And I depend on Thee.
The parody does not extend beyond the first verse.
It was one of the aims of Herbert to turn the Muse from profane love verses to sacred purposes. Mr. Chambers points to another reference to this poem in some very bad verses by Sir Kenelm Digby in Bright's edition of Digby's Poems (p. 8), The Roxburghe Club.
APPENDIX C.
I. POEMS FROM ADDITIONAL MS. 25707. Page [433].
The authorship of the four poems here printed from A25 has been discussed in the Text and Canon, &c. There is not much reason to doubt that the first is what it professes to be. The order of the names in the heading, and the character of the verses both suggest that the second and corresponding verses are Donne's contribution. There is a characteristic touch in each one. I cannot find anything eminently characteristic in any of the rest of the group. The third poem refers to the poetical controversy on Love and Reason carried on with much spirit between the Earl of Pembroke and Sir Benjamin Rudyerd in their Poems as printed by the younger Donne in 1660. A much finer fragment of the debate, beginning—
And why should Love a footboy's place despise?
is attributed to Donne by the Bridgewater MS. and the MS. in the library of the Marquess of Crewe. It is part of a poem by Rudyerd in the debate in the volume referred to.
II. POEMS FROM THE BURLEY MS. Page [437].
Of the poems here printed from the Burley-on-the-Hill MS., none I think is Donne's. The chief interest of the collection is that it comes from a commonplace-book of Sir Henry Wotton, and therefore presumably represents the work of the group of wits to which Donne, Bacon, and Wotton belonged. I have found only one of them in other MSS., viz. that which I have called Life a Play. This occurs in quite a number of MSS. in the British Museum, and has been published in Hannah's Courtly Poets. It is generally ascribed to Sir Walter Raleigh; and Harleian MS. 733 entitles it Verses made by Sir Walter Raleigh made the same morning he was executed. I have printed it because with the first, and another in the Reliquiae Wottonianae, it illustrates Wotton's taste for this comparison of life to a stage, a comparison probably derived from an epigram in the Greek Anthology, which may be the source of Shakespeare's famous lines in As You Like It. The epitaph by Jonson on Hemmings, Shakespeare's fellow-actor and executor, is interesting. A similar epitaph on Burbage is found in Sloane MS. 1786: