in the bibliographical note in the Grolier Club edition (which I occasionally call Grolier for convenience), has inadvertently given the Elegie on the L. C. as one of the poems first printed in 1635. This is an error. The poem was included in 1633 as the sixth in [pg lxiv] a group of Elegies, the rest of which are love poems. The editor of 1635 merely transferred it to its proper place among the Funerall Elegies, just as modern editors have transferred the Elegie on his Mistris ('By our first strange and fatall interview') from the funeral to the love Elegies.

The authenticity of the poems added in 1635 will be fully discussed later. The conclusion of the present editor is that of the English poems fifteen are certainly Donne's; three or four are probably or possibly his; the remaining eleven are pretty certainly not by Donne. There is no reason to think that 1635 is in any way a more authoritative edition than 1633. It has fewer signs of competent editing of the text, and it begins the process of sweeping in poems from every quarter, which was continued by Waldron, Simeon, and Grosart.

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

In the issuing of all these editions of Donne's poems, the younger Donne, who seems to have claimed the right to benefit by his father's literary remains, had apparently no part.⁹

[pg lxv]

By J. D.

VVITH

ELEGIES

ON

THE AUTHORS

DEATH.

LONDON.

Printed by M. F. for John Marriot,
and are to be sold at his Shop in S^t Dunstans
Church-yard in Fleet-street.
1639.

Title Page

[pg lxvi]

What assistance, if any, the printer and publisher had from others of Donne's friends and executors it is impossible now to say, though one can hardly imagine that without some assistance they could have got access to so many poems or been allowed to publish the elegies on his death, some of which refer to the publication of the poems.¹⁰ Walton, as we have seen, wrote verses to be prefixed to the second edition. At any rate in 1637 the younger John Donne made an effort to arrest the unauthorized issue of his father's works. Dr. Grosart first printed in his edition of the poems (Fuller Worthies' Library, 1873, ii, p. lii) the following petition and response preserved in the Record Office:

The humble petition of John Donne, Clercke.

Doth show unto your Grace that since y^e death of his Father (latly Deane of Pauls) there hath bene manie scandalous Pamflets printed, and published, under his name, which were [pg lxvii] none of his, by severall Boocksellers, withoute anie leave or Autoritie; in particuler one entitoled Juvenilia, printed for Henry Seale; another by John Marriott and William Sheares, entitoled Ignatius his Conclave, as allsoe certaine Poems by y^e sayde John Marriote, of which abuses thay have bene often warned by your Pe^tr and tolde that if thay desisted not, thay should be proceeded against beefore your Grace, which thay seeme soe much to slight, that thay profess soddainly to publish new impressions, verie much to the greife of your Pe^tr and the discredite of y^e memorie of his Father.

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

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

Dec: 16, 1637. W. Cant.

Despite this injunction the edition of 1639 was issued, as the previous ones had been, by Marriot and M. F. It was not till ten years later that the younger Donne succeeded in establishing his claim. In 1649 Marriot prepared a new edition, printed as before by M. F. The introductory matter remained unchanged except that the printing being more condensed it occupies three pages instead of five; the use of Roman and Italic type is exactly reversed; and there are some slight changes of spelling. The printing of the poems is also more condensed, so that they occupy pp. 1-368 instead of 1-388 in 1635-39. The text underwent some generally unimportant alteration or corruption, and two poems were added, the lines Upon Mr. Thomas Coryats Crudities (p. 172. It had been printed with Coryats Crudities in 1611) and the short poem called Sonnet. The Token (p. 72).

Only a very few copies of this edition were issued. W. C. Hazlitt describes one in his Bibliographical Collections, &c., [pg lxviii] Second Series (1882), p. 181. The only copy of whose existence I am aware is in the Library of Harvard College. It was used by Professor Norton in preparing the Grolier Club edition, and I owe my knowledge of it to this and to a careful description made for me by Miss Mary H. Buckingham. The title-page is here reproduced.

By J. D.

WITH

ELEGIES

ON

THE AUTHORS

DEATH.

LONDON.

Printed by M. F. for Iohn Marriot,
and are to be sold at his Shop in S^t Dunstans
Church-yard in Fleet-street.
1649.

Title Page

[pg lxix]

What happened seems to have been this. The younger Donne intervened before the edition was issued, and either by authority or agreement took it over. Marriot remained the publisher. The title-page which in 1649 was identical with that of 1635-39, except for the change of date and the 'W' in 'WITH', now appeared as follows:

By J. D.

WITH

ELEGIES

ON THE

AUTHORS DEATH.

TO WHICH

Is added divers Copies under his own hand
never before in print.

LONDON.

Printed for John Marriot, and are
to be sold by Richard Marriot at his shop
by Chancery lane end over against the Inner
Temple gate. 1650.

Title Page

[pg lxx]

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

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

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

In 1654 the poems were published once more, but printed from the same types as in 1650. The text of the poems (pp. 1-368) is identical in 1649, 1650, 1654; of the additional matter (pp. 369-392) in 1650, 1654. The only change made in the last is on the title-page, where a new publisher's name appears,¹¹ as in the following facsimile:

[pg lxxi]

By J. D.

WITH

ELEGIES

ON THE

AUTHORS DEATH.

TO WHICH

Is added divers Copies under his own hand
never before in Print.

LONDON,

Printed by J. Flesher, and are to be sold
by John Sweeting at the Angel in
Popeshead-Alley. 1654.

Title Page

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

[pg lxxii]

BY

JOHN DONNE,

late Dean of St. Pauls.

WITH

ELEGIES

ON THE

AUTHORS DEATH.

To which is added
Divers Copies under his own hand,
Never before Printed.

In the SAVOY,

Printed by T. N. for Henry Herringman, at the sign of
the Anchor, in the lower-walk of the
New-Exchange. 1669.

Title Page

[pg lxxiii]

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

This edition added two elegies which a sense of propriety had hitherto excluded from Donne's printed works, though they are in almost all the manuscript collections, and a satire which most of the manuscripts assign not to Donne but to Sir John Roe. The introductory material remains as in 1650-54 and unpaged; but the Elegies to the Author are now paged, and the poems with the prose letters inserted in 1633 and added to in 1635 (see above, p. lxiii, note 8), the Elegies to the Author, and the additional sheets inserted in 1650, occupy pp. 1-414. The love Elegies were numbered as in earlier editions, but the titles which some had borne were all dropped. Elegie XIIII (XII in this edition) was enlarged. Two new Elegies were added, one (Loves Progress) as Elegie XVIII, the second (Going to Bed) unnumbered and simply headed To his Mistress going to bed. The text of the poems underwent considerable alteration, some of the changes showing a reversion to the text of 1633, others a reference to manuscript sources, many editorial conjecture.

The edition of 1669 is the last edition of Donne's poems which can be regarded as in any degree an authority for the text of the poems, because it is the last which affords evidence of access to independent manuscript sources. All subsequent editions, till we come to those of Grosart and Chambers, were based on these. If the editor preferred one reading to another it was on purely internal evidence, a result of his own decision as to which was the more correct or the preferable reading. In 1719, for example, a new edition was brought out by the well-known publisher Jacob Tonson. The title-page runs as over.

[pg lxxiv]

ON SEVERAL

OCCASIONS.

Written by the Reverend

JOHN DONNE, D.D.

Late Dean of St. PAUL'S.

WITH

Elegies on the Author's Death.

To this Edition is added,

Some Account of the Life
of the Author.

LONDON:

Printed for J. Tonson, and Sold by
W. Taylor at the Ship in
Pater-noster-Row. 1719.

