'Make a present of this life to the next, by living now as you will live then; and so make this life and the next one'—or, as another poet puts it:

This I take to be Donne's meaning. The 'This' of 1635-69 and the MSS., which Chambers also has adopted, seems required by the antithesis. If one recalls that 'this' is very commonly written 'thys', and that final 's' is little more than a tail, it is easy to account for 'Thy' in 1633. The meaning too is not clear at a glance, and 'Thy' might seem to an editor to make it easier. The thought is much the same as in the Obsequies to the Lord Harrington, p. 279.

Compare also: 'Sir, our greatest businesse is more in our power then the least, and we may be surer to meet in heaven than in any place upon earth.' Letters, p. 188. And see the quotation in note to p. 112, l. 44, 'this and the next are not two worlds,' &c.

Page 191. To the Countesse of Bedford.

ll. 1-6. The sense of this verse, carefully and correctly printed in the 1633 edition, was obscured if not corrupted by the insertion of a semicolon after 'Fortune' in the later editions. The correct punctuation was restored in 1719, which was followed in subsequent editions until Grosart returned to that of the 1635-39 editions (which the Grolier Club editor also adopts), and Chambers completed the confusion by printing the lines thus,

Even Mr. Gosse has been misled into quoting this truncated and enigmatical compliment to Lady Bedford, regarding it, I presume, as of the same nature as Shakespeare's lines,

But this has a meaning; what meaning is there in saying that a man is refined to 'beauty and fortune'? Poor Donne was not likely to boast of either at this time. What he says is something quite different, and strikes the key-note of the poem. 'You have refined and sharpened my judgement, and now I see that the worthiest things owe their value to rareness or use. Value is nothing intrinsic, but depends on circumstances.' This, the next two verses add, explains why at Court it is your virtue which transcends, in the country your beauty. To Donne the country is always dull and savage; the court the focus of wit and beauty, though not of virtue. On the relative nature of all goodness he has touched in the Progresse of the Soule, p. 316, ll. 518-20:

With the sentiment regarding Courts compare: 'Beauty, in courts, is so necessary to the young, that those who are without it, seem to be there to no other purpose than to wait on the triumphs of the fair; to attend their motions in obscurity, as the moon and stars do the sun by day; or at best to be the refuge of those hearts which others have despised; and by the unworthiness of both to give and take a miserable comfort.' Dryden, Dedication of the Indian Emperor.

ll. 8-9.

I have completed the enclosure of (Where ... show) in brackets which 1633 began but forgot to carry out. The statement is parenthetical, and it is of the essence of Donne's wit to turn aside in one parenthesis to make another, dart from one distracting thought to a further, returning at the end to the main track. He has left the Countess for a moment to explain why the Court 'is not Vertues clime'. She is too transcendent to be, or at any rate to be seen there, as I (he adds, quite irrelevantly) am too low. Then taking up again the thought of the first line he continues: 'all my rhyme is claimed there by your vertues, for there rareness gives them value. I am the comment on what there is a dark text; the usher who announces one that is a stranger.'

For brackets within brackets compare: 'And yet it is imperfect which is taught by that religion which is most accommodate to sense (I dare not say to reason (though it have appearance of that too) because none may doubt but that that religion is certainly best which is reasonablest) That all mankinde hath one protecting Angel; all Christians one other, all English one other, all of one Corporation and every civill coagulation or society one other; and every man one other.' Letters, p. 43.

l. 13. To this place: i.e. Twickenham. O'F heads the poem To the Countesse of Bedford, Twitnam. The poem is written to welcome her home. See l. 70.

