Compare also the Letter To M^rs M. H. (pp. 216-8), where the same idea recurs:

Page 59. The Blossome.

Page 61. The Primrose, &c.

It is noteworthy that the addition 'being at Montgomery Castle', &c. was made in 1635. It is unknown to 1633 and the MSS. It may be unwarranted. If it be accurate, then the poem is probably addressed to Mrs. Herbert and is a half mystical, half cynical description of Platonic passion. The perfect primrose has apparently five petals, but more or less may be found. Seeking for one to symbolize his love, he fears to find either more or less. What can be less than woman? But if more than woman she becomes that unreal thing, the object of Platonic affection and Petrarchian adoration: but, as he says elsewhere,

Let woman be content to be herself. Since five is half ten, united with man she will be half of a perfect life; or (and the cynical humour breaks out again) if she is not content with that, since five is the first number which includes an even number (2) and an odd (3), it may claim to be the perfect number, and she to be the whole in which we men are included and absorbed. We have no will of our own.

'From Sarai's name He took a letter which expressed the number ten, and reposed one which made but five; so that she contributed that five which man wanted before, to show a mutual indigence and support.' Essays in Divinity (Jessop, 1855), p. 118.

'Even for this, he will visite to the third, and fourth generation; and three and foure are seven, and seven is infinite. Sermons 50. 47. 440.

l. 30. this, five, I have introduced a comma after 'this' to show what, I think, must be the relation of the words. The later editions drop 'this', and it seems to me probable that an original reading and a correction have survived side by side. Donne may have written 'this' alone, referring back to 'five', and then, thinking the reference too remote, he may have substituted 'five' in the margin, whence it crept into the text without completely displacing 'this'. The support which the MSS. lend to 1633 make it dangerous to remove either word now, but I have thought it well to show that 'this' is 'five'. In the MSS. when a word is erased a line is drawn under it and the substituted word placed in the margin.

Page 62. The Relique.

and: 'This mis-devotion, and left-handed piety, of praying for the dead.' Sermons 80. 77. 780.

l. 17. You shalbe. I have recorded this reading of several MSS. because the poem is probably addressed to Mrs. Herbert and Donne may have so written. His discrimination of 'thou' and 'you' is very marked throughout the poems. 'Thou' is the pronoun of feeling and intimacy, 'you' of respect. Compare 'To Mrs. M. H.', and remember that Mrs. Herbert's name was Magdalen.

ll. 27-8. Comming and going, wee Perchance might kisse, but not between those meales: i.e. the kiss of salutation and parting. In a sermon on the text 'Kisse the Son, lest he be angry', Donne enumerates the uses of kissing sanctioned by the Bible, and this among them: 'Now by this we are slid into our fourth and last branch of our first part, The perswasion to come to this holy kisse, though defamed by treachery, though depraved by licentiousnesse, since God invites us to it, by so many good uses thereof in his Word. It is an imputation laid upon Nero, that Neque adveniens neque proficiscens, That whether comming or going he never kissed any: And Christ himself imputes it to Simon, as a neglect of him, That when he came into his house he did not kisse him. This then was in use', &c. Sermons 80. 41. 407.

The kiss of salutation lasted in some countries till the later eighteenth century, perhaps still lasts. See Rousseau's Confessions, Bk. 9, and Byron's Childe Harold, III. lxxix.

But Erasmus, in 1499, speaks as though it were a specially English custom: 'Est praeterea mos nunquam satis laudatus. Sive quo venis, omnium osculis exciperis; sive discedis aliquo, osculis dimitteris; redis, redduntur suavia; venitur ad te, propinantur suavia; disceditur abs te, dividuntur basia; occurritur alicubi, basiatur affatim; denique quocunque te moves, suaviorum plena sunt omnia.'

Page 64. The Dissolution.

Page 66. Negative Love.

Page 67. The Prohibition.

l. 18. So, these extreames shall neithers office doe. The 'neithers' of D, H40, JC, supported by 'neyther' in O'F and 'neyther their' in Cy, is much more characteristic than 'ne'er their', and more likely to have been altered than to have been substituted for 'ne'er their'. The reading of Cy shows how the phrase puzzled an ordinary copyist. 'These extremes shall by counteracting each other prevent either from fulfilling his function.' Compare, 'As two yoke-devils sworn to either's purpose' (i.e. each to the other's purpose). Shakespeare, Hen. V, II. ii. 107.

l. 22. So shall I, live, thy stage not triumph bee. I have placed a comma after I to make quite clear that 'live' is the adjective, not the verb. The 'stay' of 1633 is defensible, but the 1633 editor was somewhat at sea about this poem, witness the variations introduced while the edition was printing in ll. 20 and 24 and the misprinting of l. 5. All the MSS. I have consulted support 'stage'; and this gives the best meaning: 'Alive, I shall continue to be the stage on which your victories are daily set forth; dead, I shall be but your triumph, a thing achieved once, never to be repeated.' Compare:

ll. 23, 24. There are obviously two versions of these lines which the later editions have confounded. The first is that of the text, from 1633. The second is that of the MSS. and runs, properly pointed:

The punctuation of the MSS. is very careless, but the lines as printed are quite intelligible. As given in the editions 1635-69 they are nonsensical.

Page 68. The Expiration.

Page 70. The Paradox.

In the latter group of MSS. this poem is followed immediately by another of the same kind, which is found also in H40, RP31, and O'F, as well as several more miscellaneous MSS. I print from TCC:

A Paradox.

FINIS.

Page 71. Farewell to Love.

What has happened is, I believe, this: Donne here, as elsewhere, used an obsolescent word, viz. 'eagers', the verb, meaning 'sharpens'. The copyist did not recognize the form, took 'desire' for the verb, and made 'eager' the adjectival complement to 'be', changing 'desire' to 'desires' as predicate to 'curse'. What Donne had in mind was the Aristotelian doctrine that the desire to beget children is an expression of man's craving for immortality. The most natural function, according to Aristotle, of every living thing which is not maimed in any way is to beget another living thing like itself, that so it may partake of what is eternal and divine. This participation is the goal of all desire, and of all natural activity. But perishable individuals cannot partake of the immortal and divine by continuous existence. Nothing that is perishable can continue always one and the same individual. Each, therefore, participates as best he may, some more, some less; remaining the same in a way, i.e. in the species, not in the individual.' (De Anima, B. 4. 415 A-B.) Donne's argument then is this: 'Why of all animals have we alone this feeling of depression and remorse after the act of love? Is it a device of nature to restrain us from an act which shortens the life of the individual (he refers here to a prevalent belief as to the deleterious effect of the act of love), needed because that other curse which Adam brought upon man, the curse of mortality,

The latest use of 'eager' as a verb quoted by the O.E.D. is from Mulcaster's Positions (1581), where the sense is that of imitating physically: 'They that be gawled ... may neither runne nor wrastle for eagering the inward'. The Middle English use is closer to Donne's: 'The nature of som men is so ... unconvenable that ... poverte myhte rather egren hym to don felonies.' Chaucer, Boëth. De Consol. Phil. In the Burley MS. (seventeenth century) the following epigram on Bancroft appears:

In Harl. MS. 4908 f. 83 the last line reads:

Page 71. A Lecture upon the Shadow.

The text of this poem in the editions is that of A18, N, TC among the MSS. A slightly different recension is found in most of the other MSS. The chief difference is that the latter read 'love' for 'loves' at ll. 9, 14, and 19. They also, however, read 'least' for 'high'st' at l. 12. In l. 19 they vacillate between 'once' and 'our'. It would not be difficult to defend either version. The only variation from the printed text which I have admitted is that on which all the MSS. are unanimous, viz. 'first' for 'short' in l. 26; 'short' is an obvious blunder.

Note on the music to which certain of Donne's songs were set.

A song meant for the Elizabethans a poem intended to be sung, generally to the accompaniment of the lute. Donne had clearly no thought of his songs being an exception to this rule:

Yet it is difficult to think of some, perhaps the majority, of Donne's Songs and Sonets as being written to be sung. Their sonorous and rhetorical rhythm, the elaborate stanzas which, like the prolonged periods of the Elegies, seem to give us a foretaste of the Miltonic verse-paragraph, suggest speech,—impassioned, rhythmical speech rather than the melody of song. We are not haunted by a sense of the tune to which the song should go, as we are in reading the lyrics of the Elizabethan Anthologies or of Robert Burns. Yet some of Donne's songs were set to music. A note in one group of MSS. describes three of them as 'Songs which were made to certain ayres which were made before'. One of these is The Baite, which must have been set to the same air as Marlowe's song. I reproduce here a lute-accompaniment found in William Corkine's Second Book of Ayres (1612). The airs of the other two (see p. 18 (note)) I have not been able to find, nor are they known to Mr. Barclay Squire, who has kindly helped and guided me in this matter of the music. With his aid I have reproduced here the music of two other songs, and, at another place, that of one of Donne's great Hymns.

