Ad Henricum Wottonum.

Wotton, the country, and the country swayne,

How can they yeeld a Poet any sense?

How can they stirre him up or heat his vaine?

How can they feed him with intelligence?

You have that fire which can a witt enflame

In happy London Englands fayrest eye:

Well may you Poets have of worthy name

Which have the foode and life of Poetry.

And yet the Country or the towne may swaye

Or beare a part, as clownes do in a play.

Donne was one of those to whom Wotton showed Bacon's poem, and the result was the present letter which occasionally echoes Bacon's words. Wotton replied to it in some characteristic verses preserved in B (Lord Ellesmere's MS.) and P (belonging to Captain Harris). I print it from the former:

To J: D: from M^r H: W:

Worthie Sir:

Tis not a coate of gray or Shepheards life,

Tis not in feilds or woods remote to live,

That adds or takes from one that peace or strife,

Which to our dayes such good or ill doth give:

5It is the mind that make the mans estate

For ever happy or unfortunate.

Then first the mind of passions must be free

Of him that would to happiness aspire;

Whether in Princes Pallaces he bee,

10Or whether to his cottage he retire;

For our desires that on extreames are bent

Are frends to care and traitors to content.

Nor should wee blame our frends though false they bee

Since there are thousands false, for one that's true,

15But our own blindness, that we cannot see

To chuse the best, although they bee but few:

For he that every fained frend will trust,

Proves true to frend, but to himself unjust.

The faults wee have are they that make our woe,

20Our virtues are the motives of our joye,

Then is it vayne, if wee to desarts goe

To seek our bliss, or shroud us from annoy:

Our place need not be changed, but our Will,

For every where wee may do good or ill.

25But this I doe not dedicate to thee,

As one that holds himself fitt to advise,

Or that my lines to him should precepts be

That is less ill then I, and much more wise:

Yet 'tis no harme mortality to preach,

For men doe often learne when they do teach.

The date of the débat is before April 1598, when Bastard's Chrestoleros was entered on the Stationers' Register, probably 1597-8, the interval between the return of the Islands Expedition and Donne's entry into the household of Sir Thomas Egerton. Mr. Chambers has shown that during this interval Donne was occasionally employed by Cecil to carry letters to and from the Commanders of the English forces still in France. But it was not till about April 1598 that he found permanent employment.

l. 8. Remoraes; Browne doubts 'whether the story of the remora be not unreasonably amplified'. The name is given to any of the fish belonging to the family Echeneididae, which by means of a suctorial disk situated on the top of the head adhere to sharks, other large fishes, vessels, &c., letting go when they choose. The ancient naturalists reported that they could arrest a ship in full course. See Bartholomaeus Anglicus, Lib. xiii, De Aqua et ejus Ornatu.

l. 11. the even line is the reading of all the MS. copies, and must have been taken from one of these by the 1669 editor. The use of the word is archaic and therefore more probably Donne's than an editor's emendation. Compare Chaucer's 'Of his stature he was of even length', i.e. 'a just mean between extremes, of proper magnitude or degree'. The 'even line' is, as the context shows, the exact mean between the 'adverse icy poles'. I suspect that 'raging' is an editorial emendation. There are several demonstrable errors in the 1633 text of this poem. The 'other' of P, and 'over' of S, are errors which point to 'even' rather than 'raging'.

l. 12. th'adverse icy poles. The 'poles' of most MSS. is obviously necessary if we are to have two temperate regions. The expression is a condensed one for 'either of the adverse icy poles'. Compare:

He that at sea prayes for more winde, as well

Under the poles may begge cold, heat in hell.

One cannot be under both the poles at once. One is 'under' the pole in Donne's cosmology because the poles are not the termini of the earth's axis but of the heavens'. 'For the North and Southern Pole, are the invariable terms of that Axis whereon the Heavens do move.' Browne, Pseud. Epidem. vi. 7.

Tristior illa

Terra sub ambobus non iacet ulla polis. Ovid, Pont. ii. 7. 64.

l. 17. Can dung and garlike, &c. This is the text of the 1633 edition made consistent with itself, and it has the support of several MSS. Clearly if we are to read 'or' in one line we must do so in both, and adopt the 1635-69 text. It is tempting at first sight to do so, but I believe the MSS. are right. What Donne means is, 'Can we procure a perfume, or a medicine, by blending opposite stenches or poisons?' This is his expansion of the question, 'Shall cities, built of both extremes, be chosen?' The change to 'or' obscures the exact metaphysical point. It would be an improvement perhaps to bracket the lines as parenthetical.

According to Donne's medical science the scorpion (probably its flesh) was an antidote to its own poison: 'I have as many Antidotes as the Devill hath poisons, I have as much mercy as the Devill hath malice; There must be scorpions in the world; but the Scorpion shall cure the Scorpion; there must be tentations; but tentations shall adde to mine and to thy glory, and Eripiam, I will deliver thee.' Sermons 80. 52. 527. Obviously Donne could not ask in surprise, 'Can a Scorpion or Torpedo cure a man?' Each can; it is their combination he deprecates. In Ignatius his Conclave he writes, 'and two Poysons mingled might do no harme.'

In speaking of scent made from dung Donne has probably the statement of Paracelsus in his mind to which Sir Thomas Browne also refers: 'And yet if, as Paracelsus encourageth, Ordure makes the best Musk, and from the most fetid substances may be drawn the most odoriferous Essences; all that had not Vespasian's nose, might boldly swear, here was a subject fit for such extractions.' Pseudodoxia Epidemica, iii. 26.

Page 181, ll. 19-20. Cities are worst of all three; of all three

(O knottie riddle) each is worst equally.

This is the punctuation of 1633 and of D, H49, Lec, and W. The later punctuation which Chambers has adopted and modernized, is not found to be an improvement if scrutinized. He reads:

Cities are worst of all three; of all three?

O knotty riddle! each is worst equally.

The mark of interrogation after 'three' would be justifiable only if the poet were going to expatiate upon the badness of cities. 'Of all three? that is saying very little, &c., &c.' But this is not the tenor of the passage. From one thought he is led to another. 'Cities are worst of all three (i.e. Court, City, Country). Nay, each is equally the worst.' The interjected 'O knottie riddle' does not mean, 'Who is to say which is the worst?' but 'How can it come that each is worst? This is a riddle!' Donne here echoes Bacon:

And where's the citty from foul vice so free

But may be term'd the worst of all the three?

ll. 25-6. The country is a desert, &c. The evidence for this reading is so overwhelming that it is impossible to reject it. I have modified the punctuation to bring out more clearly what I take it to mean. 'The country is a desert where no goodness is native, and therefore rightly understood. Goodness in the country is like a foreign language, a faculty not born with us, but acquired with pain, and never thoroughly understood and mastered.' Only Dr. Johnson could stigmatize in adequate terms so harsh a construction, but the 1635-54 emendation is not less obscure. Does it mean that any good which comes there quits it with all speed, while that which is native and must stay is not understood? This is not a lucid or just enough thought to warrant departure from the better authorized text.

l. 27. prone to more evills; The reading 'mere evils' of several MSS., including D, H49, Lec, is tempting and may be right. In that case 'meere' has the now obsolete meaning of 'pure, unadulterated', 'meere English', 'meere Irish', &c. in O.E.D., or more fully, 'absolute, entire, sheer, perfect, downright', as in 'Th'obstinacie, willfull disobedience, meere lienge and disceite of the countrie gentlemen,' Hist. MSS. Com. (1600), quoted in O.E.D.; 'the mere perdition of the Turkish fleet,' Shakespeare, Othello, II. ii. 3. Such a strong adjective would however come better after 'devills' in the next line. Placed here it disturbs the climax. What Donne says here is that men in the country become beasts, and more prone to evil than beasts because of their higher faculties:

If lecherous goats, if serpents envious

Cannot be damn'd; Alas; why should I bee?

Why should intent or reason, borne in mee,

Make sinnes, else equall, in mee more heinous?

Holy Sonnets, IX, p. [326].

And in this same letter, ll. 41-2, he develops the thought further.

Page 182, ll. 59-62. Only in this one thing, be no Galenist, &c. The Galenists perceived in the living body four humours; hot, cold, moist, and dry, and held that in health these were present in fixed proportions. Diseases were due to disturbance of these proportions, and were to be cured by correction of the disproportion by drugs, these being used as they were themselves hot, cold, moist, or dry; to add to whichever humours were defective. The chymiques or school of Paracelsus, held that each disease had an essence which might be got rid of by being purged or driven from the body by an antagonistic remedy.

Page 183. To S^r Henry Goodyere.

Goodyere and Walton form between them the Boswell to whom we owe our fullest and most intimate knowledge of the life of Donne. To the former he wrote apparently a weekly letter in the years of his residence at Pyrford, Mitcham, and London. And Goodyere preserved his letters and his poems. Of the letters published by Donne's son in 1651-4, the greatest number, as well as the most interesting and intimate, are addressed to Goodyere. Some appeared with the first edition of the poems, and it is ultimately to Goodyere that we probably owe the generally sound text of that edition.

Sir Henry Goodyere was the son of Sir William Goodyere of Monks Kirby in Warwickshire, who was knighted by James in 1603, and was the nephew of Sir Henry Goodyere (1534-95) of Polesworth in Warwickshire. The older Sir Henry had got into trouble in connexion with one of the conspiracies on behalf of Mary, Queen of Scots, but redeemed his good name by excellent service in the Low Countries, where he was knighted by Leicester. He married Frances, daughter of Hugh Lowther of Lowther, Westmoreland, and left two daughters, Frances and Anne. The latter, who succeeded the Countess of Bedford as patroness to the poet Michael Drayton and as the 'Idea' of his sonnets, married Sir Henry Raynsford. The former married her cousin, the son of Sir William, and made him proprietor of Polesworth, to which repeated allusion is made in Donne's Letters. He was knighted, in 1599, in Dublin, by Essex. He is addressed as a knight by Donne in 1601, and appears as such in the earliest years of King James. (See Nichol's Progresses of King James.)

He was a friend of wits and poets and himself wrote occasional verses in rivalry with his friends. Like Donne he wrote satirical congratulatory verses for Coryats Crudities (1611) and an elegy on Prince Henry for the second edition of Sylvester's Lachrymae Lachrymarum (1613), and there are others in MS., including an Epithalamium on Princess Elizabeth.

The estate which Goodyere inherited was apparently encumbered, and he was himself generous and extravagant. He was involved all his life in money troubles and frequently petitioned for relief and appointments. It was to him probably that Donne made a present of one hundred pounds when his own fortunes had bettered. The date of the present letter was between 1605 and 1608, when Donne was living at Mitcham. These were the years in which Goodyere was a courtier. In 1604-5 £120 was stolen from his chamber 'at Court', and in 1605 he participated in the jousting at the Barriers. Life at the dissolute and glittering Court of James I was ruinously extravagant, and the note of warning in Donne's poem is very audible. Sir Henry Goodyere died in March 1627-8.

Additional MS. 23229 (A23) contains the following:

Funerall Verses sett on the hearse

of Henry Goodere knighte; late of Polesworth.