The development of Donne's subtle and extravagant conceits is a little difficult. The Countess is the sun which exhales the sweetness of the country when she comes thither (13-18). Apparently the Countess has returned to Twickenham in Autumn, perhaps arriving late in the evening. When she emerges from her chariot it is the breaking of a new day, the beginning of a new year or new world. Both the Julian and the Gregorian computations are thus falsified (19-22). It shows her truth to nature that she will not suffer a day which begins at a stated hour, but only one that begins with the actual appearance of the light (23-4: a momentary digression). Since she, the Sun, has thus come to Twickenham, the Court is made the Antipodes. While the 'vulgar sun' is an Autumnal one, this Sun which is in Spring, receives our sacrifices. Her priests, or instruments, we celebrate her (25-30). Then Donne draws back from the religious strain into which he is launching. He will not sing Hymns as to a Deity, but offer petitions as to a King, that he may view the beauty of this Temple, and not as Temple, but as Edifice. The rest of the argument is simpler.

l. 60. The same thinge. The singular of the MSS. seems to be required by 'you cannot two'. The 's' of the editions is probably due to the final 'e'. But 'things' is the reading of Lec, the MS. representing most closely that from which 1633 was printed.

ll. 71-2. Who hath seene one, &c. 'Who hath seen one, e.g. Twickenham, which your dwelling there makes a Paradise, would fain see you too, as whoever had been in Paradise would not have failed to seek out the Cherubim.' The construction is elliptical. Compare:

The Cherubim are specially mentioned (although the Seraphim are the highest order) because they are traditionally the beautiful angels: 'The Spirit of Chastity ... in the likenesse of a faire beautifull Cherubine.' Bacon, New Atlantis (1658), 22 (O.E.D.).

Page 193. To S^r Edward Herbert. at Iulyers.

Edward Herbert, first Baron of Cherbury (1563-1648), the eldest son of Donne's friend Mrs. Magdalen Herbert, had not long returned from his first visit to France when he set out again in 1610 with Lord Chandos 'to pass to the city of Juliers which the Prince of Orange resolved to besiege. Making all haste thither we found the siege newly begun; the Low Country army assisted by 4,000 English under the command of Sir Edward Cecil. We had not long been there when the Marquis de la Chartre, instead of Henry IV, who was killed by that villain Ravaillac, came with a brave French army thither'. Autobiography, ed. Sidney Lee. The city was held by the Archduke Leopold for the Emperor. The Dutch, French, and English were besieging the town in the interest of the Protestant candidates, the Elector of Brandenburg, and the Palatine of Neuburg. The siege marked the beginning of the Thirty Years' War. Herbert was a man of both ability and courage but of a vanity which outweighed both. Donne's letter humours both his Philosophical pose and his love of obscurity and harshness in poetry. His own poems with a few exceptions are intolerably difficult and unmusical, and Jonson told Drummond that 'Donne said to him he wrote that Epitaph upon Prince Henry, Look to me Faith, to match Sir Ed. Herbert in obscureness'. (Jonson's Conversations, ed. Laing.) The poems have been reprinted by the late Professor Churton Collins. In 1609 when Herbert was in England he and Donne both wrote Elegies on Mistress Boulstred.

l. 1. Man is a lumpe, &c. The image of the beasts Donne has borrowed from Plato, The Republic, ix. 588 B-E.

Page 194, ll. 23-6. A food which to chickens is harmless poisons men. Our own nature contributes the factor which makes a food into a poison either corrosive or killing by intensity of heat or cold: 'Et hic nota quod tantus est ordo naturae, ut quod est venenosum et inconveniens uni est utile et conveniens alteri; sicut jusquiamus qui est cibus passeris licet homini sit venenosus; et sicut napellus interficit hominem solum portatus, et mulierem praegnantem non laesit manducatus, teste Galieno; et mus qui pascitur napello est tiriaca contra napellum.' Benvenuto on Dante, Div. Comm.: Paradiso, i. The plants here mentioned are henbane and aconite. Concerning hemlock the O.E.D. quotes Swan, Spec. M. vi. § 4 (1643), 'Hemlock ... is meat to storks and poison to men.' Donne probably uses the word 'chickens' as equivalent to 'young birds', not for the young of the domestic fowl. For the cold of the hemlock see Persius, Sat. v. 145; Ovid, Amores, iii. 7. 13; and Juvenal, Sat. vii. 206, a reference to Socrates' gift from the Athenians of 'gelidas ... cicutas'.

