ll. 25-6. The country is a desert, &c. The evidence for this reading is so overwhelming that it is impossible to reject it. I have modified the punctuation to bring out more clearly what I take it to mean. 'The country is a desert where no goodness is native, and therefore rightly understood. Goodness in the country is like a foreign language, a faculty not born with us, but acquired with pain, and never thoroughly understood and mastered.' Only Dr. Johnson could stigmatize in adequate terms so harsh a construction, but the 1635-54 emendation is not less obscure. Does it mean that any good which comes there quits it with all speed, while that which is native and must stay is not understood? This is not a lucid or just enough thought to warrant departure from the better authorized text.
l. 27. prone to more evills; The reading 'mere evils' of several MSS., including D, H49, Lec, is tempting and may be right. In that case 'meere' has the now obsolete meaning of 'pure, unadulterated', 'meere English', 'meere Irish', &c. in O.E.D., or more fully, 'absolute, entire, sheer, perfect, downright', as in 'Th'obstinacie, willfull disobedience, meere lienge and disceite of the countrie gentlemen,' Hist. MSS. Com. (1600), quoted in O.E.D.; 'the mere perdition of the Turkish fleet,' Shakespeare, Othello, II. ii. 3. Such a strong adjective would however come better after 'devills' in the next line. Placed here it disturbs the climax. What Donne says here is that men in the country become beasts, and more prone to evil than beasts because of their higher faculties:
If lecherous goats, if serpents envious
Cannot be damn'd; Alas; why should I bee?
Why should intent or reason, borne in mee,
Make sinnes, else equall, in mee more heinous?
Holy Sonnets, IX, p. [326].
And in this same letter, ll. 41-2, he develops the thought further.
Page 182, ll. 59-62. Only in this one thing, be no Galenist, &c. The Galenists perceived in the living body four humours; hot, cold, moist, and dry, and held that in health these were present in fixed proportions. Diseases were due to disturbance of these proportions, and were to be cured by correction of the disproportion by drugs, these being used as they were themselves hot, cold, moist, or dry; to add to whichever humours were defective. The chymiques or school of Paracelsus, held that each disease had an essence which might be got rid of by being purged or driven from the body by an antagonistic remedy.