Vandals and the Goths invade us.
The agreement of the printed texts does not carry much weight, for any examination of the variants in this poem will reveal that they are errors due to misunderstanding, e.g. l. 20, 'tome,' 'to me,' 'tomb' show that each edition has been printed from the last, preserving, or conjecturally amending, its blunders. If therefore the 1633 editor mistook 'in[~u]date' for 'invade', that is sufficient. Besides the metrical harshness of the line there seems to be no reason why the epithet 'ravenous' should be applied to the Vandals and not extended to the Goths. The metaphor of inundation is used by Donne in the sermons: 'The Torrents, and Inundations, which invasive Armies pour upon Nations, we are fain to call by the name of Law, The Law of Armes.' Sermons 26. 3. 36. Milton too uses it:
A multitude like which the populous North
Poured never from her frozen loins, to pass
Rhene or the Danaw, where her barbarous sons
Came like a deluge on the South, and spread
Beneath Gibraltar to the Libyan sands.
Paradise Lost, i. 351-4.
Probably both Donne and Milton had in mind Isaiah's description of the Assyrian invasion, where in the Vulgate the word is that used here: 'Propter hoc ecce Dominus adducet super eos aquas fluminis fortes et multas, regem Assyriorum, et omnem gloriam eius; et ascendet super omnes rivos eius, et fluet super universas ripas eius; et ibit per Iudam, inundans, et transiens usque ad collum veniet.' Isaiah viii. 7-8.
Donne uses the word exactly as here in the Essays in Divinity: 'To which foreign sojourning ... many have assimilated and compared the Roman Church's straying into France and being impounded in Avignon seventy years; and so long also lasted the inundation of the Goths in Italy.' Ed. Jessop (1855), p. 155.