l. 1. Away thou fondling, &c. The reading of the majority of editions and MSS. is 'changeling', but this is a case not of a right and wrong reading but of two versions, both ascribable to the author. Which was his emendation it is impossible to say. He may have changed 'fondling' (a 'fond' or foolish person) thinking that the idea was conveyed by 'motley', which, like Shakespeare's epithet 'patch', is a synecdoche from the dress of the professional fool or jester. On the other hand the idea of 'changeling' is repeated in 'humorist', which suggests changeable and fanciful. I have, therefore, let the 1633 text stand. 'Changeling' has of course the meaning here of 'a fickle or inconstant person', not the common sense of a person or thing or child substituted for another, as 'fondling' is not here a 'pet, favourite', as in modern usage.
l. 3. Consorted. Grosart, who professes to print from H51, reads Consoled, without any authority.
l. 6. Natures Secretary: i.e. Aristotle. He is always 'the Philosopher' in Aquinas and the other schoolmen. Walton speaks of 'the great secretary of nature and all learning, Sir Francis Bacon'.
l. 7. jolly Statesmen. All the MSS. except O'F agree with 1633 in reading 'jolly', though 'wily' is an obvious emendation. Chambers adopts it. By 'jolly' Donne probably meant 'overweeningly self-confident ... full of presumptuous pride ... arrogant, over-bearing' (O.E.D.). 'Evilmerodach, a jolly man, without Iustyse and cruel.' Caxton (1474). 'It concerneth every one of us ... not to be too high-minded or jolly for anything that is past.' Sanderson (1648).
l. 10. Giddie fantastique Poets of each land. In a letter Donne tells Buckingham, in Spain, how his own library is filled with Spanish books 'from the mistress of my youth, Poetry, to the wife of mine age, Divinity'. This line in the Satires points to the fact, which Donne was probably tempted later to obscure a little, that his first prolonged visit to the Continent had been made before he settled in London in 1592 and probably without the permission of the Government. The other than Spanish poets would doubtless be French and Italian. Donne had read Dante. He refers to him in the fourth Satyre ('who dreamt he saw hell'), and in an unpublished letter in the Burley MS. he dilates at some length, but in no very creditable fashion, on an episode in the Divina Commedia. Of French poets he probably knew at any rate Du Bartas and Regnier.
l. 12. And follow headlong, wild uncertain thee? I have retained the 1633 punctuation instead of, with Chambers, comma-ing 'wild' as well as 'headlong'. The latter is possibly an adverb here, going with 'follow'. The use of 'headlong' as an adjective with persons was not common. The earliest example in the O.E.D. is from Hudibras:
The Friendly Rug preserv'd the ground,
And headlong Knight from bruise or wound.
Donne's line is, however, ambiguous; and the subsequent description of the humorist would justify the adjective.