Page 29. A Valediction: of the Booke.
l. 3. Esloygne. Chambers alters to 'eloign', but Donne's is a good English form.
From worldly care himself he did esloyne.
Spenser, F. Q. I. iv. 20.
The two forms seem to have run parallel from the outset, but that with 's' disappears after the seventeenth century.
Page 30, l. 7. Her who from Pindar could allure. Corinna, who five times defeated Pindar at Thebes. Aelian, Var. Hist. xiii. 25, referred to by Professor Norton. He quotes also from Pausanias, ix. 22.
l. 8. And her, through whose help Lucan is not lame. His wife, Polla Argentaria, who 'assisted her husband in correcting the three first books of his Pharsalia'. Lemprière. The source of this tradition I cannot discover. The only reference indicated by Schanz is to Apollinaris Sidonius (Epist. 2, 10, 6, p. 46), who includes her among a list of women who aided and inspired their husbands: 'saepe versum ... complevit ... Argentaria cum Lucano.'
l. 9. And her, whose booke (they say) Homer did finde, and name. I owe my understanding of this line to Professor Norton, who refers to the Myriobiblon or Bibliotheca of Photius, of which the first edition was published at Augsburg in 1601. There Photius, in an abstract of a work by Ptolemy Hephaestion of Alexandria, states that Musaeus' daughter Helena wrote on the war of Troy, and that from her work Homer took the subject of his poem. But another account refers to Phantasia of Memphis, the daughter of Nicarchus, whose work Homer got from a sacred scribe named Pharis at Memphis. This last source is mentioned by Lemprière, who knows nothing of the other. Probably, therefore, it is the better known tradition.
ll. 21-2. I have interchanged the old semicolon at the end of l. 21 and the comma at the end of l. 22. I take the first three lines of the stanza to form an absolute clause: 'This book once written, in cipher or new-made idiom, we are thereby (in these letters) the only instruments for Loves clergy—their Missal and Breviary.' I presume this is how it is understood by Chambers and the Grolier Club editor, who place a semicolon at the end of each line. It seems to me that with so heavy a pause after l. 21 a full stop would be better at the end of l. 22.
l. 25. Vandals and Goths inundate us. This, the reading of quite a number of independent MSS., seems to me greatly preferable to that of the printed texts: