No More Learning

[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.