The paraphrase of Lamentations, and the Epithalamion made at Lincolns Inn (which is not in D, H49, Lec) are other poems which show, in passages where there are divergent readings, a tendency to follow the readings of A18, N, TC, though in neither of these poems is the identity complete. It is further noteworthy that to several poems unnamed in D, H49, Lec the editor of 1633 has given the title which these bear in A18, N, TCC, and TCD, as though he had access to both the collections at the same time.
These two groups of manuscripts, which have come down to us, thus seem to represent the two principal sources of the edition of 1633. What other poems that edition contains were derived either from previously printed editions (The Anniversaries and the Elegy on Prince Henry) or were got from more miscellaneous and less trustworthy sources.
A third manuscript collection of Donne's poems is of interest because it seems very probable that it or a similar collection came into the hands of the printer before the second edition of 1635 was issued. A considerable number of the errors, or inferior readings, of the later editions seem to be traceable to its influence. At least it is remarkable how often when 1635 and the subsequent editions depart from 1633 and the general tradition of the manuscripts they have the support of this manuscript and this manuscript alone. This is the manuscript which I have called
O'F, because it was at one time in the possession of the Rev. T. R. O'Flaherty, of Capel, near Dorking, a great student of Donne, and a collector. He contributed several notes on Donne to Notes and Queries. I do not know of any more extensive work by him on the subject.
This manuscript has been already described by Mr. R. Warwick Bond in the Catalogue of Ellis and Elvey, 1903. It is a large but somewhat indiscriminate collection, made apparently with a view to publication. The title-page states that it contains 'The Poems of D. J. Donne (not yet imprinted) consisting of
The reader will notice how far this arrangement agrees with, how far it differs from, that adopted in 1635.
Of the twenty-eight new poems, genuine, doubtful, and spurious, added in 1635, this manuscript contains twenty, a larger number than I have found in any other single manuscript. An examination of the text of these does not, however, make it certain that all of them were derived from this source or from this source only. The text, for example, of the Elegie XI. The Bracelet, in 1635, is evidently taken from a manuscript differing in important respects from O'F and resembling closely Cy and P. Elegie XII, also, His parting from her, can hardly have been derived from O'F, as 1635 gives an incomplete, O'F has an entire, version of the poem. In others, however, e.g. Elegie XIII. Julia; Elegie XVI. On his Mistris; Satyre, 'Men write that love and reason disagree,' it will be seen that the text of 1635 agrees more closely with O'F than with any of the other manuscripts cited. The second of these, On his Mistris, is a notable case, and so are the four Divine Sonnets added in 1635. Most striking of all is the case of the Song, probably not by Donne, 'Soules joy now I am gone,' where the absurd readings 'Words' for 'Wounds' and 'hopes joyning' for 'lipp-joyning' (or perhaps 'lipps-joyning') must have come from this source. One can hardly believe that two independent manuscripts would perpetrate two such blunders. Taken with the many changes from the text of 1633 in which 1635 has the support of O'F, one can hardly doubt that among the fresh manuscript collections which came into the hands of the printer of 1635 (often only to mislead him) O'F was one.
Besides the twenty poems which passed into 1635, O'F attributes some eighteen other poems to Donne, of which few are probably genuine.[23] Of the other manuscript collections I must speak more shortly. There is no evidence that any of them was used by the seventeenth-century editors.
B is a handsome, vellum-bound manuscript belonging to the Earl of Ellesmere's library at Bridgewater House. I am, I think, the first editor who has examined it. The volume bears on the fly-leaf the autograph signature ('J. Bridgewater') of the first Earl of Bridgewater, the son of Donne's early patron, Elizabeth's Lord Keeper and later Lord Chancellor. On the title-page 'Dr Donne' is written in the same hand. John Egerton, it will be remembered, was, like Donne, a volunteer in Essex's expedition to the Azores in 1597. In 1599 he and his elder brother Thomas were in Ireland, where the latter was killed, leaving John to be his father's heir. The book-number, inscribed on the second leaf, is in the handwriting of the second Earl of Bridgewater, the Elder Brother of Milton's Comus. The manuscript has thus interesting associations, and links with Donne's earliest patron. I had hoped that it might prove, being made for those who had known Donne all his life, an exceptionally good manuscript, but can hardly say that my expectations were fulfilled. It was probably put together in the twenties, because though it contains the Holy Sonnets it does not contain the hymns written at the close of the poet's life. It resembles O'F, S, S96, and P, rather than either of the first two collections which I have described, D, H49, Lec and A18, N, TC, in that it includes with Donne's poems a number of poems not by Donne,[24] but most of them apparently by his contemporaries, Sir John Roe, Francis Beaumont, Jonson, and other of the wits of the first decade of the seventeenth century, the men who collaborated in writing witty poems on Coryat, or Characters in the style of Sir Thomas Overbury. In the case of some of these initials are added, and a later, but not modern, hand has gone over the manuscript and denied or queried Donne's authorship of others. Textually also B tends to range itself, especially in certain groups of poems, as the Satyres and Holy Sonnets, with O'F, S96, W when these differ from D, H49, Lec and A18, N, TC. In such cases the tradition which it represents is most correctly preserved in W. In a few poems the text of B is identical with that of S96. On the whole B cannot be accepted in any degree as an independent authority for the text. It is important only for its agreements with other manuscripts, as helping to establish what I may call the manuscript tradition, in various passages, as against the text of the editions.