Page 412. An Elegie.
Grosart prints this very incorrectly. He does not even reproduce correctly the MS. S, which he professes to follow. Chambers follows Grosart, adopting some of the variants of the Haslewood-Kingsborough MS. reported by Grosart. They both have the strange reading 'cut in bands' in l. 11, which as a fact is not even in S, from which Grosart professes to derive it. The reading of all the MSS., 'but in his handes,' makes quite good sense. The Scot wants matter, except in his hands, i.e. dirt, which is 'matter out of place'. The reading, 'writ in his hands', which Chambers reports after Grosart, is probably a mistake of the latter's. Indeed his own note suggests that the reading of H-K is 'but in's hands'.
Page 417. To the Countesse of Huntington.
It looks as if some lines of this poem had been lost. The first sentence has no subject unless 'That' in the second line be a demonstrative—a very awkward construction.
If written by Donne this poem must have been composed about the same time as The Storme and The Calme. He is writing apparently from the New World, from the Azores. But it is as impossible to recover the circumstances in which the poem was written as to be sure who wrote it.
Page 422. Elegie.
ll. 5-6. denounce ... pronounce. The reading of the MSS. seems to me plainly the correct one. 'In others, terror, anguish and grief announce the approach of death. Her courage, ease and joy in dying pronounce the happiness of her state.' The reading of the printed texts is due to the error by which 1635 and 1639 took 'comming' as an epithet to 'terror' as 'happy' is to 'state'. Some MSS. read 'terrors' and 'joyes'.
l. 22. Their spoyles, &c. I have adopted the MS. reading here, though with some hesitation, because (1) it is the more difficult reading: 'Soules to thy conquest beare' seems more like a conjectural emendation than the other reading, (2) The construction of the line in the printed texts is harsh—one does not bear anything 'to a conquest', (3) the meaning suits the context better. It is not souls that are spoken of, but bodies. The bodies of the wicked become the spoil of death, trophies of his victory over Adam; not so those of the good, which shall rise again. See 1 Cor. xv. 54-5.
Page 424. Psalme 137.
This Psalm is found in a MS. collection of metrical psalms (Rawlinson Poetical 161), in the Bodleian Library, transcribed by a certain R. Crane. The list of authors is Fr. Dav., Jos. Be., Rich. Cripps, Chr. Dav., Th. Carry. That Davison is the author of this particular Psalm is strongly suggested by the poetical Induction which in style and verse resembles the psalm. The induction is signed 'Fr. Dav.' The first verse runs:
Come Urania, heavenly Muse,
and infuse
Sacred flame to my invention;
Sing so loud that Angells may
heare thy lay,
Lending to thy note attention.
Page 429. Song.
Soules joy, now I am gone, &c. George Herbert, in the Temple, gives A Parodie of this poem, opening:
Soul's joy, when thou art gone,
And I alone,
Which cannot be,
Because Thou dost abide with me,
And I depend on Thee.
The parody does not extend beyond the first verse.
It was one of the aims of Herbert to turn the Muse from profane love verses to sacred purposes. Mr. Chambers points to another reference to this poem in some very bad verses by Sir Kenelm Digby in Bright's edition of Digby's Poems (p. 8), The Roxburghe Club.
APPENDIX C.
I. POEMS FROM ADDITIONAL MS. 25707. Page [433].
The authorship of the four poems here printed from A25 has been discussed in the Text and Canon, &c. There is not much reason to doubt that the first is what it professes to be. The order of the names in the heading, and the character of the verses both suggest that the second and corresponding verses are Donne's contribution. There is a characteristic touch in each one. I cannot find anything eminently characteristic in any of the rest of the group. The third poem refers to the poetical controversy on Love and Reason carried on with much spirit between the Earl of Pembroke and Sir Benjamin Rudyerd in their Poems as printed by the younger Donne in 1660. A much finer fragment of the debate, beginning—
And why should Love a footboy's place despise?
is attributed to Donne by the Bridgewater MS. and the MS. in the library of the Marquess of Crewe. It is part of a poem by Rudyerd in the debate in the volume referred to.
II. POEMS FROM THE BURLEY MS. Page [437].
Of the poems here printed from the Burley-on-the-Hill MS., none I think is Donne's. The chief interest of the collection is that it comes from a commonplace-book of Sir Henry Wotton, and therefore presumably represents the work of the group of wits to which Donne, Bacon, and Wotton belonged. I have found only one of them in other MSS., viz. that which I have called Life a Play. This occurs in quite a number of MSS. in the British Museum, and has been published in Hannah's Courtly Poets. It is generally ascribed to Sir Walter Raleigh; and Harleian MS. 733 entitles it Verses made by Sir Walter Raleigh made the same morning he was executed. I have printed it because with the first, and another in the Reliquiae Wottonianae, it illustrates Wotton's taste for this comparison of life to a stage, a comparison probably derived from an epigram in the Greek Anthology, which may be the source of Shakespeare's famous lines in As You Like It. The epitaph by Jonson on Hemmings, Shakespeare's fellow-actor and executor, is interesting. A similar epitaph on Burbage is found in Sloane MS. 1786: