XXXII.

ON SIR IOHN ROE.

What two brave perills of the private sword

Could not effect, not all the furies doe,

That selfe-devided Belgia did afford;

What not the envie of the seas reach'd too,

The cold of Mosco, and fat Irish ayre,

His often change of clime (though not of mind)

What could not worke; at home in his repaire

Was his blest fate, but our hard lot to find.

Which shewes, where ever death doth please t' appeare,

Seas, serenes, swords, shot, sicknesse, all are there.

In his conversations with Drummond Jonson as usual gave more intimate and less complimentary details: 'Sir John Roe was an infinite spender, and used to say, when he had no more to spend he could die. He died in his (i.e. Jonson's) arms of the pest, and he furnished his charges 20lb., which was given him back,' doubtless by his brother William. Morant states that 'Sir John the eldest son, having no issue, sold this Manor (i.e. Higham-hill) to his father-in-law Sir Reginald Argall, of whom it was purchased by the second son—Sir William Rowe'.

Such a career is much more likely than Donne's to have produced the satire 'Sleep, next Society', with its lurid picture of cashiered captains, taverns, stews, duellists, hard drinkers, and parasites. It is much more like a scene out of Bartholomew Fair than any of Donne's five Satyres. Nor was Donne likely at any time to have written of James I as Roe does. He moved in higher circles, and was more politic. But Roe had ability. 'Deare Love, continue nice and chaste' is not quite in the taste of to-day, but it is a good example of the paradoxical, metaphysical lyric; and there are both feeling and wit in 'Come, Fates; I feare you not', unlike as it is to Donne's subtle, erudite, intenser strain.

Returning to the list of poems open to question on pp. [cxxviii]-ix we have sixteen left to consider. Of some of these there is very little to say.

Nos. 1 and 14 are most probably by the Earl of Pembroke, and the Earl of Pembroke collaborating with Sir Benjamin Rudyard. Both were wits and poets of Donne's circle. The first song,

'Soules joy, now I am gone'

is ascribed to Donne only in 1635-69, and is there inaccurately printed. It is assigned to Pembroke in the younger Donne's edition of Pembroke and Ruddier's Poems (1660), a bad witness, but also by Lansdowne MS. 777, which Mr. Chambers justly calls 'a very good authority'.[14] The latter, however, believes the poem to be Donne's because the central idea—the inseparableness of souls—is his, and so is the contemptuous tone of

Fooles have no meanes to meet,

But by their feet.

But both the contemptuous tone and the Platonic thought were growing common. We get it again in Lovelace's

If to be absent were to be

Away from thee.

The thought is Donne's, but not the airy note, the easy style, or the tripping prosody. Donne never writes of absence in this cheerful, confident strain. He consoles himself at times with the doctrine of inseparable souls, but the note of pain is never absent. He cannot cheat his passionate heart and senses with metaphysical subtleties.

The song Farewell to love, the second in the list of poems added in 1635, is found only in O'F and S96. There is therefore no weighty external evidence for assigning it to Donne, but no one can read it without feeling that it is his. The cynical yet passionate strain of wit, the condensed style, and the metaphysical turn given to the argument, are all in his manner. As printed in 1635 the point of the third stanza is obscured. As I have ventured to amend it, an Aristotelian doctrine is referred to in a way that only Donne would have done in quite such a setting.

The three Elegies, XII, XIII, and XIV (7, 8, 9 in the list), must also be assigned to Donne, unless some more suitable candidate can be advanced on really convincing grounds. The first of the three, His parting from her, is so fine a poem that it is difficult to think any unknown poet could have written it. In sincerity and poetic quality it is one of the finest of the Elegies,[15] and in this sincerer note, the absence of witty paradox, it differs from poems like The Bracelet and The Perfume and resembles the fine elegy called His Picture and two other pieces that stand somewhat apart from the general tenor of the Elegies, namely, the famous elegy On his Mistris, in which he dissuades her from travelling with him as a page:

By our first strange and fatal interview,

and that rather enigmatical poem The Expostulation, which found its way into Jonson's Underwoods:

To make the doubt clear that no woman's true,

Was it my fate to prove it strong in you?

All of these poems bear the imprint of some actual experience, and to this cause we may perhaps trace the comparative rareness with which His parting from her is found in manuscripts, and that it finally appeared in a mutilated form. The poet may have given copies only to a few friends and desired that it should not be circulated. In the Second Collection of poems in TCD it is signed at the close, 'Sir Franc: Wryothlesse.' Who is intended by this I do not know. The ascriptions in this collection are many of them purely fanciful. Still, that the poem is Donne's rests on internal evidence alone.

Of the other two elegies, Julia, which is found in only two manuscripts, B and O'F, is quite the kind of thing Donne might have amused himself by writing in the scurrilous style of Horace's invectives against Canidia, frequently imitated by Mantuan and other Humanists. The chief difficulty with regard to the second, A Tale of a Citizen and his Wife, is to find Donne writing in this vein at so late a period as 1609 or 1610, the date implied in several of the allusions. He was already the author of religious poems, including probably La Corona. In 1610 he wrote his Litanie, and, as Professor Norton points out, in the same letter in which he tells of the writing of the latter he refers to some poem of a lighter nature, the name of which is lost through a mutilation of the letter, and says, 'Even at this time when (I humbly thank God) I ask and have his comfort of sadder meditations I do not condemn in myself that I have given my wit such evaporations as those, if they be free from profaneness, or obscene provocations.' Whether this would cover the elegy in question is a point on which perhaps our age and Donne's would not decide alike. Donne's nature was a complex one. Jack Donne and the grave and reverend divine existed side by side for not a little time, and even in the sermons Donne's wit is once or twice rather coarser than our generation would relish in the pulpit. But once more we must add that it is possible Donne has in this case been made responsible for what is another's. Every one wrote this occasional poetry, and sometimes wrote it well.

There is no more difficult poem to understand or to assign to or from Donne than the long letter headed To the Countesse of Huntington, 13 on the list, which, for the time being, I have placed in the Appendix B. On internal grounds there is more to be said for ascribing it to Donne than any other single poem in this collection. Nevertheless I have resolved to let it stand, that it may challenge the attention it deserves.[16] The reasons which led me to doubt Donne's authorship are these:

(1) The poem was not included in the 1633 edition, nor is it found in either of the groups D, H49, Lec and A18, N, TCC, TCD. It was added in 1635 with four other spurious poems, the dialogue ascribed to Donne and Wotton but assigned by the great majority of manuscripts to the Earl of Pembroke and Sir Benjamin Rudyard, the two epistles to Ben Jonson, and the Elegy addressed to Sir Thomas Roe, which we have assigned, for reasons given above, to Sir John Roe. The poem is found in only two manuscript collections, viz. P and the second, miscellaneous collection of seventeenth-century poems in TCD. In both of these it is headed Sr Walter Ashton (or Aston) to the Countesse of Huntingtone, and no reference whatsoever is made to Donne. I do not attach much importance to this title. Imaginary headings were quite common in the case of poems circulating in manuscript. Poems are inscribed as having been written by the Earl of Essex or Sir Walter Raleigh the night before he died, or as found in the pocket of Chidiock Tichbourne. Editors have occasionally taken these too seriously. Drayton's Heroicall Epistles made it a fashion to write such letters in the case of any notorious love affair or intrigue. The manuscript P contains a long imaginary letter from Sir Philip Sidney to Lady Mary Rich and a fragment of her reply. In the same manuscript the poem, probably by the Earl of Pembroke, 'Victorious beauty though your eyes,' is headed The Mar: B to the Lady Fe: Her., i.e. the Marquis of Buckingham to—I am not sure what lady is intended. The only thing which the title given to the letter in question suggests is that it was not an actual letter to the Countess but an imaginary one.

(2) Of Donne's relations with Elizabeth Stanley, who in 1603 became the Countess of Huntingdon, his biographers have not been able to tell us very much. He must have met her at the house of Sir Thomas Egerton when her mother, the dowager Countess of Derby, married that statesman in 1600. Donne says:

I was your Prophet in your yonger dayes,

And now your Chaplaine, God in you to praise.

(p. [203], ll. 69-70.)

Donne's friend, Sir Henry Goodyere, seems to have had relations with her either directly or through her first cousin, the Countess of Bedford, for Donne writes to him from Mitcham, 'I remember that about this time you purpose a journey to fetch, or meet the Lady Huntington.' This fact lends support to the view of Mr. Chambers and Mr. Gosse that she is 'the Countesse' referred to in the following extract from a letter to Goodyere, which has an important bearing on the poem under consideration. Very unfortunately it is not dated, and Mr. Chambers and Mr. Gosse differ widely as to the year in which it may have been written. The latter places it in April, 1615, when Donne was on the eve of taking Orders, and was approaching his noble patronesses for help in clearing himself of debt. But Mr. Chambers points to the closing reference to 'a Christning at Peckam', and dates the letter 1605-6, when Donne was at Peckham after leaving Pyrford and before settling at Mitcham. I am not sure that this is conclusive, for in Donne's unsettled life before 1615 Mrs. Donne might at any time have gone for her lying-in or for a christening festival to the house of her sister Jane, Lady Grimes, at Peckham. But the tone of the letter, melancholy and reflective, is that of the letters to Goodyere written at Mitcham, and the general theme of the letter, a comparison of the different Churches, is that of other letters of the same period. The one in question (Letters 1651, p. 100; Gosse, Life, ii. 77) seems to be almost a continuation of another (Letters, 1651, p. 26; Gosse, Life, i. 225). Whatever be its date, this is what Donne says: 'For the other part of your Letter, spent in the praise of the Countesse, I am always very apt to beleeve it of her, and can never beleeve it so well, and so reasonably, as now, when it is averred by you; but for the expressing it to her, in that sort as you seeme to counsaile, I have these two reasons to decline it. That that knowledge which she hath of me, was in the beginning of a graver course then of a Poet, into which (that I may also keep my dignity) I would not seeme to relapse. The Spanish proverb informes me, that he is a fool which cannot make one Sonnet, and he is mad which makes two. The other strong reason is my integrity to the other Countesse' (i.e. probably the Countess of Bedford. The words which follow seem to imply a more recent acquaintance than is compatible with so late a date as 1615), 'of whose worthinesse though I swallowed your words, yet I have had since an explicit faith, and now a knowledge: and for her delight (since she descends to them) I had reserved not only all the verses which I should make, but all the thoughts of womens worthinesse. But because I hope she will not disdain, that I should write well of her Picture, I have obeyed you thus far as to write; but intreat you by your friendship, that by this occasion of versifying, I be not traduced, nor esteemed light in that Tribe, and that house where I have lived. If those reasons which moved you to bid me write be not constant in you still, or if you meant not that I should write verses; or if these verses be too bad, or too good, over or under her understanding, and not fit; I pray receive them as a companion and supplement of this Letter to you,' &c. If this was written in 1615 it is incompatible with the fact (supposing the poem under consideration to be by Donne) that he had already written to the Countess of Huntingdon a letter in a very thinly disguised tone of amatory compliment. If, however, it was written, as is probable, earlier, the reference may be to this very poem. Perhaps Goodyere thought it 'over or under' the Countess's understanding and did not present it.

(3) Certainly, looking at the poem itself, one has difficulty in declaring it to be, or not to be, Donne's work. Its metaphysical wit and strain of high-flown, rarefied compliment suggest that only he could have written it; in parts, on the other hand, the tone does not seem to me to be his. It is certainly very different from that of the other letters to noble ladies. It carries one back to the date of the Elegies. If Donne's, it is a further striking proof how much of the tone of a lover even a married poet could assume in addressing a noble patroness. Would Donne at any time of his life write to the Countess of Huntingdon in the vein of p. [418], ll. 21-36, or the next paragraph, ll. 37-76? One could imagine the Earl of Pembroke, or some one on a level of equality socially with the Countess, writing so; not a dependent addressing a patroness. The only points of style and verse which might serve as clues are (1) the peculiar use of 'young', e.g. l. 84 'youngest flatteries', l. 13 'younger formes'. With which compare in the Letter to Wotton, here added, at p. [188]:

Ere sicknesses attack, yong death is best.

(2) A recurring pattern of line to which Sir Walter Raleigh drew my attention:

I have not found this pattern elsewhere, and indeed the versification throughout seems to me unlike that of Donne. Donne's decasyllabic couplets have two quite distinctive patterns. The one is that of the Satyres. In these the logical or rhetorical scheme runs right across the metrical scheme—that is, the sense overflows from line to line, and the pauses come regularly inside the line. A good example is the paragraph beginning at p. [156], l. 65.

Graccus loves all as one, &c.

In the Elegies and in the Letters the structure is not so irregular and unmusical, but is periodic or paragraphic, i.e. the lines do not fall into couplets but into larger groups knit together by a single sentence or some closely connected sentences, the full meaning or emphasis being well sustained to the close. Good examples are Elegie I. ll. 1 to 16, Elegie IV. ll. 13 to 26, Elegie V. l. 5 to the end, Elegie VIII. ll. 1 to 34. Excellent examples are also the letter To the Countesse of Salisbury and the Hymn to the Saints and the Marquesse Hamylton. Each of these is composed of three or four paragraphs at the most. Now in the poem under consideration there are two, or three at the most, paragraphs which suggest Donne's manner, viz. ll. 1 to 10, ll. 11 to 16, and ll. 37 to 46. But the rest of the poem is almost monotonously regular in its couplet structure. To my mind the poem is not unlike what Rudyard might have written. Indeed a fine piece of verse by Rudyard, belonging to the dialogue between him and the Earl of Pembroke on Love and Reason, is attributed to Donne in several manuscripts. The question is an open one, but had I realized in time the weakness of the positive external evidence I should not have moved the poem. I have been able to improve the text materially.

With regard to the Elegie on Mistris Boulstred (18 on the list) I cannot expect readers to accept at once the conjecture I have ventured to put forward regarding the authorship, for I have changed my own mind regarding it. Two Elegies, both perhaps on Mris. Boulstred, Donne certainly did write, viz.

Death I recant, and say, unsaid by mee

What ere hath slip'd, that might diminish thee;

and another, entitled Death, beginning

Language thou art too narrow, and too weake

To ease us now; great sorrow cannot speake.

Both of these are attributed to Donne by quite a number of manuscripts and are very characteristic of his poetry in this kind, highly charged with ingenious wit and extravagant eulogy. It is worth noting that in the Hawthornden MS. the second bears no title (it is signed 'J. D.'), and that it is not included in D, H49, Lec. It is certainly Donne's; it is not quite certain that it was written on Mris. Boulstred. Indeed, as I have pointed out elsewhere, the reference to Judith in a verse letter which seems to have been sent to Lady Bedford with the poem, and the tenor of the poem, suggest that Lady Markham is the subject of the elegy. Jonson, in speaking of Mris. Boulstred, says, 'whose Epitaph Done made,' which points to a single poem; but he may have been speaking loosely, or be loosely reported.

In contrast to these two elegies that beginning 'Death be not proud' is found in only five manuscripts, B, H40, O'F, P, RP31. Of these H40 and RP31 are really one, and in them the poem is not ascribed to Donne. In two others, O'F and P, the poem is given in a very interesting and suggestive manner, viz. as a continuation of 'Death I recant'. What this suggests is the fairly obvious fact that the second poem is to some extent a reply to the first. 'Death I recant' is answered by 'Death be not proud'. If O'F and P are right in their arrangement, then Donne answers himself. Beginning in one mood, he closes in another; from a mood which is almost rebellious he passes to one of Christian resignation. This was the view I put forward in a note to the Cambridge History of Literature (iv. 216). I had hardly, however, sent off my proofs before I felt that there was more than one objection to this view. There is in the first place nothing to show that 'Death I recant' is not a poem complete in itself; there is no preparation for the recantation. In the second place, 'Death be not proud' is as a poem slighter in texture, vaguer in thought, in feeling more sentimental and pious, than Donne's own Epicedes. Whoever wrote it had a warmer feeling for Mris. Boulstred than underlies Donne's rather frigid hyperboles. This suggested to me that the poem was indeed an answer to 'Death I recant', but by another person, another member of Lady Bedford's entourage. In this mood I came on the ascription in H40, viz. 'By C. L. of B.' This indicated no one whom I knew; but in RP31 it appeared as 'By L. C. of B.,' i.e. Lucy, Countess of Bedford. We know that the Countess did write verses, for Donne refers to them. In a letter which Mr. Gosse dates 1609 (Gosse's Life, &c., i. 217; Letters, 1651, p. 67) he speaks of some verses written to himself: 'They must needs be an excellent exercise of your wit, which speak so well of so ill.' That the Countess of Bedford could have written 'Death be not proud', we cannot prove in the absence of other examples of her work; that if she could she did, is very likely. She had probably asked Donne for some verses on the death of her friend. He replied with 'Death I recant'. The tone, which if not pagan is certainly not Christian, while it is untouched by any real feeling for the subject of the elegy, displeased her, and she replied in lines at once more ardent and more resigned. At any rate, whether by Lady Bedford or not, the poem is not like Donne's work, and the external evidence is against its being his. B attributes it to 'F. B.', i.e. Francis Beaumont. It is right, on the other hand, to point out that Donne opens one of the Holy Sonnets with the exclamation used here:

Death be not proud!

I have left the question of authorship an open one. Personally I cannot bring myself to think that it is Donne's.

The sonnet On the Blessed Virgin Mary (19 on the list), 'In that O Queene of Queenes, thy birth was free,' is included among Donne's poems in 1635 and in B, O'F, S, S96. There is little doubt that it is not Donne's but Henry Constable's. It is found in a series of Spiritual Sonnets by H. C., in Harl. MS. 7553, f. 41, which were first published by T. Park in Heliconia, ii. 1815, and unless all of these are to be given to Donne this cannot. It is not in his style, and Donne more than once denies the Immaculate Conception in the full Catholic sense of the doctrine. Nothing could more expressly contradict this sonnet than the lines in the Second Anniversarie:

Where thou shalt see the blessed Mother-maid

Joy in not being that, which men have said.

Where she is exalted more for being good,

Then for her interest of Mother-hood.

Of the next three poems (20, 21, 22 on the list), the second, the Ode beginning 'Vengeance will sit above our faults', seems to me very doubtful, although on second thoughts I have re-transferred it from the Appendix to the place among the Divine Poems which it occupies in 1635. Against its authenticity are the following considerations: (1) It is not at all in the style of Donne's other specifically religious poems. The elevated, stoical tone is more like Jonson's occasional religious pieces than Donne's personal, tormented, Scholastic Divine Poems. (2) Of the manuscripts in which it appears, B, Cy, H40, RP31, O'F, P, S, the best, RP31, assigns it, not to Donne, but to 'Sir Edward Herbert', i.e. Lord Herbert of Cherbury.[17] Mr. Chambers, indeed, inadvertently stated that in this manuscript 'it is said to have been written to George Herbert'. The name 'Sr Edw. Herbert' is written beside the poem, and that in such cases is meant to indicate the author of the poem. It seems to me quite possible that it was written by Lord Herbert, but until more evidence be forthcoming I have let it stand, because (1) the letters 'I. D.' printed after the poem show that the poem must have been so initialled in the manuscript from which it was printed, and (2) because, though not in the style of Donne's later religious poems, it is somewhat in the style of the philosophical, stoical letter which Donne addressed to Sir Edward Herbert at the siege of Juliers in 1610. The poem was possibly composed at the same time. (3) The thought of the last verse, our ignorance of ourselves, recurs in Donne's poems and prose. Compare Negative Love (p. [66]):

If any who deciphers best,

What we know not, our selves,

and the passage quoted in the note to this poem.

The poem Upon the translation of the Psalmes by Sir Philip Sydney, and the Countesse of Pembroke his Sister, if by Donne, was probably written late in his life and never widely circulated. It occurred to me that the author might be John Davies of Hereford, who was a dependent of the Countess and her two sons, and who made a calligraphic copy of the Psalms of Sidney and his sister, from which they were printed by Singer in 1823. But Professor Saintsbury considers, I think justly, that the 'wit' of the opening lines,

Eternall God (for whom who ever dare

Seeke new expressions, doe the Circle square,

And thrust into strait corners of poore wit

Thee who art cornerlesse and infinite),

is above Davies' level, and indeed the whole poem is. The lines To Mr. Tilman after he had taken orders (22 on the list) were also probably privately communicated to the person to whom they were addressed. The best argument for their genuineness is that Walton seems to quote from them when he describes Donne's preaching.

For they doe

As Angels out of clouds, from Pulpits speake,

must have suggested 'always preaching to himself, like an angel from a cloud, but in none'. This does not, however, carry us very far. Walton had seen the editions of 1635 and 1639 before he wrote these lines in 1640.

The verse On the Sacrament (23 on the list) is probably assigned to Donne by a pure conjecture. It is very frequently attributed to Queen Elizabeth.

Of the two poems added in 1649 the lines Upon Mr. Thomas Coryats Crudities are of course Donne's. They appeared with his name in his lifetime, and Donne is one of the friends mentioned by Coryat in his letters from India. The Token (4 on the list) may or may not be Donne's. It is found in several, but no very good, manuscripts. Its wit is quite in Donne's style, though not absolutely beyond the compass of another. The poems which the younger Donne added in 1650 are in much the same position. 'He that cannot chose but love' (5 on the list) is a trifle, whoever wrote it. 'The heavens rejoice in motion' (10 on the list) is in a much stronger strain of paradox, and if not Donne's is by an ambitious and witty disciple. If genuine, it is strange that it did not find its way into more collections. It is found in A10, where a few of Donne's poems are given with others by Roe, Hoskins, and other wits of his circle. It is also, however, given in JC, a manuscript containing in its first part few poems that are not demonstrably genuine. As things stand, the balance of evidence is in favour of Donne's authorship.

Besides the Elegies XVIII and XIX, which are Donne's, as we have seen, and the Satyre 'Sleep next Society', which is not Donne's, the edition of 1669 prefixed to the song Breake of Day a fresh stanza:

Stay, O sweet, and do not rise.

It appears in the same position in S96, but is given as a separate poem in A25, C, O'F, and P. It certainly has no connexion with Donne's poem, for the metre is entirely different and the strain of the poetry less metaphysical.

The separate stanza was a favourite one in Song-Books of the seventeenth century. It was printed apparently for the first time in 1612, in The First Set of Madrigals and Motets of five Parts: apt for Viols and Voices. Newly composed by Orlando Gibbons. Here it begins

Ah, deare hart why doe you rise?

In the same year it was printed in A Pilgrimes Solace. Wherein is contained Musicall Harmonie of 3, 4 and 5 parts, to be sung and plaid with the Lute and Viols. By John Dowland. The stanza begins

Sweet stay awhile, why will you rise?

Mr. Chambers conjectures that the affixing of Dowland's initials to the verse in some collection led to Donne being credited with it, which is quite likely; but we are not sure that Dowland wrote it, and the common theme appears to have drawn the poems together. In The Academy of Complements, Wherein Ladies, Gentlewomen, Schollers, and Strangers may accomodate their Courtly practice with gentile Ceremonies, Complemental amorous high expressions, and Formes of speaking or writing of Letters most in fashion (1650) the verse is connected with a variation of the first stanza of Donne's poem so as to make a consistent song:

Lie still, my dear, why dost thou rise?

The light that shines comes from thine eyes.

The day breaks not, it is my heart,

Because that you and I must part.

Stay or else my joys will die,

And perish in their infancy.

'Tis time, 'tis day, what if it be?

Wilt thou therefore arise from me?

Did we lie down because of night,

And shall we rise for fear of light?

No, since in darkness we came hither,

In spight of light we'll lye together.

Oh! let me dye on thy sweet breast

Far sweeter than the Phœnix nest.

It was probably some such combination as this which suggested to the editor of 1669 to prefix the stanza to Donne's poem. The poem in The Academy of Compliments was repeated in Wits Interpreter, the English Parnassus, a sure guide to those Admirable Accomplishments that compleat our English Gentry in the most acceptable Qualifications of Discourse or Writing (1655). But the first stanza is given again in this collection as a separate poem.

The translation of the Psalme 137, which was inserted in 1633 and never withdrawn (as the Epitaph on Shakespeare was) is pretty certainly not by Donne. The only manuscript which ascribes it to him is A25 followed by C. On the other hand it is assigned to Francis Davison, editor of the Poetical Rhapsody, in RP61 (Bodleian Library). In one manuscript, Addl. MS. 27407, the poem is accompanied with a letter, unsigned and undirected, which speaks of this as one out of several translations made by the author. The handwriting and style of the letter are not Donne's, but the letter explains why this one Psalm is found floating around by itself. It was, the translator says, a freer paraphrase than the others. Apparently it proved a favourite.

When one turns from the poems attributed to Donne in the old editions to those which some of the more recent editors have added, one launches into a sea which I have no intention of attempting to navigate in its entirety. Both Sir John Simeon and Dr. Grosart were disposed to cry 'Eureka' too readily, and assigned to Donne a number of poems culled from various manuscripts for the genuineness of which there is no evidence external or internal. I shall confine my remarks to the few poems I have myself incorporated for the first time in an edition of Donne's poems; to the Song 'Absence hear my protestation', which it is now the fashion to ascribe to Donne absolutely, letting evidence 'go hang'; and to the four poems which Mr. Chambers printed from A25. I have added some more in my Appendix C, because they are interesting ἀδέσποτα illustrative of the influence in seventeenth-century poetry of Donne's realistic passion and his paradoxical wit.

Of the poems which appear here for the first time in a collected edition, it is not necessary to say much of those which are taken from W, the Westmoreland MS. now in the possession of Mr. Gosse, who with the greatest and most spontaneous kindness has permitted me to print them all. These include two Epigrams, four additional Letters, and three Holy Sonnets. The Epigrams, the Holy Sonnets, and two of the Letters have been already printed by Mr. Gosse in his Life of John Donne, 1899. There can be no doubt of their genuineness. They enlarge a series of Letters and a series of Sonnets which appear in 1633 and in all the best manuscript collections. In their arrangement I have followed W in preference to 1633, which is based on A18, N, TC. Of the letter taken from the Burley MS. there may be greater doubt in some minds. To me it seems unquestionably Donne's (aut Donne aut Diabolus), an addition to the series of letters which he wrote to Sir Henry Wotton between the return of the Islands Expedition and Essex's return from Ireland. The Burley MS. is a commonplace-book of Wotton's and includes poems which we know as Donne's, e.g. 'Come, Madam, come'; some of his Paradoxes with a covering letter; other letters which from their substance and style seem to be Donne's; and a number of poems, including this which alone of all the doubtful poems in the manuscript is initialled 'J. D.' The manuscript contains work by Donne. Does this come under that head? Only internal evidence can decide. Of the other poems in the manuscript, most of which I print in Appendix C, none are certainly Donne's.

'Absence heare my protestation' was printed in Donne's lifetime in Davison's A Poetical Rhapsody (1602, 1608, 1621), but with no reference to Donne's authorship, although his name was yearly growing a more popular hostel for wandering, unclaimed poems.[18] It was not printed in any edition of his poems from 1633 to 1719. It is not found in either of the most trustworthy manuscript collections, D, H49, Lec, or A18, N, TC. It is found in B, Cy, L74, O'F, P, S96, but none of these can be counted an authority. In 1711 it was for the first time ascribed to Donne in The Grove, a miscellaneous collection of poems, on the authority of 'an old Manuscript of Sir John Cotton's of Stratton in Huntington-Shire'. On the other hand, in one well authenticated manuscript, HN, it is transcribed by William Drummond of Hawthornden from what he describes as a collection of poems 'belonging to John Don' (not 'by Donne'), and, with another poem, is initialled 'J. H.' That other poem called

His Melancholy.

Love is a foolish melancholy, &c.,

is by a Manchester manuscript (Farmer-Chetham MS., ed. Grosart, Chetham Society Publications, lxxxix, xc) assigned to 'Mr. Hoskins', and in another manuscript (A10) it is signed 'H' with the left leg of H so written as to suggest JH run together. Clearly at any rate the onus probandi lies with those who say the poem is by Donne. Internally it has never seemed to me so since I came to know Donne well. The metaphysical, subtle strain is like Donne, as it is in Soules Joy, but here as there (though there is more feeling in Absence, the closing line has a very Donne-like note of sudden anguish, 'and so miss her') the tone is airier, the prosody more tripping. The stressed syllables are less weighted emotionally and vocally. Compare

Sweetest love, I do not goe,

For wearinesse of thee

Nor in hope the world can show

A fitter Love for me;

or

Draw not up seas to drowne me in thy spheare,

Weepe me not dead, in thine armes, but forbeare

To teach the sea, what it may doe too soone;

with the more tripping measure, in which one touches the stressed syllables as with tiptoe, of

By absence this good means I gaine,

That I can catch her

Where none can watch her,

In some close corner of my braine.

There are more of Hoskins' poems extant, but the manuscript volume of poems which he left behind ('bigger than those of Dr. Donne') was lost in 1653.

Four poems were first printed as Donne's by Mr. Chambers (op. cit., Appendix B). They are all found in Addl. MS. 25707 (A25), and, so far as I know, there only. I have placed them first in Appendix C, as the only pieces in that Appendix which are at all likely to be by Donne. A25 is a manuscript written in a number of different hands, some six within the portion that includes poems by Donne. The relative age of these it would be impossible to assign with any confidence. What looks the oldest (I may call it A) is used only for three poems, viz. Donne's Elegye: 'What [sic] that in Color it was like thy haire,' his Obsequies Upon the Lord Harrington yt last died, and the Elegie of Loves progresse. It is in Elizabethan secretary's hand, and seems to me identical with the writing in which the same poems are copied in C, the Cambridge University Library MS. A second hand, B, inserts the larger number of the poems unquestionably by Donne in close succession, but a third hand, C, transcribes several by Donne along with poems by other wits, as Francis Beaumont. A fourth hand, D, seems to be the latest because it is the handwriting in which the Index was made out, and the poems inserted in this hand are inserted in odd spaces left by the other writers. Now of the poems in question, one, A letter written by Sr H: G: and J. D. alternis vicibus, is copied by D, and the same hand adds immediately An Elegie on the Death of my never enough Lamented master King Charles the First, by Henry Skipwith. The poem attributed to Donne was therefore not entered here till after 1649. But of course it may have come from an older source, and it has quite the appearance of being genuine. Whoever made the collection would seem to have had access to some of Goodyere's work, for this poem is almost immediately preceded by an Epithalamion of the Princess Mariage, by Sr H. G., and a little earlier the Good Friday poem by Donne is headed Mr J. Dun goeing from Sir H. G. on good friday sent him back this Meditacon on the waye. That reads like a note by Goodyere himself. If this be what happened, the copyist may have ascribed to Donne some of Goodyere's own verses. Certainly there is nothing in the other three poems, 'O Fruitful garden,' 'Fie, fie, you sons of Pallas,' 'Why chose she black' (all in the handwriting C) which would warrant our ascribing them to Donne. Later in the collection a coarse poem, 'Why should not Pilgrims to thy body come,' in a fifth hand, is signed J. D., but P assigns it to F. B., and it is more in Beaumont's style. Poems by and on Beaumont occupy a considerable space in A25. He is a quite possible candidate for the authorship of some of the poems assigned to Donne in the hand C.

Mr. Hazlitt attributes to Donne (General Index to Hazlitt's Handbook, &c., p. 228) a Funeral Elegie on the death of Philip Stanhope, who died at Christ Church in 1625. I have not been able to find the volume in which it appears; but, as it is said to be by John Donne Alumnus, the author must be the younger Donne.

[1] Mr. Chambers has reprinted a good many of these, but only in an Appendix and under the title of Doubtful Poems. He has added a few more from A25, from Coryats Crudities, and from some manuscripts in the Bodleian Library. If printed at all it is a pity that these poems were not reproduced more correctly. Textually the appendices are much the worst part of Mr. Chambers' edition. In most cases he has, I presume, taken the poems over as they stand from Simeon and Grosart.

[2] All three editors have also dropped the song 'Deare Love continue nice and chaste', David Laing having pointed out (Archaeologia Scotica, iv. 73-6) that this poem occurs in the Hawthornden MSS. with the signature 'J. R.' Chambers also rejects the sonnet On the Blessed Virgin Mary, probably by Henry Constable, and all three editors exclude the lines On the Sacrament.

[3] I have given with each poem a list of the editions and manuscripts (known to me) in which it is contained. A glance at these will show the weight of the external evidence. Of internal evidence every man must be judge for himself.

[4] To these must of course be added poems already published in Donne's name. See II. lvi.

[5] In F. G. Waldron's A Collection of Miscellaneous Poetry. 1802.

[6] Chambers includes it in his Appendix A, Doubtful Poems, but seems to lean to the view that it is by Roe. The second is printed as Donne's by Grosart and as presumably Donne's by Chambers.

[7] In O'F and S, where they also occur, they are more dispersed; but these manuscripts have, like 1635, adopted a classification of the poems they contain which involves their distribution as songs, elegies, letters and satires. A10 is the most significant witness. This manuscript contains very few poems by Donne. Why should it select just this suspicious group?

[8] Among the marriage licences granted by the Bishop of London in 1601 (Harleian Society Publications) is the following: 'Henry Sackford the younger, of the Charter House, Gent; 27, father dead, and Sarah Rowe of St Johns in St John's Street, co. Middlesex, Maiden, dau. of John Rowe of Clapham, Beds, Esq. decd (i.e. deceas'd) about 9 years since,' &c.

[9] See the genealogies given in the Harleian Society Publications, vol. xiii, 1878, from the Visitation of Essex 1612 (pp. 282-3) and the Visitation of Essex 1634 (p. 479).

[10] The oldest was the John Rowe of Clapham, Beds. The second, Henry, was also Mayor of London and was knighted in 1603. The fourth, Robert, was the father of the ambassador, and died while his son was a child. There were two daughters—Mary, who married Thomas Randall, and Elizabeth, who married William Garret of Dorney, co. Bucks. The son of the latter couple was Donne's intimate friend George Gerrard or Garrard.

[11] Row, John, of Essex. arm. matric. 14 Oct., 1597, aged 16. (Joseph Foster, Alumni Oxonienses, iii, 1284). The Provost of Queen's has kindly informed me that in the College books his name is entered simply as 'Rowe' and as having entered 'Ter. Mich. 1597'. He tells me further that in Andrew Clark's edition of the University Matriculation Registers it is stated that the date of his matriculation was between Oct. 14 and Dec. 2, 1597. There can be no doubt, I think, that this is our Roe. There are not likely to have been two in the County of Essex with the right to be called 'armiger'. Had his father still lived he would have been entered as 'fil. gen.' or 'fil. arm.'

[12] Hist. MSS. Com.: Buccleugh MSS. (Montague House), vol. i, pp. 56, 58. The letters are dated May 13, Nov. 7.

[13] Calendar of State Papers. Ireland, 1606-8, p. 538. I owe this and the last reference to Mr. Murray L. R. Beavan, University Assistant in History, Aberdeen University.

[14] Other poems by Pembroke are found in the manuscript collections of Donne's poems. A scholarly edition of the poems of Pembroke and Rudyard would be a boon. Many ascribed to them by the younger Donne in his edition of 1660 could be removed and others added from manuscript sources.

[15] It is one of the worst printed in 1635 and 1669 (where it first appeared in full), and has admitted of many emendations from the manuscripts. Grosart has already introduced some from the Hazlewood-Kingsborough MS., but he left some gross errors. In the lines,

That I may grow enamoured on your mind,

When my own thoughts I there reflected find,

all the three modern editions are content still to read,

When my own thoughts I there neglected find

—a strange reason for being enamoured. Some difficult and perhaps corrupt lines still remain.]

[16] In forming this Appendix it was not my intention to remove these poems dogmatically from under the aegis of Donne's name. I wished rather to separate them from those which are indubitably his and facilitate comparison. Further evidence may show that I have erred as to one or other. This letter is the only one about which I feel any doubt myself. I have taken as much trouble with their text as with the rest of the poems.

[17] H40 has no ascription. In the poem just discussed the ascription made correctly, at least intelligibly, in RP31, was transposed in H40. This must be the later collection. See II. p. [cxiv].

[18] Absence is printed, again unsigned, in Wit Restored in severall Select Poems not formerly published. (1658.)