Page 8. Song.

Page 23. Breake of Day.

Page 46. The Baite.

EPIGRAMS.

Pages 75-8. Of the epigrams sixteen are given in all the editions, 1633-69. Of these, thirteen are in A18, N, TC, none in D, H49, Lec. Of the remaining three, two are in W, one in HN, both good authorities. I have added three of interest from W, of which one is in HN, and all three are in O'F. W includes among the Epigrams the short poem On a Jeat Ring Sent, printed generally with the Songs and Sonets. In HN there is one and in the Burley MS. are three more. Of these the one in HN and two of those in Bur are merely coarse, and there is no use burdening Donne with more of this kind than he is already responsible for. The last in Bur runs:

Donne's epigrams were much admired, and some of his elegies were classed with them as satirical 'evaporations of wit'. Drummond says: 'I think if he would he might easily be the best epigrammatist we have found in English; of which I have not yet seen any come near the Ancients. Compare his Marry and Love with Tasso's stanzas against beauty; one shall hardly know who hath best.' The stanzas referred to are entitled Sopra la bellezza, and begin:

Page 75. Pyramus and Thisbe. The Grolier Club edition prints the first line of this epigram,

A Burnt Ship. In W the title is given in Italian, in O'F in Latin. Compare James's letter to Salisbury on the Dutch demands for assistance against Spain;—'Should I ruin myself for maintaining them.... I look that by a peace they should enrich themselves to pay me my debts, and if they be so weak as they cannot subsist, either in peace or war, without I ruin myself for upholding them, in that case surely the nearest harm is to be first eschewed: a man will leap out of a burning ship and drown himself in the sea; and it is doubtless a farther off harm from me to suffer them to fall again into the hands of Spain, and let God provide for the danger that may with time fall upon me or my posterity, than presently to starve myself and mine with putting the meat in their mouth.' The King to Salisbury, 1607, Hatfield MSS., quoted in Gardiner's History of England, ii. 25.

Page 76. A Lame Begger. Compare:

Page 76. Sir John Wingefield. In that late Island. Mr. Gosse has inadvertently printed 'base' for 'late'. The 'Lady' island of O'F is due probably to ignorance of what island was intended. It is, of course, Cadiz itself, which is situated on an island at the extreme point of the headland which closes the bay of Cadiz to the west. 'Then we entered into the island of Cales with our footmen,' says Captain Pryce in his letter to Cecil. Strype's Annals, iv. 398. Another account relates how 'on the 21st they took the town of Cadiz and at the bridge in the island were encountered by 400 horses'. Here the severest fighting took place at 'the bridge from Mayne to Cadiz'. What does Donne mean by 'late island'? Is it the island we lately visited so gloriously, or the island on which the sun sets late, that western island, now become a new Pillar of Hercules? It would not be unlike Donne to give a word a startlingly condensed force. Compare (if the reading be right) 'far faith' (p. 189, l. 4) and the note.

Pages 75-6. The series of Epigrams A burnt ship, Fall of a wall, A lame begger, Cales and Guyana, Sir John Wingefield seem to me all to have been composed during the Cadiz expedition. The first suggests, and was probably suggested by, the fight in the harbour when so many of the Spanish ships were burned. The Fall of a wall may mark an incident in the attack of the landing party which forced its way into the city. A lame begger records a common spectacle in a Spanish and Catholic town. Cales and Guyana must clearly have been written when, after Cadiz had been taken and sacked, the leaders were debating their next step. Essex (and Donne is on Essex's side) urged that the fleet should sail west and intercept the silver fleet, but Howard, the Lord Admiral, insisted on an immediate return to England. The last of the series chronicles the one death to which every account of the expedition refers.

Page 77. Antiquary. Who is the Hamon or Hammond that is evidently the subject of this epigram and is referred to in Satyre V, l. 87, I cannot say. I am disposed to think that it may be John Hammond, LL.D., the civilist, the father of James I's physician and of Charles I's chaplain. I have no proof that he was an antiquarian, but a civilist and authority on tithes may well have been so, and he belonged to the class which Donne satirizes with most of anger and feeling, the examiners and torturers of Catholic prisoners. We find him in Strype's Annals collaborating with the notorious Topcliffe.

Phryne. An epigram often quoted by Ben Jonson. Drummond, Conversations, ed. Laing, 842.

Page 78. Raderus. 'Matthew Rader (1561-1634), a German Jesuit, published an edition of and commentary upon Martial in 1602.' Chambers. Compare: 'He added, moreover, that though Raderus and others of his order did use to geld Poets and other authors (and here I could not choose but wonder why they have not gelded their Vulgar Edition which in some places hath such obscene words, as the Hebrew tongue which is therefore called holy, doth so much abhorre that no obscene thing can be uttered in it)....' The reason which Donne gives is that 'They reserve to themselves the divers forms, and the secrets, and mysteries in this latter which they find in the authors whom they gelde.' Ignatius his Conclave (1610), pp. 94-6. The epigram is therefore a coarse hit at the Jesuits.

Mercurius Gallo-Belgicus. A journal or register of news started at Cologne in 1598. The first volume consisted of 659 pages and was entitled: Mercurius Gallo-Belgicus; sive rerum in Gallia et Belgia potissimum: Hispania quoque, Italia, Anglia, Germania, Polonia, vicinisque locis ab anno 1588 usque ad Martium anni praesentis 1594 gestarum, nuncius. In the seventeenth century it was published half-yearly and ornamented with maps. Its Latin was not unimpeachable (Jonson speaks of a 'Gallo-Belgic phrase', Poetaster, v. i), nor its news always trustworthy.

The Lier. This was first printed in Sir John Simeon's Unpublished Poems of Donne (1856-7), whence it is included by Chambers in his Appendix A. It is given the title Supping Hours. Its inclusion in HN (whence the present title) and W strengthens its claim to be genuine. Probably it was written after the Cadiz expedition, and contains a reminiscence (Mr. Gosse has suggested this) of Spanish fare.

THE ELEGIES.

Of the Elegies two groups seem to have been pretty widely circulated before the larger collections were made or publication took place. Each contained either twelve or thirteen, the twelve or thirteen being made up sometimes by the inclusion of the Funeral Elegy, 'Sorrow who to this house,' afterwards called Elegie on the L. C. The order in the one group, as we find it in e.g. D, H49, Lec, is The Bracelet,¹ Going to Bed, Jealousie, The Anagram, Change, The Perfume, His Picture, 'Sorrow who to this house,' 'Oh, let mee not serve,' Loves Warr, On his Mistris, 'Natures lay Ideott, I taught,' Loves Progress. The second group, as we find it in A25, JC, and W, contains The Bracelet, The Comparison, The Perfume, Jealousie, 'Oh, let not me (sic W) serve,' 'Natures lay Ideott, I taught,' Loves Warr, Going to Bed, Change, The Anagram, On his Mistris, His Picture, 'Sorrow, who to this house.' The last is not given in A25. It will be noticed that D, H49, Lec drops The Comparison; A25, JC, W, Loves Progress; and that there were thirteen elegies, taking the two groups together, apart from the Funeral Elegy.

¹ I take the titles given in the editions for ease of reference to the reader of this edition. The only title which D, H49, Lec have is On Loves Progresse; A25, JC, and W have none. Other MSS. give one or other occasionally.

These are the most widely circulated and probably the earliest of Donne's Elegies, taken as such. Of the rest The Dreame is given in D, H49, Lec, but among the songs, and The Autumnall is placed by itself. The rest are either somewhat doubtful or were not allowed to get into general circulation.

Can we to any extent date the Elegies? There are some hints which help to indicate the years to which the earlier of them probably belong. In The Bracelet Donne speaks of Spanish 'Stamps' as having

The last of these references is too indefinite to be of use. I mean that it covers too wide a period. Nor, indeed, do the others bring us very far. The first indicates the period from the alliance between the League and the King of Spain, 1585, when Philip promised a monthly subsidy of 50,000 crowns, to the conversion and victory of Henry IV in 1593; the second, the short time during which Spanish influence gained the upper hand in Scotland, between 1582 and 1586. After 1593 is the only determinable date. In Loves Warre we are brought nearer to a definite date.

points to the period between Henry's conversion ('yea and our God of late') and the conclusion of peace between France and Spain in 1598. The line,

(taken with a similar allusion in one of his letters:

refers most probably to Raleigh's expedition in 1595 to discover the fabulous wealth of Manoa. Had the Elegy been written after the Cadiz expedition there would certainly have been a more definite reference to that war. The poem was probably written in the earlier part of 1596, when the expedition was in preparation and Donne contemplated joining it.

To date one of the poems is not of course to date them all, but their paradoxical, witty, daring tone is so uniform that one may fairly conjecture that these thirteen Elegies were written between 1593 and Donne's first entry upon responsible office as secretary to Egerton in 1598.

The twelfth (His parting from her) and fifteenth (The Expostulation) Elegies it is impossible to date, but it is not likely that they were written after his marriage. Julia is quite undatable, a witty sally Donne might have written any time before 1615. But the fourteenth (A Tale of a Citizen and his Wife) was certainly written after 1609, probably in 1610.

The Autumnall raises rather an interesting question. Mr. Gosse has argued that it was most probably composed as late as 1625. Walton's dating of it is hopelessly confused. He states (Life of Mr. George Herbert, 1670, pp. 14-19) 'that Donne made the acquaintance of Mrs. Herbert and wrote this poem when she was residing at Oxford with her son Edward, Donne being then near to (about First Ed.) the Fortieth year of his Age'; 'both he and she were then past the Meridian of man's life.' But according to Lord Herbert his mother left Oxford and brought him to town about 1600, shortly before the insurrection of Essex, i.e. when Donne was twenty-seven years old, and secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, and Lady Herbert was about thirty-five or thirty-six. It is, of course, not impossible that Donne visited Oxford between 1596 and 1600, but he was not then the grave person Walton portrays. The period which the latter has in view is that in which Donne was at Mitcham and Mrs. Herbert living in London. 'This day', he writes in a letter to her, dated July 23, 1607, 'I came to town and to the best part of it your house.' In 1609 Mrs. Herbert married Sir John Danvers. We know that in 1607-9 Donne was in correspondence with Mrs. Herbert and was sending her copies of his religious verses. Walton's evidence points to its being about the same time that he wrote this poem.

Mr. Gosse's argument for a later date is, regarded a priori, very persuasive. 'Unless it is taken as describing the venerable and beautiful old age of a distinguished woman, the piece is an absurdity; to address such lines to a youthful widow, who was about to become the bride of a boy of twenty, would have been a monstrous breach of taste and good manners' (Life, &c., ii. 228). It is, however, somewhat hazardous to fix a standard of taste for the age of James I, and above all others for John Donne. To the taste of the time and the temper of Donne such a poem might more becomingly be addressed to a widow of forty, the mother of ten children, one already an accomplished courtier, than it might be written by a priest in orders. Donne would have been startled to hear that in 1625 he had spent any time in such a vain amusement as composing a secular elegy. The poem he wrote to Mrs. Herbert before 1609 was probably thought by her and him an exquisite compliment. He expressly disclaims speaking of the old age which disfigures. He writes of one whose youthful beauty has flown. Forty seemed old for a woman, even to Jane Austen, and in Montaigne's opinion it is old for a man: 'J'estois tel, car je ne me considère pas à cette heure, que je suis engagé dans les avenues de la vieillesse, ayant pieça franchy les quarante ans:

Ce que je seray doresnevant ce ne sera plus qu'un demy estre, ce ne sera plus moy; je m'eschappe les jours et me desrobe a moy mesme:

Mrs. Herbert's marriage was due to no 'heyday of the blood'. It was the gravity of Danvers' temper which attracted her, and he became the steady friend and adviser of her children.

There are, moreover, some items of evidence which go to support Walton's testimony. The poem is found in one MS., S, dated 1620, which gives us a downward date; and in 1610 occurs what looks very like an allusion to Donne's poem in Ben Jonson's Silent Woman. Clerimont and True-wit are speaking of the Collegiate ladies, and the former asks,

The resemblance may be accidental, yet the frequency with which the poem is dubbed An Autumnal Face or The Autumnall shows that the phrase had struck home. Jonson's comedies seethe with such allusions, and I rather suspect that he is poking fun at his friend's paradoxes, perhaps in a sly way at that 'grave and youthful matron' Lady Danvers. We cannot prove that the poem was written so early, but the evidence on the whole is in favour of Walton's statement.

Page 79. Elegie I.

l. 4. That Donne must have written 'sere-barke' or 'seare-barke' is clear, both from the evidence of the editions and MSS. and from the vacillation of the latter. 'Cere-cloth' is a word which Donne uses more than once in the sermons: 'A good Cere-cloth to bruises,' Sermons 80. 10. 101; 'A Searcloth that souples all bruises,' Ibid. 80. 66. 663. But to substitute 'sere-cloth' for 'sere-barke' would be to miss the force of Donne's vivid description. The 'sere-cloth' with which the sick man is covered is his own eruptive skin. Both Chambers and Norton have noted the resemblance to Hamlet's poisoned father: