This naughty man
Shall face to face be brought to Margaret,
Who I believe was pack'd in all this wrong,
Hir'd to it by your brother.
Shakespeare, Much Ado, V. i. 307.
l. 44. the pale wretch shivered. I have (with the support of the best MSS.) changed the semicolon to a full stop here, not that as the punctuation of the editions goes it is wrong, but because it is ambiguous and has misled both Chambers and the Grolier Club editor. By changing the semicolon to a comma they make ll. 43-4 an adverbial clause of time which, with the conditional clause 'Had it beene some bad smell', modifies 'he would have thought ... had wrought'. This seems to me out of the question. The 'when' links the statement 'the pale wretch shivered' to what precedes, not to what follows. As soon as the perfume reached his nose he shivered, knowing what it meant. A new thought begins with 'Had it been some bad smell'.
The use of the semicolon, as at one time equivalent to a little less than a full stop, at another to a little more than a comma, leads occasionally to these ambiguities. The few changes which I have made in the punctuation of this poem have been made with a view to obtaining a little more consistency and clearness without violating the principles of seventeenth-century punctuation.
l. 49. The precious Vnicornes. See Browne, Vulgar Errors, iii. 23: 'Great account and much profit is made of Unicornes horn, at least of that which beareth the name thereof,' &c. He speaks later of the various objects 'extolled for precious Horns'; and Donne's epithet doubtless has the same application, i.e. to the horns.
Page 86. Elegie V.
l. 8. With cares rash sodaine stormes being o'rspread. I have let the 1633 reading stand, though I feel sure that Donne is not responsible for 'being o'rspread'. Printing from D, H49, Lec, in which probably the word 'cruel' had been dropped, the editor or printer supplied 'being' to adjust the metre. I have not corrected it because I am not sure which is Donne's version. Clearly the line has undergone some remodelling. My own view is that the earliest form is suggested by B, S, S96,