No More Learning

The Bracelet_, in _1635_, is evidently
taken from a manuscript differing in important respects from _O'F_ and
resembling closely _Cy_ and _P_. _Elegie XII_, also, _His parting
from her_, can hardly have been derived from _O'F_, as _1635_ gives
an incomplete, _O'F_ has an entire, version of the poem. In others,
however, e. g. _Elegie XIII. Julia_; _Elegie XVI. On his Mistris_;
_Satyre_, 'Men write that love and reason disagree,' it will be seen
that the text of 1635 agrees more closely with _O'F_ than with any of
the other manuscripts cited. The second of these, _On his Mistris_, is
a notable case, and so are the four _Divine Sonnets_ added in _1635_.
Most striking of all is the case of the _Song_, probably not by Donne,
'Soules joy now I am gone,' where the absurd readings 'Words'
for 'Wounds' and 'hopes joyning' for 'lipp-joyning' (or perhaps
'lipps-joyning') must have come from this source. One can hardly
believe that two independent manuscripts would perpetrate two such
blunders. Taken with the many changes from the text of _1633_ in which
_1635_ has the support of _O'F_, one can hardly doubt that among the
fresh manuscript collections which came into the hands of the printer
of _1635_ (often only to mislead him) _O'F_ was one.

Besides the twenty poems which passed into _1635_, _O'F_ attributes
some eighteen other poems to Donne, of which few are probably
genuine. [23] Of the other manuscript collections I must speak more
shortly. There is no evidence that any of them was used by the
seventeenth-century editors.


_B_ is a handsome, vellum-bound manuscript belonging to the Earl of
Ellesmere's library at Bridgewater House.
I am, I think, the first
editor who has examined it. The volume bears on the fly-leaf
the autograph signature ('J. Bridgewater') of the first Earl of
Bridgewater, the son of Donne's early patron, Elizabeth's Lord Keeper
and later Lord Chancellor. On the title-page 'Dr Donne' is written in
the same hand. John Egerton, it will be remembered, was, like Donne, a
volunteer in Essex's expedition to the Azores in 1597. In 1599 he and
his elder brother Thomas were in Ireland, where the latter was killed,
leaving John to be his father's heir. The book-number, inscribed
on the second leaf, is in the handwriting of the second Earl of
Bridgewater, the Elder Brother of Milton's _Comus_. The manuscript has
thus interesting associations, and links with Donne's earliest patron.
I had hoped that it might prove, being made for those who had known
Donne all his life, an exceptionally good manuscript, but can hardly
say that my expectations were fulfilled. It was probably put together
in the twenties, because though it contains the _Holy Sonnets_ it
does not contain the hymns written at the close of the poet's life. It
resembles _O'F_, _S_, _S96_, and _P_, rather than either of the first
two collections which I have described, _D_, _H49_, _Lec_ and _A18_,
_N_, _TC_, in that it includes with Donne's poems a number of poems
not by Donne,[24] but most of them apparently by his contemporaries,
Sir John Roe, Francis Beaumont, Jonson, and other of the wits of the
first decade of the seventeenth century, the men who collaborated in
writing witty poems on Coryat, or _Characters_ in the style of Sir
Thomas Overbury. In the case of some of these initials are added, and
a later, but not modern, hand has gone over the manuscript and denied
or queried Donne's authorship of others. Textually also _B_ tends to
range itself, especially in certain groups of poems, as the _Satyres_
and _Holy Sonnets_, with _O'F_, _S96_, _W_ when these differ from _D_,
_H49_, _Lec_ and _A18_, _N_, _TC_. In such cases the tradition which
it represents is most correctly preserved in _W_. In a few poems the
text of _B_ is identical with that of _S96_. On the whole _B_ cannot
be accepted in any degree as an independent authority for the text.