And, if that young, and his now dying Picture, were at this time set together, every beholder might say, Lord! How much is Dr. Donne already chang'd, before he is chang'd!' The change written in the portrait is the change from the poet of the Songs and Sonets to the poet of the Holy Sonnets and last Hymns.
The design of this last picture and of the marble monument made from it is not very clear. He was painted, Walton says, standing on the figure of the urn. But the painter brought with him also 'a board of the just height of his body'. What was this for? Walton does not explain. But Mr. Hamo Thornycroft has pointed out that the folds of the drapery show the statue was modelled from a recumbent figure. Can it be that Walton's account confuses two things? The incident of the picture is not in the 1640 Life, but was added in 1658. How could Donne, a dying man, stand on the urn, with his winding-sheet knotted 'at his head and feet'? Is it not probable that he was painted lying in his winding-sheet on the board referred to; but that the monument, as designed by himself, and executed by Nicholas Stone, was intended to represent him rising at the Last Day from the urn, habited as he had lain down—a symbolic rendering of the faith expressed in the closing words of the inscription
Hic licet in Occiduo Cinere
Aspicit Eum
Cuius nomen est Oriens.
Page 37, l. 14. The textual note should have indicated that in most or all of the MSS. cited the whole line runs:
(Thou lovest Truth) but an Angell at first sight.
This is probably the original form of the line, corrected later to avoid the clashing of the 'but's.
Page 96, l. 6, note. The R212 cited here is Rawlinson Poetical MS. 212, a miscellaneous collection of seventeenth-century prose and poetry (e.g. Davies' Epigrams. See II. p. 101). I had cited it once or twice in my first draft. The present instance escaped my eye. It helps to show how general the reading 'tyde' was.
Page 115, l. 54. goeing on it fashions. The correct reading is probably 'growing on it fashions', which has the support of both JC, and 1650-69 where 'its' is a mere error. I had made my text before JC came into my hand. To 'grow on' for 'to increase' is an Elizabethan idiom: 'And this quarrel grew on so far,' North's Plutarch, Life of Coriolanus, ad fin. See also O.E.D.