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),