To Lucy, &c., is xciii of the Epigrammes. The fourteenth line runs:
Be of the best; and 'mongst those, best are you.
The comma makes the sense clearer. In l. 3, 1616 reads 'looke,' with comma.
To John Donne (p. [6]) is xcvi. There are no errors; but 'punees' is in 1616 more correctly spelt 'pui'nees'.
Pages 7, 175, 369. I am indebted for the excellent copies of the engravings here reproduced to the kind services of Mr. Laurence Binyon. The portraits form a striking supplement to the poems along with which they are placed. The first is the young man of the Songs and Sonets, the Elegies and the Satyres, the counterpart of Biron and Benedick and the audacious and witty young men of Shakespeare's Comedies. 'Neither was it possible,' says Hacket in his Scrinia Reserata: a Memorial of John Williams ... Archbishop of York (1693), 'that a vulgar soul should dwell in such promising features.'
The engraving by Lombart is an even more lifelike portrait of the author of the Letters, Epicedes, Anniversaries and earlier Divine Poems, learned and witty, worldly and pious, melancholy yet ever and again 'kindling squibs about himself and flying into sportiveness', writing at one time the serious Pseudo-Martyr, at another the outrageous Ignatius his Conclave, and again the strangely-mooded, self-revealing Biathanatos: 'mee thinks I have the keyes of my prison in mine owne hand, and no remedy presents it selfe so soone to my heart, as mine own sword.'
After describing the circumstances attending the execution of the last portrait of Donne, Walton adds in the 1675 edition of the Lives (the passage is not in the earlier editions of the Life of Donne): 'And now, having brought him through the many labyrinths and perplexities of a various life: even to the gates of death and the grave; my desire is, he may rest till I have told my Reader, that I have seen many Pictures of him, in several habits, and at several ages, and in several postures: And I now mention this, because, I have seen one Picture of him, drawn by a curious hand at his age of eighteen; with his sword and what other adornments might then suit with the present fashions of youth, and the giddy gayeties of that age: and his Motto then was,
How much shall I be chang'd,
Before I am chang'd.