S96. Stowe MS. 961 is a small folio volume in the British Museum, containing a collection of Donne's poems very neatly and prettily transcribed. It cannot have been made before 1630 as it contains all the three hymns written during the poet's last illnesses. Indeed it is the only manuscript which I have found containing a copy of the Hymne to God, my God in my Sicknes. It is a very miscellaneous collection. Three satires are followed by the long obsequies to the Lord Harington, and these by a sequence of Letters, Funeral Elegies, Elegies, and Songs intermingled. It is regrettable that so well-written a manuscript is not more reliable, but its text is poor, its titles sometimes erroneous, and its ascriptions inaccurate.[30]
(3) In the third class I place manuscripts which are not primarily collections of Donne's poems but collections of seventeenth-century poems among which Donne's are included. It is not easy to draw a hard and fast line between this class and the last because, as has been seen, most of the manuscripts at the end of the last list contain poems which are not, or probably are not, by Donne. Still, in these collections Donne's work predominates, and the tendency of the collector is to bring the other poems under his aegis. Initials like J. R., F. B., J. H. disappear, or J. D. takes their place. In the case of these last collections this is not so. Poems by Donne are included with poems which the collector assigns to other wits. Obviously this class could be made to include many different kinds of collections, ranging from those in which Donne is a prominent figure to those which include only one or two of his poems. But such manuscripts have comparatively little value and no authority for the textual critic, though they are not without importance for the student of the canon of Donne's poetry. I shall mention only one or two, though I have examined a good many more.
A25. Additional MS. 25707, in the British Museum, is a large and interesting collection, written in several different hands, of early seventeenth-century poems, Jacobean and Caroline. It contains an Elegie by Henry Skipwith on the death of King Charles I, but most of the poems are early Jacobean, and either the bulk of the collection was made before this and some other poems were inserted, or it is derived from older collections. Indeed, most of the poems by Donne were probably got from some older collection or collections not unlike some of those already described. They consist of twelve elegies arranged in the same order as in JC, W, and to some extent O'F, which is not the order of D, H49, Lec and 1633; a number of Songs with some Letters and Obsequies following one another sometimes in batches, at times interspersed with poems by other writers; the five Satyres, separated from the other poems and showing some evidences in the text of deriving from a collection like Q or its duplicate in the Dyce collection.[31] The only one of the Divine Poems which A25 contains is The Crosse. No poem which can be proved to have been written later than 1610 is included.
The poems by Donne in this manuscript are generally, but not always, initialled J. D., and are thus distinguished from others by F. B., H. K., N. H., H. W., Sr H. G., T. P., T. G., G. Lucy., No. B., &c. The care with which this has been done lends interest to those poems which are here ascribed to Donne but are not elsewhere assigned to him. A25 (with its partial duplicate C) is the only manuscript which attributes to 'J. D.' the Psalm, 'By Euphrates flowery side,' that was printed in 1633 and all the subsequent editions.[32]
C. A strange duplicate of certain parts of A25 is a small manuscript in the Cambridge University Library belonging to the Baumgartner collection. It is a thin folio, much damaged by damp, and scribbled over. A long poem, In cladem Rheensen ('Verses upon the slaughter at the Isle of Rhees'), has been used by the cataloguer to date the manuscript, but as this has evidently been inserted when the whole was bound, the rest of the contents may be older or younger. The collection opens with three of the Elegies contained in A25. It then omits eleven poems which are in A25, and continues with twenty Songs and Obsequies, following the order of A25 but omitting the intervening poems. Some nine more poems are given, following the order of A25, but many are omitted in C which are found in A25, and the poems in C are often only fragments of the whole poems in A25. Evidently C is a selection of poems either made directly from A25, or from the collection of Donne's poems (with one or two by Beaumont and others) which A25 itself drew from.
A10. Additional MS. 10309, in the British Museum, is a little octavo volume which was once the property of Margaret Bellasis, probably the eldest daughter of Thomas, first Lord Fauconberg. It is a very miscellaneous collection of prose (Hall's Characterismes of Vice) and verse. Of Donne's undoubted poems there are very few, but there is an interesting group of poems by Roe or others (the authors are not named in the manuscript) which are frequently found with Donne's, and some of which have been printed as his.[33]
M. This is a manuscript bought by Lord Houghton and now in the library of the Marquis of Crewe. It is entitled
A Collection of