Title Page

This edition opens with the Epistle Dedicatory as in 1650-69, which is followed by an abridgement of Walton's Life of Donne. An examination of the text of the poems shows clearly that this edition was printed from that of 1669, but is by no means a slavish reproduction. The editor has consulted earlier [pg lxxv] editions and corrected mistakes, but I have found no evidence either that he knew the editions of 1633 and 1635, or had access to manuscript collections. He very wisely dropped the Satire 'Sleep next Society', inserted for the first time by the editor of 1669, and certainly not by Donne. It was reinserted by Chalmers in 1810.¹²

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

To Iohn Dunne.

In 1616 Ben Jonson's Epigrammes were published in the first (folio) edition of his works, and they contain the Epigram, printed in this edition, To Lucy, Countesse of Bedford, with Mr. Donnes Satyres. In these and similar cases the 'bookes' referred to are not printed but manuscript works. Mr. Chambers has pointed out (Poems of John Donne, i, pp. xxxviii-ix) an interesting reference in Drayton's Epistle to Reynolds to poems circulating thus 'by transcription'; and Anthony Wood speaks of Hoskins having left a 'book of poems neatly written'. In Donne's own letters we find references to his poems, his paradoxes and problems, and even a long treatise like the ΒΙΑΘΑΝΑΤΟΣ, being sent to his friends with injunctions of secrecy, and in the case of the last with an express statement that it had not been, and was not to be, printed. Sometimes the manuscript collection seems to have been made by Donne himself, or on his instruction, for a special friend and patron like Lord Ancrum; but after he had become a distinguished Churchman who, as Jonson told Drummond, 'repenteth highlie and seeketh to destroy all his poems,' it was his friends and admirers who collected and copied them. An instructive reference to the interest awakened in Donne's early poems by his fame as a preacher comes to us from Holland. Constantine Huyghens, the Dutch poet, and father of the more famous scientist, Christian, was a member of the Dutch embassy in 1618, 1621-23, and again in 1624. He moved in the best circles, and made the acquaintance of Donne ('great preacher and great conversationalist', he calls [pg lxxvii] him) at the house probably of Sir Robert Killigrew. Writing to his friend and fellow-poet Hooft, in 1630, he says:¹³

'I think I have often entertained you with reminiscences of Dr. Donne, now Dean of St. Pauls in London, and on account of this remunerative post (such is the custom of the English) held in high esteem, in still higher for the wealth of his unequalled wit, and yet more incomparable eloquence in the pulpit. Educated early at Court in the service of the great; experienced in the ways of the world; sharpened by study; in poetry, he is more famous than anyone. Many rich fruits [pg lxxviii] from the green branches of his wit¹⁴ have lain mellowing among the lovers of art, which now, when nearly rotten with age, they are distributing. Into my hands have fallen, by the help of my special friends among the gentlemen of that nation, some five and twenty of the best sort of medlars. Among our people, I cannot select anyone to whom they ought to be communicated sooner than to you,¹⁵ as this poets manner of conceit and expression are exactly yours, Sir.'

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

Had Donne undertaken the publication of his own poems, such of these manuscript collections as have been preserved—none of which are autograph, and few or none of which have a now traceable history—would have little importance for a modern editor. The most that they could do would be to show us occasionally what changes a poem had undergone between its earliest and its latest appearance. But Donne's poems were not published in this way, and the manuscripts cannot be ignored. They must have for his editor at least the same interest and importance as the Quartos have for the editor of Shakespeare. Whatever opinion he may hold, on a priori or a posteriori grounds, regarding the superior [pg lxxix] authority of the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays, no editor, not 'thirled to' a theory, will deny that a right reading has been preserved for us often by the Quartos and the Quartos only. No wise man will neglect the assistance even of the more imperfect of them. Before therefore discussing the relative value of the different editions, and the use that may be made of the manuscripts, it will be well to give a short description of the manuscripts which the present editor has consulted and used, of their relation to one another, their comparative value, and the relation of some of them to the editions. It is, of course, possible that there are manuscripts of Donne's poems which have not yet come to light; and among them may be some more correctly transcribed than any which has come into the present editor's hands. He has, however, examined between twenty and thirty, and with the feeling recently of moving in a circle—that new manuscripts were in part or whole duplicates of those which had been already examined, and confirmed readings already noted but did not suggest anything fresh.

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

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

Q. This is a small quarto manuscript, bound up with a number of other manuscripts, in a volume (MS. 216) in the library of Queen's College, Oxford. It is headed Mr. John Dunnes Satires, and contains the five Satires (which alone I have accepted as Donne's own) followed by A Storme, A Calme, and one song, The Curse (see p. 41), here headed Dirae. As Mr. Chambers says (Poems of John Donne, i, p. xxxvi), this is probably just the kind of 'booke' which Freeman read. [pg lxxx] The poems it contains are probably those of Donne's poems which were first known outside the circle of his intimate friends.

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

If manuscripts like Q and the Dyce MS. carry us back, as they seem to do, to the form in which the Satyres circulated before any of the later collections of Donne's poems were made (between 1620 and 1630), they are clearly of great importance for the editor. The text of the Satyres in 1633 and the later editions, which closely resembles that of one of the later MS. collections, presents many variants from the older tradition. It is a difficult matter to decide how far these may be the corrections of the author himself, or of the collector and editor.

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

W is a much larger 'book' than Q. It begins with the five [pg lxxxi] Satyres, as that does. Leaving one page blank, it then continues with a collection of the Elegies numbered, thirteen in all, of which twelve are Love Elegies, and one, the last, a Funeral Elegy, 'Sorrow who to this house.'¹⁶ These are followed by an Epithalamion (that generally called 'made at Lincolns Inn') and a number of verse letters to different friends, some of which are not contained in any of the old editions. So many of them are addressed to Rowland Woodward, or members of his family, that Mr. Gosse conjectures that the manuscript was prepared for him, but this cannot be proved.¹⁷ The letters are followed by the Holy Sonnets, these by La Corona, and the book closes (as many collections of the poems do) with a bundle of prose Paradoxes, followed in this case by the Epigrams. Both the Holy Sonnets and the Epigrams contain poems not printed in any of the old editions.

It should be noted that though W as a whole may have been transcribed as late as 1625, it clearly goes back in portions to an earlier date. The letters are headed e.g. To Mr. H. W., To Mr. C. B., &c. Now the custom in manuscripts [pg lxxxii] and editions is to bring these headings up to date, changing 'To Mr. H. W.' into 'To S^r Henry Wotton'. That they bear headings which were correct at the date when the poems were written points to their fairly direct descent from the original copies.

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

A23. This same manuscript (Addl. MS. 23229), which is a very miscellaneous collection of fragments, presented to the Museum by John Wilson Croker, contains two other portions of what seem to have been similar small 'books' of Donne's poems. The one is a fragment of what seems to have been a carefully written copy of the Epithalamion, with introductory Eclogue, written for the marriage of the Earl of Somerset. Probably it was one of those prepared and circulated at the time. The other consists of some leaves from a collection of the Satyres finely written on large quarto sheets.

G. This is a manuscript containing only the Metempsychosis, or Progresse of the Soule, now in the possession of Mr. Gosse, who (Life &c. of John Donne, i. 141) states that it 'belonged to a certain Bradon, and passed into the Phillipps Collection'. It is not without errors, but its text is, on the whole, more correct than that of the manuscript source from which the version of 1633 was set up in the first instance.