ll. 31-2. Thus man, that might be'his pleasure, &c. These lines are condensed and obscure. The 'his' must mean 'his own'. 'Man who in virtue of that gift of reason which makes him man might be to himself a source of joy, becomes instead, by the abuse of reason, his own rod. Reason which should be the God directing his life becomes the devil which misleads him.' Chambers prints 'His pleasure', 'His rod', referring 'his' to God—which seems hardly possible.

ll. 34-8. wee'are led awry, &c. Chambers's punctuation of this passage is clearly erroneous:

This must mean that we are led astray by those who, in their abridgement of man, still show him to us greater than he really is. But this is the opposite of what Donne says. 'Greater than due' goes with 'no form'. Compare:

'And therefore the Philosopher draws man into too narrow a table, when he says he is Microcosmos, an Abridgement of the world in little: Nazianzen gives him but his due, when he calls him Mundum Magnum, a world to which all the rest of the world is but subordinate: For all the world besides, is but God's Foot-stool; Man sits down upon his right-hand,' &c. Sermons 26. 25. 370.

'It is too little to call Man a little world; Except God, Man is a diminutive to nothing. Man consists of more pieces, more parts, than the world; than the world doth, nay than the world is.' Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, &c. (1624), p. 64.

On the other hand the Grolier Club editor has erroneously followed 1635-69 in altering the full stop after 'chaw' to a comma; and has substituted a semicolon for the comma after 'fill' (l. 39), reading:

But 'All that is fill'd,' &c. is not object to 'can draw'. It is subject (in apposition with 'All the round world') to 'is but a pill'.

Page 195, l. 47. This makes it credible. I have changed the comma after 'credible' to a semicolon to avoid the misapprehension, into which the Grolier Club editor seems to have fallen, that what is credible is 'that you have dwelt upon all worthy books'. It is because Lord Herbert has dwelt upon all worthy books that it is credible that he knows man.

Page 195. To the Countesse of Bedford.

l. 1. T'have written then, &c. This is one of the most difficult of Donne's poems. With his usual strain of extravagant compliment Donne has interwoven some of his deepest thought and most out-of-the-way theological erudition and scientific lore. Moreover the poem is one of those for which the MS. resembling D, H49, Lec was not available. The text of 1633 was taken from a MS. belonging to the group A18, N, TCC, TCD, and contains several errors. Some of these were corrected in 1635 from O'F or a MS. resembling it, but in the most vital case what was a right but difficult reading in 1633 was changed for an apparently easier but erroneous reading.

The emendations which I have accepted from 1635 are—

l. 5. 'debt' for 'doubt'.

l. 7. 'nothings' for 'nothing'.

l. 20. 'or all It; You.' for 'or all, in you.' There is not much to choose between the two, but 'the world's best all' is not a very logical expression. But the 1633 reading may mean 'the world's best part, or the world's all,—you.' The alteration of 1635 is not necessary, but looks to me like the author's own emendation.

l. 4. Then worst of civill vices, thanklessenesse. 'Naturall and morall men are better acquainted with the duty of gratitude, of thankesgiving, before they come to the Scriptures, then they are with the other duty of repentance which belongs to Prayer; for in all Solomons bookes, you shall not finde halfe so much of the duty of thankefulnesse, as you shall in Seneca and in Plutarch. No book of Ethicks, of moral doctrine, is come to us, where there is not, almost in every leafe, some detestation, some Anathema against ingratitude.' Sermons 80. 55. 550.

Page 197, l. 54. Wee (but no forraine tyrants could) remove. Following the hint of O'F, I have bracketed all these words to show that the verb to 'Wee' is 'remove', not 'could remove'.

Here the later editions change 'not' to 'borne', and the correction has been accepted by Grosart and Chambers. But 1633 is right. If 'not' be changed, the force of the antithesis is lost. What is 'borne free' does not need to be preserved. What Donne expresses is a form of the doctrine of conditional immortality. In a sermon on the Penitential Psalms (Sermons 80. 53. 532) he says: 'We have a full cleerenesse of the state of the soule after this life, not only above those of the old Law, but above those of the Primitive Christian Church, which, in some hundreds of years, came not to a cleere understanding in that point, whether the soule were immortall by nature, or but by preservation, whether the soule could not die or only should not die,' &c. Here the antithesis between 'being preserved' and 'being naturally free' (i.e. immortal) is presented as sharply as in this line of the verse Letter. But Donne states the doctrine tentatively 'because that perchance may be without any constant cleerenesse yet'. Elsewhere he seems to accept it: 'And for the Immortality of the Soule, it is safelier said to be immortall by preservation, then immortal, by nature; That God keepes it from dying, then, that it cannot dye.' Sermons 80. 27. 269. This makes the correct reading of the line quite certain.

The tenor of Donne's thought seems to me to be as follows: He is speaking of the soul's eclipse by the body (ll. 40-2), by the body which should itself be an organ of the soul's life, of prayer as well as labour (ll. 43-8). He returns in ll. 49-52 to the main theme of the body's corrupting influence, and this leads him to a new thought. It is not only the soul which suffers by this absorption in the body, but the body itself:

By this descent of the soul into the body we deprive the latter of its proper dignity, to be the Casket, Temple, Palace of the Soul. Then Donne turns aside to enforce the dignity of the Body. It will be redeemed from death, and the Soul is only preserved. No more than the Body is the Soul naturally immortal. These lines are almost a parenthesis. The poet returns once more to his main theme, the degradation of the soul by our exclusive regard for the body.

Thus the deepest thought of Donne's poetry, his love poetry and his religious poetry, emerges here again. He will not accept the antithesis between soul and body. The dignity of the body is hardly less than that of the soul. But we cannot exalt the body at the expense of the soul. If we immerse the soul in the body it is not the soul alone which suffers but the body also. In the highest spiritual life, as in the fullest and most perfect love, body and soul are complementary, are merged in each other; and after death the life of the soul is in some measure incomplete, the end for which it was created is not obtained until it is reunited to the body. 'Yet have not those Fathers, nor those Expositors, who have in this text, acknowledged a Resurrection of the soule, mistaken nor miscalled the matter. Take Damascens owne definition of Resurrection: Resurrectio est ejus quod cecidit secunda surrectio: A Resurrection is a second rising to that state, from which anything is formerly fallen. Now though by death, the soule do not fall into any such state, as that it can complaine, (for what can that lack, which God fils?) yet by death, the soule fals from that, for which it was infused, and poured into man at first; that is to be the forme of that body, the King of that Kingdome; and therefore, when in the generall Resurrection, the soule returns to that state, for which it was created, and to which it hath had an affection, and a desire, even in the fulnesse of the Joyes of Heaven, then, when the soule returns to her office, to make up the man, because the whole man hath, therefore the soule hath a Resurrection: not from death, but from a deprivation of her former state; that state which she was made for, and is ever enclined to.' Sermons 80. 19. 189.

Here, as before, Donne is probably following St. Augustine, who combats the Neo-Platonic view (to which mediaeval thought tended to recur) that a direct source of evil was the descent of the soul into the body. The body is not essentially evil. It is not the body as such that weighs down the soul (aggravat animam), but the body corrupted by sin: 'Nam corruptio corporis ... non peccati primi est causa, sed poena; nec caro corruptibilis animam peccatricem, sed anima peccatrix fecit esse corruptibilem carnem.' In the Resurrection we desire not to escape from the body but to be clothed with a new body,—'nolumus corpore exspoliari, sed ejus immortalitate vestiri.' Aug. De Civ. Dei, xiv. 3, 5. He cites St. Paul, 2 Cor. v. 1-4.

l. 59. As men to our prisons, new soules to us are sent, &c.: 'new' is the reading of 1633 only, 'now' followed or preceded by a comma of the other editions and the MSS. It is difficult to decide between them, but Donne speaks of 'new souls' elsewhere: 'The Father creates new souls every day in the inanimation of Children, and the Sonne creates them with him.' Sermons 50. 12. 100. 'Our nature is Meteorique, we respect (because we partake so) both earth and heaven; for as our bodies glorified shall be capable of spirituall joy, so our souls demerged into those bodies, are allowed to partake earthly pleasure. Our soul is not sent hither, only to go back again; we have some errand to do here; nor is it sent into prison, because it comes innocent; and he which sent it, is just.' Letters (1651), p. 46.

l. 68. Two new starres. See Introductory Note to Letters.

Page 198, l. 72. Stand on two truths: i.e. the wickedness of the world and your goodness. You will believe neither.

Page 198. To the Countesse of Bedford.

On New-yeares day.  

Donne cannot mean that the matter and form are 'intricately intertwined or intermingled', using the words as in Bacon: 'The formes of substances (as they are now by compounding and transplanting multiplied) are so perplexed.' Bacon, Adv. Learn. ii. 7. § 5. The question of meteors in all their forms was one of great interest and great difficulty to ancient science. Seneca, who gathers up most of what has been said before him, recurs to the subject again and again. See the Quaestiones Naturales, i. 1, and elsewhere. Aristotle, he says, attributes them to exhalations from the earth heated by the sun's rays. They are at any rate not falling stars, or parts of stars, but 'have their origin below the stars, and—being without solid foundation or fixed abode—quickly perish'. But there was great uncertainty as to their what and where. Donne compares himself to them in the uncertainty of his position and worldly affairs. 'Wind is a mixt Meteor, to the making whereof divers occasions concurre with exhalations.' Sermons 80. 31. 305.

Page 199, l. 19. cherish, us doe wast. The punctuation of 1633 is odd at the first glance, but accurate. If with all the later editions one prints 'cherish us, doe wast', the suggestion is that 'wast' is intransitive—'in cherishing us they waste themselves,' which is not Donne's meaning. It is us they waste.

Page 200, l. 44. Some pitty. I was tempted to think that Lowell's conjecture of 'piety' for 'pitty' must be right, the more so that the spelling of the two words was not always differentiated. But it is improbable that Donne would say that 'piety' in the sense of piety to God could ever be out of place. What he means is probably that at Court pity, which elsewhere is a virtue, may not be so if it induces a lady to lend a relenting ear to the complaint of a lover.

What follows is ambiguous. As punctuated in 1633 the lines run:

This must mean, practically repeating what has been said: 'Some vain amusements which, on this side of the line separating the cloister from the Court, would be sin; are on that side, in the Court, becoming—amusements, sinful in the cloister, are permissible at Court.' The last line thus contains a sharp antithesis. But can 'on this side' mean 'in the cloister'? Donne is not writing from the cloister, and if he had been would say 'In this place'. 'Faith', he says elsewhere, 'is not on this side Knowledge but beyond it.' Sermons 50. 36. 325. This is what he means here, and I have so punctuated it, following 1719 and subsequent editions: 'Some vain disport, so long as it falls short of actual sin, is permissible at Court.'

l. 48. what none else lost: i.e. innocence. Others never had it.

Page 201. To the Countesse of Huntingdon.

Elizabeth Stanley, daughter of Ferdinando, fifth Earl of Derby, married Henry Hastings, fifth Earl of Huntingdon, in 1603. Her mother's second husband was Sir Thomas Egerton, whom Lady Derby married in 1600. Donne was then Egerton's secretary, and in lines 57-60 he refers to his early acquaintance with her, then Lady Alice Stanley. If the letter in Appendix A, p. 417, 'That unripe side', &c., be also by Donne, and addressed to the Countess of Huntingdon, it must have been written earlier than this letter, which belongs probably to the period immediately before Donne's ordination.

l. 13. the Magi. The MSS. give Magis, and in The First Anniversary (l. 390) Donne writes, 'The Aegyptian Mages'. The argument of the verse is: 'As such a miraculous star led the Magi to the infant Christ, so may the beams of virtue transmitted by your fame guide fit souls to the knowledge of virtue; and indeed none are so bad that they may not be thus led. Your light can illumine and guide the darkest.'

l. 18. the Sunnes fall. In Autumn? or does Donne refer to the fall of the sun to the centre in the new Astronomy? In the Letters, p. 102, he says that 'Copernicisme in the Mathematiques hath carried earth farther up from the stupid Center; and yet not honoured it, because for the necessity of appearances, it hath carried heaven so much higher from it'. Compare An Anatomie of the World, l. 274.

Page 202, l. 25. She guilded us: But you are gold, and Shee; The 1633 reading is the more pregnant, and therefore the more characteristic of Donne. 'She guilded us, but you she changed into her own substance.' The 1635 reading implies transubstantiation, but does not indicate so clearly the identity of the new substance with virtue's own essence.

ll. 33-6. Else being alike pure, &c. This verse follows in the closest way on what has gone before, and should not be separated from it by a full stop as in Chambers and Grolier. The last line of this stanza concludes the whole argument which began at l. 29. 'The high grace of virginity indeed is not yours, because virtue, having made you one with herself, wished in you to reveal herself. Virtue and Virginity are each too pure for earthly vision. As air and aqueous vapour are each invisible till both are changed into thickened air or cloud, so virtue becomes manifest in you as mother and wife. It is for our sake you take these low names.'

ll. 41-4. So you, as woman, one doth comprehend, &c. 'One, your husband, comprehends your being. To others it is revealed, but under the veil of kindred; to still others of friendship; to me, who stand more remote, under the relationship of prince to subject.'

l. 47. I, which doe soe. The edition of 1633 reads, 'I, which to you', making a logical and grammatical construction of the sentence impossible. The editor has failed to note that the personal reference of 'owe' is supplied in l. 45, 'To whom'. 'I, which doe so' means 'I, who contemplate you'.

Page 203. To M^r T. W.

To M^r T. W. The group of letters which begins with this I have arranged according to the order in which they are found in W, Mr. Gosse's Westmoreland MS. In this MS. a better text of these poems is given than that of 1633; lines are supplied which have been dropped, and a few whole letters. The series contains also a reply to one of Donne's letters. For these reasons it seems to me preferable to follow an order which may correspond to the order of composition.

In 1633, which follows A18, N, TCC, TCD, the letters are headed M. T. W., M. R. W., &c., 'M' standing, as often, for 'Mr.' Seeing, however, that 'Mr.' is the general form in W, I have used it as clearer.

The first of the letters has been headed hitherto To M. I. W., and Mr. Chambers conjectured that the person addressed might be Izaak Walton. It is clear from the other MSS. that A18, N, TC, which 1633 follows, is wrong and that I. W. should be T. W., Thomas Woodward. The T and I of this MS. are very similar, though distinguishable. Unfortunately we know nothing more of Thomas Woodward than that he was Rowland's brother and Donne's friend. The 'sweet Poet' must not be taken too seriously. Donne and his friends were corresponding with one another in verse, and complimenting each other in the polite fashion of the day.

Page 204, ll. 13-16. But care not for me, &c. These lines form a crux in the textual criticism of Donne's poetry. I shall print them as they stand in W:

Some copies of the 1633 edition (including those used by myself and by the Grolier Club editor) print these words, but obscure the meaning by bracketing 'alas ... schoole'. Other copies (e.g. that used by Chambers) insert after 'Before' a 'by', which the Grolier Club editor also does as a conjecture. The 1635 editor, probably following O'F, resorted to another device to clear up the sense and changed 'Before' to 'But for', which Grosart and Chambers follow. The majority of the MSS., however, agree with W, and the case illustrates well the difficulties which beset an eclectic use of the editions.

If the bracket in 1633 is dropt, or rearranged as in the text, the reading is correct and intelligible. The printers and editors have been misled by Donne's phrase, 'In Natures, and in Fortunes gifts'. They took this to go with 'A monster and a beggar': 'I that ever was a monster and a beggar in Natures and in Fortunes gifts.' This is a strange expression, taken, I suppose, to mean that Donne never enjoyed the blessings either of Nature or of Fortune. But what Donne says is somewhat different. The phrase 'I that ever was in Natures and in Fortunes gifts' means 'I that ever was the Almsman of Nature and Fortune'. Donne is using metaphorically a phrase of which the O.E.D. quotes a single instance: 'I live in Henry the 7th's Gifts' (i.e. his Almshouses). T. Barker, The Art of Angling (1651). The whole sentence might be paraphrased thus: 'I, who was ever the Almsman of Nature and Fortune, am now a fool.' Parenthetically he adds, 'Till thy grace begot me, a monster and a beggar, in the Muses' school'. Possibly 'and a beggar' should be left outside the brackets and taken with 'In Natures and in Fortunes gifts': 'I, that was an almsman and beggar, was by you begotten a poet, though a monstrous one;' ('monster' goes properly with 'got') 'and am now a fool'—possibly the last allusion is to his rash marriage. Donne's prose and verse of the years following 1601 are full of this melancholy depreciation of himself and his lot. Daniel calls himself the

Compare also:

In W 'All haile sweet Poet' is followed at once by these lines, presumably written by Thomas Woodward and possibly in reply to the above. They are found standing by themselves in B, O'F, P, S96. In these they are apparently ascribed to Donne. I print from W:

To M^r J. D.

l. 25. Now if this song, &c. By interchanging the stops at 'evill' and at 'passe' the old editions have obscured these lines. Mr. Chambers, accepting the full stop at 'evill', prints:—

The reason for writing is not clear. 'If thou forget,' &c. explains ''Twill be good prose'. 'Read this without attending to the rhymes and you will find it good prose.' If we drop the epithet 'good', this criticism will apply to a considerable portion of metaphysical poetry.

Page 205, l. 30. thy zanee, i.e. thy imitator, as the Merry-Andrew imitates the Mountebank:

Page 205. To M^r T. W.

Page 206. To M^r T. W.

To M^r T. W.

According to Aristotle, all the higher, more intellectual arts, as distinct from those which supply necessities or add to the pleasures of life, are the fruits of leisure: 'At first he who invented any art that went beyond the common perceptions of man was naturally admired by men, not only because there was something useful in the inventions, but because he was thought wise and superior to the rest. But as more arts were invented, and some were directed to the necessities of life, others to its recreation, the inventors of the latter were naturally always regarded as wiser than the inventors of the former, because their branches of knowledge did not aim at utility. Hence when all such inventions were already established, the sciences which do not aim at giving pleasure or at the necessities of life were discovered, and first in the places where men first began to have leisure. This is why the mathematical arts were founded in Egypt; for there the priestly caste was allowed to be at leisure.' Met. A. 981^b (translated by W. D. Ross).

l. 12. a Picture, or bare Sacrament. The last word would seem to be used in the legal sense: 'The sacramentum or pledge which each of the parties deposited or became bound for before a suit.' O.E.D. The letter is a picture of his mind or pledge of his affection.

Page 207. To M^r R. W.

See also Donne's The Litanie, i. p. 342, l. 112.

Page 208. To M^r C. B.

l. 10. Heavens liberall and earths thrice fairer Sunne. I prefer the 1633 and 1669 reading, amended from W which reads 'fairer', to that of the later editions, 'the thrice faire Sunne', which Chambers adopts. There are obviously two suns in question—the Heavens' liberal sun, and the earth's thrice-fairer one, i.e. the lady. Exiled from both, Donne carries with him sufficient fire to melt the ice of the wintry regions he must visit—not 'that which walls her heart'. Commenting on a similar conceit in Petrarch:

Tassoni tells how while writing he found himself detained at an Inn by a severe frost, and that sighs were of little use to melt it. Considerazioni, &c. (1609), p. 228.

To M^r E. G.

Page 209. To M^r R. W.

Page 210. To M^r R. W.

Page 211. To M^r S. B.

Probably Samuel Brooke, the brother of Christopher. He officiated at Donne's marriage and was imprisoned. He was later Chaplain to Prince Henry, to James I, and to Charles I; professor of Divinity at Gresham College (1612-29) and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, 1629. He wrote Latin plays, poems, and religious treatises. The tone of Donne's letter implies that he is a student at Cambridge. It was written therefore before 1601, probably, like several of these letters, while Donne was Egerton's secretary, and living in chambers with Christopher Brooke. A poem by Samuel Brooke, On Tears, is printed in Hannah's Courtly Poets.

Page 212. To M^r J. L.

To M^r B. B.