SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES.
Pages 5, 6. The poems of Ben Jonson are here printed just as they stand in the 1650, 1654, 1669 editions of Donne's Poems. A comparison with the 1616 edition of Jonson's Works shows some errors. The poem To John Donne (p. [5]) is xxiii of the Epigrammes. The sixth line runs
And which no affection praise enough can give!
The absurd 'no'n' of 1650 seems to have arisen from the printing 'no'affection' of the 1640 edition of Jonson's Works. The 1719 editor of Donne's Poems corrected this mistake. A more serious mistake occurs in the ninth line, which in the Works (1616) runs:
All which I meant to praise, and, yet I would.
The error 'mean' comes from the 1640 edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, which prints 'meane'.
To Lucy, &c., is xciii of the Epigrammes. The fourteenth line runs:
Be of the best; and 'mongst those, best are you.
The comma makes the sense clearer. In l. 3, 1616 reads 'looke,' with comma.
To John Donne (p. [6]) is xcvi. There are no errors; but 'punees' is in 1616 more correctly spelt 'pui'nees'.
Pages 7, 175, 369. I am indebted for the excellent copies of the engravings here reproduced to the kind services of Mr. Laurence Binyon. The portraits form a striking supplement to the poems along with which they are placed. The first is the young man of the Songs and Sonets, the Elegies and the Satyres, the counterpart of Biron and Benedick and the audacious and witty young men of Shakespeare's Comedies. 'Neither was it possible,' says Hacket in his Scrinia Reserata: a Memorial of John Williams ... Archbishop of York (1693), 'that a vulgar soul should dwell in such promising features.'
The engraving by Lombart is an even more lifelike portrait of the author of the Letters, Epicedes, Anniversaries and earlier Divine Poems, learned and witty, worldly and pious, melancholy yet ever and again 'kindling squibs about himself and flying into sportiveness', writing at one time the serious Pseudo-Martyr, at another the outrageous Ignatius his Conclave, and again the strangely-mooded, self-revealing Biathanatos: 'mee thinks I have the keyes of my prison in mine owne hand, and no remedy presents it selfe so soone to my heart, as mine own sword.'
After describing the circumstances attending the execution of the last portrait of Donne, Walton adds in the 1675 edition of the Lives (the passage is not in the earlier editions of the Life of Donne): 'And now, having brought him through the many labyrinths and perplexities of a various life: even to the gates of death and the grave; my desire is, he may rest till I have told my Reader, that I have seen many Pictures of him, in several habits, and at several ages, and in several postures: And I now mention this, because, I have seen one Picture of him, drawn by a curious hand at his age of eighteen; with his sword and what other adornments might then suit with the present fashions of youth, and the giddy gayeties of that age: and his Motto then was,
How much shall I be chang'd,
Before I am chang'd.
And, if that young, and his now dying Picture, were at this time set together, every beholder might say, Lord! How much is Dr. Donne already chang'd, before he is chang'd!' The change written in the portrait is the change from the poet of the Songs and Sonets to the poet of the Holy Sonnets and last Hymns.
The design of this last picture and of the marble monument made from it is not very clear. He was painted, Walton says, standing on the figure of the urn. But the painter brought with him also 'a board of the just height of his body'. What was this for? Walton does not explain. But Mr. Hamo Thornycroft has pointed out that the folds of the drapery show the statue was modelled from a recumbent figure. Can it be that Walton's account confuses two things? The incident of the picture is not in the 1640 Life, but was added in 1658. How could Donne, a dying man, stand on the urn, with his winding-sheet knotted 'at his head and feet'? Is it not probable that he was painted lying in his winding-sheet on the board referred to; but that the monument, as designed by himself, and executed by Nicholas Stone, was intended to represent him rising at the Last Day from the urn, habited as he had lain down—a symbolic rendering of the faith expressed in the closing words of the inscription
Hic licet in Occiduo Cinere
Aspicit Eum
Cuius nomen est Oriens.
Page 37, l. 14. The textual note should have indicated that in most or all of the MSS. cited the whole line runs:
(Thou lovest Truth) but an Angell at first sight.
This is probably the original form of the line, corrected later to avoid the clashing of the 'but's.
Page 96, l. 6, note. The R212 cited here is Rawlinson Poetical MS. 212, a miscellaneous collection of seventeenth-century prose and poetry (e.g. Davies' Epigrams. See II. p. 101). I had cited it once or twice in my first draft. The present instance escaped my eye. It helps to show how general the reading 'tyde' was.
Page 115, l. 54. goeing on it fashions. The correct reading is probably 'growing on it fashions', which has the support of both JC, and 1650-69 where 'its' is a mere error. I had made my text before JC came into my hand. To 'grow on' for 'to increase' is an Elizabethan idiom: 'And this quarrel grew on so far,' North's Plutarch, Life of Coriolanus, ad fin. See also O.E.D.
I should like in closing to express my indebtedness throughout to the Oxford English Dictionary, an invaluable help and safeguard to the editor of an English text, and also to Franz's admirable Shakespeare-Grammatik (1909), which should be translated.
Page 133, l. 58. To what is said in the note on the taking of yellow amber as a drug add: 'Divers men may walke by the Sea side, and the same beames of the Sunne giving light to them all, one gathereth by the benefit of that light pebles, or speckled shells, for curious vanitie, and another gathers precious Pearle, or medicinall Ambar, by the same light.' Sermons 80. 36. 326.
Pages 156-7. Seeke true religion, &c. All this passage savours a little of Montaigne: 'Tout cela, c'est un signe tres-evident que nous ne recevons nostre religion qu'à nostre façon et par nos mains, et non autrement que comme les autres religions se reçoyvent. Nous nous sommes rencontrez au païs où elle estoit en usage; ou nous regardons son ancienneté ou l'authorité des hommes qui l'ont maintenue; ou creignons les menaces qu'ell' attache aux mescreans, ou suyvons ses promesses. Ces considerations là doivent estre employées à nostre creance, mais comme subsidiaires: ce sont liaisons humaines. Une autre region, d'autres tesmoings, pareilles promesses et menasses nous pourroyent imprimer par mesme voye une croyance contraire. Nous sommes chrestiens à mesme titre que nous sommes ou perigordins ou alemans.' Essais (1580), II. 12. Apologie de Raimond Sebond.
Page 220, l. 46. Compare: 'One of the most convenient Hieroglyphicks of God, is a Circle; and a Circle is endlesse; whom God loves, hee loves to the end ... His hailestones and his thunderbolts, and his showres of blood (emblemes and instruments of his Judgements) fall downe in a direct line, and affect or strike some one person, or place: His Sun, and Moone, and Starres (Emblemes and Instruments of his Blessings) move circularly, and communicate themselves to all. His Church is his chariot; in that he moves more gloriously, then in the Sun; as much more, as his begotten Son exceeds his created Sun, and his Son of glory, and of his right hand, the Sun of the firmament; and this Church, his chariot, moves in that communicable motion, circularly; It began in the East, it came to us, and is passing now, shining out now, in the farthest West.' Sermons 80. 2. 13-4.
l. 47. Religious tipes, is the reading of 1633. The comma has been accidentally dropped. There is no comma in 1635-69, which print 'types'.
Page 241, ll. 343-4. As a compassionate Turcoyse, &c. Compare:
And therefore Cynthia, as a turquoise bought,
Or stol'n, or found, is virtueless, and nought,
It must be freely given by a friend,
Whose love and bounty doth such virtue lend,
As makes it to compassionate, and tell
By looking pale, the wearer is not well.
Sir Francis Kynaston, To Cynthia.
Saintsbury, Caroline Poets, ii. 161.
Page 251, ll. 9-18. The source of this simile is probably Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, III. 642-56.
Falciferos memorant currus abscidere membra
Saepe ita de subito permixta caede calentis,
Ut tremere in terra videatur ab artubus id quod
Decidit abscisum, cum mens tamen atque hominis vis
Mobilitate mali non quit sentire dolorem;
Et semel in pugnae studio quod dedita mens est,
Corpore reliquo pugnam caedesque petessit,
Nec tenet amissam laevam cum tegmine saepe
Inter equos abstraxe rotas falcesque rapaces,
Nec cecidisse alius dextram, cum scandit et instat.
Inde alius conatur adempto surgere crure,
Cum digitos agitat propter moribundus humi pes.
Et caput abscisum calido viventeque trunco
Servat humi voltum vitalem oculosque patentis,
Donec reliquias animai reddidit omnes.
Page 259, ll. 275-6. so that there is
(For aught thou know'st) piercing of substances.
'Piercing of substances,' the actual penetration of one substance by another, was the Stoic as opposed to the Aristotelian doctrine of mixture of substance (κρᾶσις), what is now called chemical combination. The Peripatetics held that, while the qualities of the two bodies combined to produce a new quality, the substances remained in juxtaposition. Plotinus devotes the seventh book of the Enneades to the subject; and one of the arguments of the Stoics which he cites resembles Donne's problem: 'Sweat comes out of the human body without dividing it and without the body being pierced with holes.' The pores were apparently unknown. See Bouillet's Enneades de Plotin, I. 243 f. and 488-9, for references.