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

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

The first of these is represented by three manuscripts which I have examined, D (Dowden), H49 (Harleian MS. 4955), and Lec (Leconfield).

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

H49 is a collection of Donne's poems, in the British Museum, bound up with some by Ben Jonson and others. It is a large folio written throughout apparently in the same hand. It opens with some poems and masques by Jonson. A certain Doctor Andrewes' poems occupy folios 57-87. They are signed Franc: Andrilla. London August 14. 1629. Donne's poems follow, filling folios 88 to 144b. Thereafter follow more poems by Andrewes, Jonson, and others, with some prose letters by Jonson.

Lec. This is a large quarto manuscript, beautifully transcribed, belonging to Lord Leconfield and preserved at [pg lxxxiv] Petworth House. Many of the manuscripts in this collection were the property of Henry, ninth Earl of Northumberland (1564-1632), the friend who communicated the news of Donne's marriage to his father-in-law.

These three manuscripts are obviously derived from one common source. They contain the same poems, except that D has one more than H49, and both of these have some which are not in Lec. The order of the poems is the same, except that D and Lec show more signs of an attempt to group the poems than H49. The text, with some divergences, especially on the part of Lec, is identical. One instance seems to point to one of them being the source of the others. In the long Obsequies to the Ld. Harrington, Brother to the Countess of Bedford, the original copyist, after beginning l. 159 'Vertue whose flood', had inadvertently finished with the second half of l. 161, 'were [sic] blowne in, by thy first breath.' This error is found in all the three manuscripts. It may, however, have come from the common source of this poem, and there are divergences in order and text which make me think that they are thus derived from one common source.

A special interest attaches to this collection, apart from the relative excellence of its text and soundness of its canon, from the probability that a manuscript of this kind was used for a large, and that textually the best, part of the edition of 1633. This becomes manifest on a close examination of the order of the poems and of their text. Mr. Gosse has said, in speaking of the edition of 1633: 'The poems are thrown together without any attempt at intelligent order; neither date, nor subject, nor relation is in the least regarded.' This is not entirely the case. Satires, Elegies, Epigrams, Songs are grouped to some extent. The disorder which prevails is due to two causes: (1) to the fact that the printer set up from a variety of sources. There was no previous collected edition to guide him. Different friends supplied collections, and of a few poems there were earlier editions. He seems to have passed from one of these to another as was most convenient at [pg lxxxv] the moment. Perhaps some were lent him only for a time. The differences between copies of 1633 show that it was prepared carefully, but emended from time to time while the printing was actually going on. (2) The second source of the order of the poems is their order in the manuscripts from which they were copied. Now a comparison of the order in 1633 with that in D, H49, Lec reveals a close connexion between them, and throws light on the composition of 1633.

It is necessary, before instituting this comparison with 1633, to say a word on the order of the poems in D, H49, Lec themselves, as it is not quite the same in all three. H49 is the most irregular, perhaps therefore the earliest, each of the others showing efforts to obtain a better grouping of the poems. All three begin with the Satyres, of which D and Lec have five, H49 only four; but the text of Lec differs from that of the other two, agreeing more closely with the version of 1633 and of another group of manuscripts. They have all, then, thirteen Elegies in the same order. After these H49 continues with a number of letters (The Storme, The Calme, To S^r Henry Wotton, To S^r Henry Goodyere, To the Countesse of Bedford, To S^r Edward Herbert, and others) intermingled with Funeral Elegies (Lady Markham, Mris Boulstred) and religious poems (The Crosse, The Annuntiation, Good Friday). Then follows a long series of lyrical pieces, broken after The Funerall by A Letter to the Lady Carey, and Mrs. Essex Rich, the Epithalamion on the Palatine marriage, and an Old Letter ('At once from hence', p. 206). The lyrical pieces are then resumed, and the collection ends with the Somerset Eclogue and Epithalamion, the Letanye, both sets of Holy Sonnets, a letter (To the Countesse of Salisbury), and the long Obsequies to the Ld. Harrington.

D makes an effort to arrange the poems following the Elegies in groups. The Funeral Elegies come first, and two blank pages are headed An Elegye on Prince Henry. The letters are then brought together, and are followed by the religious poems dispersed in H49. The lyrical poems follow [pg lxxxvi] piece by piece as in H49, and the whole closes with the two epithalamia and the Obsequies to the Ld. Harrington.

The order in Lec resembles that of H49 more closely than that of D. The mixed letters, funeral elegies, and religious poems follow the Elegies as in H49, but Lec adds to them the two letters (Lady Carey and The Countess of Salisbury) and the Letanie which in H49 are dispersed through the lyrical pieces. Lec does not contain any of the Holy Sonnets, but after The Letanie ten pages are left blank, evidently intended to receive them. Thereafter, the lyrical poems follow piece by piece as in D, H49, except that The Prohibition ('Take heed of loving mee') is omitted—a fact of some interest when we come to consider 1633. Lec closes, like D, with the epithalamia and the Obsequies to the Lo: Harrington.

Turning now to 1633, we shall see that, whatever other sources the editor of that edition used, one was a collection identical with, or closely resembling, D, H49, Lec, especially Lec. That edition begins with the Progresse of the Soule, which was not derived from this manuscript. Thereafter follow the two sets of Holy Sonnets, the second set containing exactly the same number of sonnets, and in the same order, as in D, H49, whereas other manuscripts, e.g. B, O'F, S, S96, which will be described later, have more sonnets and in a different order; and W, which agrees otherwise with B, O'F, S, S96, adds three that are found nowhere else. The sonnets are followed in 1633 by the Epigrams, which are not in D, H49, Lec, but after that the resemblance of 1633 to D, H49, Lec becomes quite striking. These manuscripts, we have seen, begin with the Satyres. The edition, however, passes on at once to the Elegies. Of the thirteen given in D, H49, Lec, 1633 prints eight, omitting the first (The Bracelet), the second (Going to Bed), the tenth (Loves Warr), the eleventh (On his Mistris), and the thirteenth (Loves Progresse). That the editor, however, had before him, and intended to print, the Satyres and the thirteen Elegies as he found them in his copy0 of D, H49, Lec, is proved by the following extract which Mr. Chambers quotes from the Stationers' Register:

[pg lxxxvii]

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

This bar—which was probably dictated by reasons of propriety, though it is difficult to see why the first and the eleventh Elegies should have been singled out—was got over later as far as the Satyres were concerned. They are printed after all the other poems, just before the prose letters. But by this time the copy of D, H49, Lec had perhaps passed out of Marriot's hands, for the text of the Satyres seems to show that they were printed, not from this manuscript, but from one represented by another group, which I shall describe later. This is, however, not quite certain, for in Lec the version of the Satyres given is not the same as in D, H49, but is that of this second group of manuscripts. Several little details show that of the three manuscripts D, H49, and Lec the last most closely resembles 1633.

Following the Elegies in 1633 come a group of letters, epicedes, and religious poems, just as in H49, Lec (D re-groups them)—The Storme, The Calme, To Sir Henry Wotton, ('Sir, more than kisses'), The Crosse, Elegie on the Lady Marckham, Elegie on Mris Boulstred ('Death I recant'), To Sr Henry Goodyere, To Mr. Rowland Woodward, To Sr Henry Wootton ('Here's no more newes'), To the Countesse of Bedford ('Reason is our Soules left hand'), To the Countesse of Bedford ('Madam, you have refin'd'), To Sr Edward Herbert, at Julyers. Here 1633 diverges. Having got into letters to noble and other people the editor was anxious to [pg lxxxviii] continue them, and accordingly from another source (which I shall discuss later) he prints a long series of letters to the Countess of Bedford, the Countess of Huntingdon, Mr. T. W., and other more intimate friends (they are 'thou', the Countesses 'you'), and Mrs. Herbert. He perhaps returns to D, H49, Lec in those to The Lady Carey and Mrs. Essex Riche, from Amyens, and To the Countesse of Salisbury; and, as in that manuscript, the Palatine and Essex epithalamia (to which, however, 1633 adds that written at Lincoln's Inn) are followed immediately by the long Obsequies to Lord Harrington. Three odd Elegies follow, two of which (The Autumnall and The Picture, 'Image of her') occur in D, H49, Lec in the same detached fashion. Other manuscripts include them among the numbered Elegies. The Elegie on Prince Henry, Psalme 137 (probably not by Donne), Resurrection, imperfect, An hymne to the Saints, and to Marquesse Hamilton, An Epitaph upon Shakespeare (certainly not by Donne), Sapho to Philaenis, follow in 1633—a queerly consorted lot. The Elegie on Prince Henry is taken from the Lachrymae Lachrymarum of Joshua Sylvester (1612); the rest were possibly taken from some small commonplace-book. This would account for the doubtful poems, the only doubtful poems in 1633. These past, the close connexion with our manuscript is resumed. The Annuntiation is followed, as in H49, Lec, by The Litanie. Thereafter the lyrical pieces begin, as in these manuscripts, with the song, 'Send home my long strayd eyes to me.' This is followed by two pieces which are not in D, H49, Lec,—the impressive, difficult, and in manuscripts comparatively rare Nocturnall upon S. Lucies day, and the much commoner Witchcraft by a picture. Thereafter the poems follow piece by piece the order in D, H49, Lec¹⁸ until [pg lxxxix] The Curse is reached.¹⁹ Then, in what seems to have been the editor's or printer's regular method of proceeding in this edition, he laid aside the manuscript from which he was printing the Songs and Sonets to take up another piece of work that had come to hand, viz. An Anatomie of the World with A Funerall Elegie and Of the Progresse of the Soule, which he prints from the edition of 1625. Without apparent rhyme or reason these long poems are packed in between The Curse and The Extasie. With the latter poem 1633 resumes the songs and (with the exception of The Undertaking) follows the order in Lec to The Dampe, with which the series in the manuscripts closes. It has been noted that in Lec, The Prohibition (which in D, H49 follows Breake of day and precedes The Anniversarie) is omitted. This must have been the case in the manuscript used for 1633, for it is omitted at this place and though printed later was probably not derived from this source.

With The Dampe the manuscript which I am supposing the editor to have followed in the main probably came to an end. The poems which follow in 1633 are of a miscellaneous character and strangely conjoined. The Dissolution (p. 64), A Ieat Ring sent (p. 65), Negative Love (p. 66), The Prohibition (p. 67), The Expiration (p. 68), The Computation (p. 69), complete the tale of lyrics. A few odd elegies follow ('Language thou art,' 'You that are she,' 'To make the doubt clear') with The Paradox. A Hymne to Christ, at the Authors last going into Germany is given a page to itself, and is followed by The Lamentations of Jeremy, The Satyres, and A Hymne to God the Father. Thereafter come the prose letters and the Elegies upon the Author.

[pg xc]

What this comparison of the order of the poems points to is borne out by an examination of the text. The critical notes afford the materials for a further verification, and I need not tabulate the resemblances at length. In Elegie IV, for example, ll. 7, 8, which occur in all the other manuscripts and editions, are omitted by 1633 and by D, H49, Lec. Again, when a song has no title in 1633 it has frequently none in the manuscript. When there are evidently two versions of a poem, as e.g. in The Good-morrow and The Flea, the version given in 1633 is generally that of D, H49, Lec. Later editions often contaminate this with another version of the poem. At the same time there are ever and again divergences between the edition and the manuscript which are not to be ignored, and cannot always be explained. Some are due to error in one or the other, but some point either to divergence between the text of the editor's manuscript and ours, or to the use by the editor of other sources as well as this. In the fifth elegy (The Picture), for example, 1633 twice seems to follow, not D, H49, Lec, but another source, another group of manuscripts which has been preserved; and in The Aniversarie ll. 23, 24, the version of 1633 is not that of D, H49, Lec but of the same second group, which will be described later. On the whole, however, it is clear that a manuscript closely resembling that now represented by these three manuscripts supplied the editor of 1633 with the bulk of the shorter poems, especially the older and more privately circulated poems, the Songs and Sonets and Elegies. When he is not following this manuscript he draws from miscellaneous and occasionally inferior sources.

It would be interesting if we could tell whence this manuscript was obtained, and whether it was a priori likely to be a good one. On this point we can only conjecture, but it seems to me a fairly tenable conjecture (though not to be built on in any way) that the nucleus of the collection, at any rate, may have been a commonplace-book which had belonged to Sir Henry Goodyere. The ground for this conjecture is the inclusion in the edition of some prose letters addressed to [pg xci] this friend, one in Latin and seven in English. There is indeed also one addressed to the Countess of Bedford; but in the preceding letter to Goodyere Donne says, 'I send you, with this, a letter which I sent to the Countesse. It is not my use nor duty to do so. But for your having it, there were but two consents, and I am sure you have mine, and you are sure you have hers.' He goes on to refer to some verses which are the subject of the letter to the Countesse. There can be no doubt that the letter printed is the letter sent to Goodyere. The Burley MS. (see Pearsall-Smith's Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, Oxford, 1907) gives us a good example of how a gentleman in the seventeenth century dealt with his correspondence. That contains, besides various letters, as of Sidney to Queen Elizabeth on the Anjou marriage, and other matter which recurs in commonplace-books, a number of poems and letters, sent to Wotton by his friends, including Donne, and transcribed by one or other of Wotton's secretaries. The letters have no signatures appended, which is the case with the letters in the 1633 edition of Donne's poems. Wotton and Goodyere did not need to be reminded of the authors, and perhaps did not wish others to know. The reason then for the rather odd inclusion of nine prose letters in a collection of poems is probably, that the principal manuscript used by the printer was an 'old book'²⁰ which had belonged to Sir Henry Goodyere and in which his secretaries had transcribed poems and letters by Donne. Goodyere's collection of Donne's poems would not necessarily be exhaustive, but it would be full; it would not like the collections of others include poems that were none of Donne's; and its text would be accurate, allowing for the carelessness, indifference, and misunderstandings of secretaries and copyists.

[pg xcii]

After D, H49, Lec, the most carefully made collection of Donne's poems is one represented now by four distinct manuscripts:

A18. Additional MS. 18646, in the British Museum.

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

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

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

These four manuscripts are closely connected with one another, but a still more intimate relation exists between A18 and TCC on the one hand, N and TCD on the other. N and TCD are the larger collections; A18 and TCC contain each a smaller selection from the same body of poems. Indeed it would seem that N is a copy of TCD, A18 of TCC.

TCD, to start with it, is a beautifully written collection of Donne's poems beginning with the Satyres, passing on to an irregularly arranged series of elegies, letters, lyrics and epicedes, and closing with the Metempsychosis or Progresse of the Soule and the Divine Poems, which include the hymns written in the last years of the poet's life. N has the same poems, arranged in the same order, and its readings are nearly always identical with those of TCD, so far as I can judge from the collation made for me. The handwriting, unlike that of TCD, is in what is known as secretary hand and is somewhat difficult to read. What points to the one manuscript [pg xciii] being a copy of the other is that in 'Sweetest Love, I do not go' the scribe has accidentally dropped stanza 4, by giving its last line to stanza 3, and passing at once to the fifth stanza. Both manuscripts make this mistake, whereas A18 and TCC contain the complete poem. In other places N and TCD agree in their readings where A18 and TCC diverge. If the one is a copy of the other, TCD is probably the more authoritative, as it contains some marginal indications of authorship which N omits.

TCC is a smaller manuscript than TCD, but seems to be written in the same clear, fine hand. It does not contain the Satyres, the Elegy (XI. in this edition) The Bracelet, and the epistles The Storme and The Calme, with which N and TCD open. It looks, however, as though the sheets containing these poems had been torn out. Besides these, however, TCC omits, without any indication of their being lost, an Elegie to the Lady Bedford ('You that are she'), the Palatine Epithalamion, a long series of letters²¹ which in N, TCD follow that To M.M.H. and precede Sapho to Philaenis, the elegies on Prince Henry and on Lord Harington, and The Lamentations of Jeremy. There are occasional differences in the grouping of the poems; and TCC does not contain some poems by Beaumont, Corbet, Sir John Roe, and Sir Thomas Overbury which are found in N and TCD. In TCD these, with the exception of that by Beaumont, are carefully initialled, and therefore not ascribed to Donne. In N these initials are in some cases omitted; and some of the poems have found their way into editions of Donne's poems.

Presumably TCC is the earlier collection, and when TCD was made, the copyist was able to add fresh poems. It is clear, however, that in the case of even those poems which the two [pg xciv] have in common, the one manuscript is not simply a copy of the others. There are several divergences, and the mistake referred to above, in 'Sweetest Love, I do not go', is not made in TCC. Strangely enough, a similar mistake is made by TCC in transcribing Loves Deitie and is reproduced in A18.

A18, indeed, would seem to be a copy of TCC. It is not in the same handwriting, but in secretary hand. It omits the opening Satyres, &c., as does TCC, but there is no sign of excision. Presumably, then, the copy was made after these poems were, if they ever were, torn out of TCC. Wherever TCC diverges from TCD, A18 follows TCC.²²

Whoever was responsible for this collection of Donne's poems, it was evidently made with care, at least as regards the canon. Very few poems that are not certainly by Donne are included, and they are correctly initialled. The only uninitialled doubtful poems are A Paradox, 'Whoso terms Love a fire,' which in all the four manuscripts follows 'No Lover saith, I love', and Beaumont's letter to the Countess of Bedford, which begins, 'Soe may my verses pleasing be.' In N, TCD this follows Donne's letter to the same lady, 'You that are she and you.' It is regrettable that the text of the poems is not so good as the canon is pure. The punctuation is careless. There are numerous stupid blunders, and there are evidences of editing in the interest of more regular metre or a more obvious meaning. At times, however, it would seem that the copyist is following a different version of a poem or poems (e.g. the Satyres) from that given in D, H49, and other manuscripts, and is embodying corrections perhaps made by the author himself. It is quite credible that Donne, in sending copies of his poems at different times to different people, may have revised and amended them. It is quite clear, as my notes will show, that of certain poems more than one version (each correct in itself) was in circulation.

Was A18, N, TC, or a manuscript resembling it one of the [pg xcv] sources of the edition of 1633? In part, I think, it was. The most probable case at first sight is that of the Satyres. These, we have seen, Marriot was at first prohibited from printing. Otherwise they would have followed the Epigrams, and immediately preceded the Elegies. As it is, they come after all the other poems; they are edited with some cautious dashes; and their text is almost identical with that of N, TCD. In the first satire the only difference between 1633 and N, TCD occurs in l. 70, where N, TCD, with all the other manuscripts read—

1633,

'high' is either a slip or an editorial emendation. There are other cases of similar editing, not all of which it is possible to correct with confidence; but a study of the textual notes will show that in general 1633 follows the version preserved in N, TCD, and also in L74 (of which later), when the rest of the manuscripts present an interestingly different text. But strangely enough this version of the Satyres is also in Lec. This is the feature in which that manuscript diverges most strikingly from D and H49. Moreover in some details in which 1633 differs from A18, N, TC it agrees with Lec. It is possible therefore that the Satyres were printed from the same manuscript as the majority of the poems.

Again in the Letters not found in D, H49, Lec there is a close but not invariable agreement between the text of 1633 and that of this group of manuscripts. Those letters, which follow that To Sir Edward Herbert, are printed in 1633 in the same order as in this edition (pp. 195-226), except that the group of short letters beginning at p. 203 ('All haile sweete Poet') is here amplified and rearranged from W. Now in A18, N, TC these letters are also brought together (N, TCD adding some which are not in A18, TCC), and the special group referred to, of letters to intimate friends, are arranged in exactly the same order as in 1633; have the same headings, the same omissions, and the same accidental linking of two [pg xcvi] poems. In the other letters, to the Countesses of Bedford, Huntingdon, Salisbury, &c., the textual notes will show some striking resemblances between the edition and the manuscripts. In the difficult letter, 'T'have written then' (p. 195), 1633 follows N, TCD where O'F gives a different and in some details more correct text. In 'This twilight of two yeares' (p. 198) the strange reading of l. 35, 'a prayer prayes,' is obviously due to N, TCD, where 'a praiser prayes' has accidentally but explicably been written 'a prayer praise'. In the letter To the Countesse of Huntingdon (p. 201) the 1633 version of ll. 25, 26 is a correct rendering of what N, TCD give wrongly:

On the other hand there are some differences, as e.g. in the placing of ll. 40-2 in 'Honour is so sublime' (p. 218), which make it impossible to affirm that these poems were taken direct from this group of manuscripts as we know them, without alteration or emendation. The Progresse of the Soule or Metempsychosis, as printed in 1633, must have been taken in the first instance from this manuscript. In both the manuscripts and the edition, at l. 83 of the poem a blank space is left after 'did'; in both, l. 137 reads, 'To see the Prince, and soe fill'd the waye'; in both, 'kinde' is substituted for 'kindle' at l. 150; in l. 180 the 'uncloth'd child' of 1633 is explicable as an emendation of the 'encloth'd' of A18, N, TC; and similarly the 'leagues o'rpast', l. 296 of 1633, is probably due to the omission of 'many' before 'leagues' in A18, N, TC—'o'rpast' supplies the lost foot. It is clear, however, from a comparison of different copies that as 1633 passed through the press this poem underwent considerable correction and alteration; and in its final printed form there are errors which I have been enabled to correct from G.

The paraphrase of Lamentations, and the Epithalamion made at Lincolns Inn (which is not in D, H49, Lec) are other poems which show, in passages where there are divergent readings, a tendency to follow the readings of A18, N, [pg xcvii] TC, though in neither of these poems is the identity complete. It is further noteworthy that to several poems unnamed in D, H49, Lec the editor of 1633 has given the title which these bear in A18, N, TCC, and TCD, as though he had access to both the collections at the same time.

These two groups of manuscripts, which have come down to us, thus seem to represent the two principal sources of the edition of 1633. What other poems that edition contains were derived either from previously printed editions (The Anniversaries and the Elegy on Prince Henry) or were got from more miscellaneous and less trustworthy sources.

A third manuscript collection of Donne's poems is of interest because it seems very probable that it or a similar collection came into the hands of the printer before the second edition of 1635 was issued. A considerable number of the errors, or inferior readings, of the later editions seem to be traceable to its influence. At least it is remarkable how often when 1635 and the subsequent editions depart from 1633 and the general tradition of the manuscripts they have the support of this manuscript and this manuscript alone. This is the manuscript which I have called

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

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

The reader will notice how far this arrangement agrees with, how far it differs from, that adopted in 1635.

Of the twenty-eight new poems, genuine, doubtful, and spurious, added in 1635, this manuscript contains twenty, a larger number than I have found in any other single manuscript. An examination of the text of these does not, however, make it certain that all of them were derived from this source or from this source only. The text, for example, of the Elegie XI. The Bracelet, in 1635, is evidently taken from a manuscript differing in important respects from O'F and resembling closely Cy and P. Elegie XII, also, His parting from her, can hardly have been derived from O'F, as 1635 gives an incomplete, O'F has an entire, version of the poem. In others, however, e.g. Elegie XIII. Julia; Elegie XVI. On his Mistris; Satyre, 'Men write that love and reason disagree,' it will be seen that the text of 1635 agrees more closely with O'F than with any of the other manuscripts cited. The second of these, On his Mistris, is a notable case, and so are the four Divine Sonnets added in 1635. Most striking of all is the case of the Song, probably not by Donne, 'Soules joy now I am gone,' where the absurd readings 'Words' for 'Wounds' and 'hopes joyning' for 'lipp-joyning' (or perhaps 'lipps-joyning') must have come from this source. One can hardly believe that two independent manuscripts would perpetrate two such blunders. Taken with the many changes from the text of 1633 in which 1635 has the support of O'F, one can hardly doubt that among the fresh manuscript collections which came into the hands of the printer of 1635 (often only to mislead him) O'F was one.

Besides the twenty poems which passed into 1635, O'F attributes some eighteen other poems to Donne, of which few [pg xcix] are probably genuine.²³ Of the other manuscript collections I must speak more shortly. There is no evidence that any of them was used by the seventeenth-century editors.

B is a handsome, vellum-bound manuscript belonging to the Earl of Ellesmere's library at Bridgewater House. I am, I think, the first editor who has examined it. The volume bears on the fly-leaf the autograph signature ('J. Bridgewater') of the first Earl of Bridgewater, the son of Donne's early patron, Elizabeth's Lord Keeper and later Lord Chancellor. On the title-page 'Dr Donne' is written in the same hand. John Egerton, it will be remembered, was, like Donne, a volunteer in Essex's expedition to the Azores in 1597. In 1599 he and his elder brother Thomas were in Ireland, where the latter was killed, leaving John to be his father's heir. The book-number, inscribed on the second leaf, is in the handwriting of the second Earl of Bridgewater, the Elder Brother of Milton's Comus. The manuscript has thus interesting associations, and links with Donne's earliest patron. I had hoped that it might prove, being made for those who had known Donne all his life, an exceptionally good manuscript, but can hardly say that my expectations were fulfilled. It was probably put together in the twenties, because though it contains the Holy Sonnets it does not contain the hymns written at the close of the poet's life. It resembles O'F, S, S96, and P, rather than either of the first two collections which I have described, D, H49, Lec and A18, N, TC, in that it includes with Donne's poems a number of poems not by Donne,²⁴ but most of them [pg c] apparently by his contemporaries, Sir John Roe, Francis Beaumont, Jonson, and other of the wits of the first decade of the seventeenth century, the men who collaborated in writing witty poems on Coryat, or Characters in the style of Sir Thomas Overbury. In the case of some of these initials are added, and a later, but not modern, hand has gone over the manuscript and denied or queried Donne's authorship of others. Textually also B tends to range itself, especially in certain groups of poems, as the Satyres and Holy Sonnets, with O'F, S96, W when these differ from D, H49, Lec and A18, N, TC. In such cases the tradition which it represents is most correctly preserved in W. In a few poems the text of B is identical with that of S96. On the whole B cannot be accepted in any degree as an independent authority for the text. It is important only for its agreements with other manuscripts, as helping to establish what I may call the manuscript tradition, in various passages, as against the text of the editions.

Still less valuable as an independent textual authority is

P. This manuscript is a striking example of the kind of collections of poems, circulating in manuscript, which gentlemen in the seventeenth century caused to be prepared, and one cannot help wondering how they managed to understand the poems, so full is the text of gross and palpable errors. P is a small octavo manuscript, once in the Phillipps collection, now in the possession of Captain C. Shirley Harris, Oxford. On the cover of brown leather is stamped the royal arms of James I. On p. 1 is written, '1623 me possidet Hen. Champernowne de Dartington in Devonia, generosus.' Two other members of this old, and still extant, Devonshire family have owned the volume, as also Sir Edward Seymour (Knight Baronett) and Bridgett Brookbrige. The poems are written [pg ci] in a small, clear hand, and in Elizabethan character. Captain Harris has had a careful transcript of the poems made, and he allowed me after collating the original with the transcript to keep the latter by me for a long time.

The collection is in the nature of a commonplace-book, and includes a prose letter to Raleigh, and a good many poems by other poets than Donne, but the bulk of the volume is occupied with his poems,²⁵ and most of the poems are signed 'J. D. Finis.' The date of the collection is between 1619, when the poem When he went with the Lo Doncaster was written, and 1623, the date on the title-page. Neither for text nor for canon is P an authority, but the very carelessness with which it is written makes its testimony to certain readings indisputable. It makes no suggestion of conscious editing. In certain poems its text is identical with that of Cy, even to absurd errors. It sometimes, however, supports readings which are otherwise confined to O'F and the later editions of the poem, showing that these may be older than 1632-5.

Cy. The Carnaby MS. consists of one hundred folio [pg cii] pages bound in flexible vellum, and is now in the Harvard College Library, Boston. It is by no means an exhaustive collection; the poems are chaotically arranged; the text seems to be careless, and the spelling unusually erratic; but most of the poems it contains are genuine.²⁶ This manuscript is not as a whole identical with P, but some of the poems it contains must have come from that or from a common source.

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

[pg ciii]

The manuscript is divided into three parts, the first containing the five Satyres, the Litany and the Storme and Calme. The second consists of Elegies and Epigrammes and the third of Miscellanea, Poems, Elegies, Sonnets by the same Author. The elegies in the second part are, as in D, H49, Lec, and W, thirteen in number. Their arrangement is that of W, and, like W, JC gives The Comparison, which, D, H49, Lec do not, but drops Loves Progress, which the latter group contains. The text of these poems is generally that of W, but here and throughout JC abounds in errors and emendations. It contains one or two poems which were published in the edition of 1650, and which I have found in no other manuscript except O'F. In these JC supplies some obvious emendations. The poems in the third part are very irregularly arranged. This is the only manuscript, professing to be of Donne's poems, which contains the elegy, 'The heavens rejoice in motion,' which the younger Donne added to the edition of 1650. It is not a very correct, but is an interesting manuscript, with very few spurious poems. At the other end of the manuscript from Donne's, are poems by Corbet.

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

H40 and RP31, i.e. Harleian MS. 4064 in the British Museum, and Rawlinson Poetical MS. 31, in the Bodleian Library, are two manuscripts containing a fairly large number of Donne's poems intermingled with poems by other and [pg civ] contemporary authors. A note on the fly-leaf of RP31 declares that the manuscript contains 'Sir John Harringtons poems written in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth', which is certainly not an accurate description.²⁷ Some of the poems must have been written as late as 1610, and they are by various authors, Wotton, Jonson, Sir Edward Herbert, Sir John Roe, Donne, Beaumont, and probably others, but names of authors are only occasionally given. Each manuscript starts with the words 'Prolegomena Quaedam', and the poem, 'Paynter while there thou sit'st.' The poems follow the same order in the two manuscripts, but of poems not by Donne RP31 contains several which are not in H40, and, on the other hand, of poems by Donne H40 inserts at various places quite a number, especially of songs, which are not in RP31. The latter is, in short, a miscellaneous collection of Elizabethan and early Jacobean poems, including several of Donne's; the former, the same collection in which Donne's poems have become by insertion the principal feature. I have cited the readings of H40 throughout; those of RP31 only when they differ from H40, or when I wish to emphasize their agreement. Wherever derived from, the poems are generally carefully and intelligently transcribed. They contain some unpublished poems of Jonson, Sir Edward Herbert, and probably Daniel.

L74. The Lansdowne MS. 740, in the British Museum, is an interesting collection of Donne's mainly earlier and secular poems, along with several by contemporaries.²⁸ The text of [pg cv] the Satyres connects this collection with A18, N, TC, but it is probably older, as it contains none of the Divine Poems and no poem written later than 1610. Its interest, apart from the support which it lends to the readings of other manuscripts, centres in the evidence it affords as to the authorship of some of the unauthentic poems which have been ascribed to Donne.

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

The manuscript is dated, at the end, '19th July 1620,' and contains no poems which are demonstrably later than this date, or indeed than 1610. As, however, it contains several of the Divine Poems, including La Corona, but not the Holy Sonnets, it affords a valuable clue to the date of these poems,—of which more elsewhere. The collection is an ambitious one, and an attempt has been made at classification. Six Satires are followed by twenty-seven Elegies (one is torn out) under which head love and funeral elegies are included, and these by a long series of songs with the Divine Poems interspersed. Some of the songs, as of the elegies, are not by Donne.²⁹

[pg cvi]

S96. Stowe MS. 961 is a small folio volume in the British Museum, containing a collection of Donne's poems very neatly and prettily transcribed. It cannot have been made before 1630 as it contains all the three hymns written during the poet's last illnesses. Indeed it is the only manuscript which I have found containing a copy of the Hymne to God, my God in my Sicknes. It is a very miscellaneous collection. Three satires are followed by the long obsequies to the Lord Harington, and these by a sequence of Letters, Funeral Elegies, Elegies, and Songs intermingled. It is regrettable that so well-written a manuscript is not more reliable, but its text is poor, its titles sometimes erroneous, and its ascriptions inaccurate.³⁰

(3) In the third class I place manuscripts which are not primarily collections of Donne's poems but collections of seventeenth-century poems among which Donne's are included. It is not easy to draw a hard and fast line between this class and the last because, as has been seen, most of the manuscripts at the end of the last list contain poems which are not, or probably are not, by Donne. Still, in these collections Donne's work predominates, and the tendency of the collector is to bring the other poems under his aegis. Initials like J. R., F. B., J. H. disappear, or J. D. takes their place. In the case of these last collections this is not so. Poems by Donne are included with poems which the collector assigns to other wits. Obviously this class could be made to include many different [pg cvii] kinds of collections, ranging from those in which Donne is a prominent figure to those which include only one or two of his poems. But such manuscripts have comparatively little value and no authority for the textual critic, though they are not without importance for the student of the canon of Donne's poetry. I shall mention only one or two, though I have examined a good many more.

A25. Additional MS. 25707, in the British Museum, is a large and interesting collection, written in several different hands, of early seventeenth-century poems, Jacobean and Caroline. It contains an Elegie by Henry Skipwith on the death of King Charles I, but most of the poems are early Jacobean, and either the bulk of the collection was made before this and some other poems were inserted, or it is derived from older collections. Indeed, most of the poems by Donne were probably got from some older collection or collections not unlike some of those already described. They consist of twelve elegies arranged in the same order as in JC, W, and to some extent O'F, which is not the order of D, H49, Lec and 1633; a number of Songs with some Letters and Obsequies following one another sometimes in batches, at times interspersed with poems by other writers; the five Satyres, separated from the other poems and showing some evidences in the text of deriving from a collection like Q or its duplicate in the Dyce collection.³¹ The only one of the Divine Poems which A25 contains is The Crosse. No poem which can be proved to have been written later than 1610 is included.

The poems by Donne in this manuscript are generally, but not always, initialled J. D., and are thus distinguished from others by F. B., H. K., N. H., H. W., Sr H. G., T. P., T. G., G. Lucy., No. B., &c. The care with which this has been done lends interest to those poems which are here ascribed to Donne but are not elsewhere assigned to him. A25 (with its partial duplicate C) is the only manuscript which attributes to [pg cviii] 'J. D.' the Psalm, 'By Euphrates flowery side,' that was printed in 1633 and all the subsequent editions.³²

C. A strange duplicate of certain parts of A25 is a small manuscript in the Cambridge University Library belonging to the Baumgartner collection. It is a thin folio, much damaged by damp, and scribbled over. A long poem, In cladem Rheensen ('Verses upon the slaughter at the Isle of Rhees'), has been used by the cataloguer to date the manuscript, but as this has evidently been inserted when the whole was bound, the rest of the contents may be older or younger. The collection opens with three of the Elegies contained in A25. It then omits eleven poems which are in A25, and continues with twenty Songs and Obsequies, following the order of A25 but omitting the intervening poems. Some nine more poems are given, following the order of A25, but many are omitted in C which are found in A25, and the poems in C are often only fragments of the whole poems in A25. Evidently C is a selection of poems either made directly from A25, or from the collection of Donne's poems (with one or two by Beaumont and others) which A25 itself drew from.

A10. Additional MS. 10309, in the British Museum, is a little octavo volume which was once the property of Margaret Bellasis, probably the eldest daughter of Thomas, first Lord Fauconberg. It is a very miscellaneous collection of prose (Hall's Characterismes of Vice) and verse. Of Donne's undoubted poems there are very few, but there is an interesting group of poems by Roe or others (the authors are not named in the manuscript) which are frequently found with Donne's, and some of which have been printed as his.³³

[pg cix]

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

A Collection of

Original Poetry

written about the time of

Ben: Jonson

qui ob. 1637

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

TCD (Second Collection).³⁴ The large manuscript volume in Trinity College, Dublin, contains two collections of poems (though editors have spoken of them as one) of very different character and value. The first I have already described. It occupies folios 1 to 292. On folio 293 a new hand begins with the song, 'Victorious Beauty though your eyes,' and from that folio to folio 565 (but some folios are torn out) follows a long and miscellaneous series of early seventeenth-century poems. There are numerous references to Buckingham, but none to the Long Parliament or the events which followed, so that the collection was probably put together before 1640. [pg cx] The poems are ascribed to different authors in a very haphazard and untrustworthy fashion. James I is credited with Jonson's epigram on the Union of the Crowns; Donne's The Baite is given to Wotton; and Wotton's 'O Faithless World' to Robert Wisedom. Probably there is more reliance to be put on the ascriptions of later and Caroline poems, but for the student of Donne and early Jacobean poetry the collection has no value. Some of Donne's poems occur, and it is noteworthy that the version given is often a different one from that occurring in the first part of the volume. Probably two distinct collections have been bound up together.

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

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

The Burley MS., to which I refer once or twice, and which is a manuscript of great importance for the editor of Donne's letters, is not a collection of poems. It is a commonplace-book of Sir Henry Wotton's in the handwriting of his secretaries. Amid its varied contents are some letters, unsigned but indubitably by Donne; ten of his Paradoxes with a covering letter; and a few poems of Donne's with other poems. Of the last, one is certainly by Donne (H. W. in Hibernia belligeranti), and I have incorporated it. The others seem to [pg cxi] me exceedingly doubtful. They are probably the work of other wits among Wotton's friends. I have printed a selection from them in Appendix C.³⁵

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

The manuscripts fall into three main groups (1) D, H49, Lec. These with a portion of 1633 come from a common source. (2) A18, N, TCC, TCD. These also come from a single stream and some parts of 1633 follow them. L74 is closely connected with them, at least in parts. (3) A25, B, Cy, JC, O'F, P, S, S96, W. These cannot be traced in their entirety to a single head, but in certain groups of poems they tend to follow a common tradition which may or may not be that of one or other of the first two groups. Of the Elegies, for example, A25, JC, O'F and W transcribe twelve in the same order and with much the same text. Again, B, O'F, S96, and W have taken the Holy Sonnets from a common source, but [pg cxii] O'F has corrected or altered its readings by a reference to a manuscript resembling D, H49, Lec, while W has a more correct version than the others of the common tradition, and three sonnets which none of these include. Generally, whenever B, O'F, S96, and W derive from the same source, W is much the most reliable witness.

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

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

Of the three most recent editors—the first to attempt to obtain a true text—of Donne's poems, each has pursued a different plan. The late Dr. Grosart³⁶ proceeded on a principle [pg cxiii] which makes it exceedingly difficult to determine accurately what is the source of, or authority for, any particular reading he adopted. He printed now from one manuscript, now from another, but corrected the errors of the manuscript by one or other of the editions, most often by that of 1669. He made no estimate of the relative value of either manuscripts or editions, nor used them in any systematic fashion.

The Grolier Club edition³⁷ was constructed on a different principle. For all those poems which 1633 contains, that edition was accepted as the basis; for other poems, the first edition, whichever that might be. The text of 1633 is reproduced very closely, even when the editor leans to the acceptance of a later reading as correct. Only one or two corrections are [pg cxiv] actually incorporated in the text. But the punctuation has been freely altered throughout, and no record of these changes is preserved in the textual notes even when they affect the sense. In more than one instance the words of 1633 are retained in this edition but are made to convey a different meaning from that which they bear in the original.

The edition of Donne's poems prepared by Mr. E. K. Chambers³⁸ for the Muses Library was not based, like Dr. Grosart's, on a casual use of individual manuscripts and editions, nor like the Grolier Club edition on a rigid adherence to the first edition, but on an eclectic use of all the seventeenth-century editions, supplemented by an occasional reference to one or other of the manuscript collections, either at first hand or through Dr. Grosart.

Of these three methods, that of the Grolier Club editor is, there can be no doubt, the soundest. The edition of 1633 comes to us, indeed, with no a priori authority. It was not [pg cxv] published, or (like the sermons) prepared for the press³⁹ by the author; nor (as in the case of the first folio edition of Shakespeare's plays) was it issued by the author's executors.

But if we apply to 1633 the a posteriori tests described by Dr. Moore in his work on the textual criticism of Dante's Divina Commedia, if we select a number of test passages, passages where the editions vary, but where one reading can be clearly shown to be intrinsically the more probable, by certain definite tests,⁴⁰ we shall find that 1633 is, taken all over, [pg cxvi] far and away superior to any other single edition, and, I may add at once, to any single manuscript.

Moreover, any careful examination of the later editions, of their variations from 1633, and of the text of the poems which they print for the first time, shows clearly that some method more trustworthy than individual preference must be found if we are to distinguish between those of their variations which have, and those which have not, some authority behind them; those which are derived from a fresh reference to manuscript sources, and those which are due to carelessness, to misunderstanding, or to unwarrantable emendation. Apart from some such sifting, an edition of Donne based, like Mr. Chambers', on an eclectic use of the editions is exactly in the same position as would be an edition of Shakespeare based on an eclectic use of the Folios, helped out by a quite occasional and quite eclectic reference to a quarto. A plain reprint of 1633 like Alford's (of such poems as he publishes) has fewer serious errors than an eclectic text.

It is here that the manuscripts come to our aid. To take, indeed, any single manuscript, as Dr. Grosart did, and select this or that reading from it as seems to you good, is not a justifiable procedure. This is simply to add to the editions one more possible source of error. There is no single manuscript which could with any security be substituted for 1633. Our analysis of that edition has made it appear probable that a manuscript resembling D, H49, Lec was the source of a large part of its text. But it would be very rash to prefer D, H49, Lec as a whole to 1633.⁴¹ It corrects some errors in that edition; it has others of its own. Even W, which has [pg cxvii] a completer version of some poems than 1633, in these poems makes some mistakes which 1633 avoids.

If the manuscripts are to help us it must be by collating them, and establishing what one might call the agreement of the manuscripts whether universal or partial, noting in the latter case the comparative value of the different groups. When we do this we get at once an interesting result. We find that in about nine cases out of ten the agreement of the manuscripts is on the side of those readings of 1633 which are supported by the tests of intrinsic probability referred to above,⁴² and on the other hand we find that sometimes the agreement of the manuscripts is on the side of the later editions, [pg cxviii] and that in such cases there is a good deal to be said for the later reading.⁴³

The first result of a collation of the manuscripts is thus to vindicate 1633, and to provide us with a means of distinguishing among later variants those which have, from those which have not, authority. But in vindicating 1633 the agreement of the manuscripts vindicates itself. If B's evidence is found always or most often to support A, a good witness, on those points on which A's evidence is in itself most probably correct, not only is A's evidence strengthened but B's own [pg cxix] character as a witness is established, and he may be called in when A, followed by C, an inferior witness, has gone astray. In some cases the manuscripts alone give us what is obviously the correct reading, e.g. p. 25, l. 22, 'But wee no more' for 'But now no more'; p. 72, l. 26, 'his first minute' for 'his short minute'. These are exceptionally clear cases. There are some where, I have no doubt, my preference of the reading of the manuscripts to that of the editions will not be approved by every reader. I have adopted no rigid rule, but considered each case on its merits. All the circumstances already referred to have to be weighed—which reading is most likely to have arisen from the other, what is Donne's usage elsewhere, what Scholastic or other 'metaphysical' dogma underlies the conceit, and what is the source of the text of a particular poem in 1633.

For my analysis of this edition has thrown light upon what of itself is evident—that of some poems or groups of poems 1633 provides a more accurate text than of others, viz. of those for which its source was a manuscript resembling D, H49, Lec, but possibly more correct than any one of these, or revised by an editor who knew the poems. But in printing some of the poems, e.g. The Progresse of the Soule, a number of the letters to noble ladies and others,⁴⁴ the Epithalamion made at Lincolns Inne, The Prohibition, and a few others, for which D, H49, Lec was not available, 1633 seems to have followed an inferior manuscript, A18, N, TC or one resembling it. In these cases it is possible to correct 1633 by comparing it with a better single manuscript, as G or W, or group of manuscripts, as D, H49, Lec. Sometimes even a generally inferior manuscript like O'F seems to offer a better text of an individual poem, at least in parts, for [pg cxx] occasionally the correct reading has been preserved in only one or two manuscripts. Only W among eleven manuscripts which I have recorded (and I have examined others) preserves the reading in the Epithalamion made at Lincolns Inne, p. 143, l. 57:

—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 [pg cxxi] 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, [pg cxxii] 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 [pg cxxiv] 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 ϑermyte' (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.'