The
punctuation
of the 1633 edition is supported by almost every
MS.
MS.
John Donne
' Lempriere.
See Browne, _Vulgar Errors_,
iii. 21.
PAGE =141=, l. 17. _Help with your presence and devise to praise. _
I have dropped the comma after 'presence' because it suggests to us,
though it did not necessarily do so to seventeenth-century readers,
that 'devise' here is a verb--both Dr. Grosart and Mr. Chambers have
taken it as such--whereas it is the noun 'device' = fancy, invention.
Their fancy and invention is to be shown in the attiring of the bride:
Conceitedly dresse her, and be assign'd
By you, fit place for every flower and jewell,
Make her for love fit fewell
As gay as Flora, and as rich as Inde.
'Devise to praise' would be a very awkward construction.
PAGE =142=, l. 26. _Sonns of these Senators wealths deep oceans. _ The
corruption of the text here has arisen in the first place from the
readily explicable confusion of 'sonnes' or 'sonns' as written and
'sonne', the final 's' being the merest flourish and repeatedly
overlooked in copying and printing, while 'sonne' easily becomes
'some', and secondly from a misapprehension of Donne's characteristic
pun.
The punctuation of the 1633 edition is supported by almost every
MS.
The 'frolique Patricians' are of course not the sons of 'these
Senators' by birth. 'I speak not this to yourselves, you Senators
of London,' says Donne in the _Sermon Preached at Pauls Cross . . . 26
Mart. 1616_, 'but as God hath blessed you in your ways, and in your
callings, so put your children into ways and courses too, in which God
may bless them. . . . The Fathers' former labours shall not excuse their
Sons future idleness. ' The sons of wealthy citizens might grow idle
and extravagant; they could not be styled 'Patricians'. It is not
of them that Donne is thinking, but of the young noblemen who are
accompanying their friend on his wedding-day. They are, or are willing
to be, the sons, by marriage not by blood, of 'these Senators', or
rather of their money-bags. In a word, they marry their daughters for
money, as the hero of the _Epithalamion_ is doing. It is fortunate for
the Senators if the young courtiers do not find in their wives as well
as their daughters, like Fastidious Brisk in Jonson's comedy, 'Golden
Mines and furnish'd Treasurie.
iii. 21.
PAGE =141=, l. 17. _Help with your presence and devise to praise. _
I have dropped the comma after 'presence' because it suggests to us,
though it did not necessarily do so to seventeenth-century readers,
that 'devise' here is a verb--both Dr. Grosart and Mr. Chambers have
taken it as such--whereas it is the noun 'device' = fancy, invention.
Their fancy and invention is to be shown in the attiring of the bride:
Conceitedly dresse her, and be assign'd
By you, fit place for every flower and jewell,
Make her for love fit fewell
As gay as Flora, and as rich as Inde.
'Devise to praise' would be a very awkward construction.
PAGE =142=, l. 26. _Sonns of these Senators wealths deep oceans. _ The
corruption of the text here has arisen in the first place from the
readily explicable confusion of 'sonnes' or 'sonns' as written and
'sonne', the final 's' being the merest flourish and repeatedly
overlooked in copying and printing, while 'sonne' easily becomes
'some', and secondly from a misapprehension of Donne's characteristic
pun.
The punctuation of the 1633 edition is supported by almost every
MS.
The 'frolique Patricians' are of course not the sons of 'these
Senators' by birth. 'I speak not this to yourselves, you Senators
of London,' says Donne in the _Sermon Preached at Pauls Cross . . . 26
Mart. 1616_, 'but as God hath blessed you in your ways, and in your
callings, so put your children into ways and courses too, in which God
may bless them. . . . The Fathers' former labours shall not excuse their
Sons future idleness. ' The sons of wealthy citizens might grow idle
and extravagant; they could not be styled 'Patricians'. It is not
of them that Donne is thinking, but of the young noblemen who are
accompanying their friend on his wedding-day. They are, or are willing
to be, the sons, by marriage not by blood, of 'these Senators', or
rather of their money-bags. In a word, they marry their daughters for
money, as the hero of the _Epithalamion_ is doing. It is fortunate for
the Senators if the young courtiers do not find in their wives as well
as their daughters, like Fastidious Brisk in Jonson's comedy, 'Golden
Mines and furnish'd Treasurie.
