No More Learning

'

PAGE =324=, V. 11. _have burnt it heretofore. _ Donne uses 'heretofore'
not infrequently in the sense of 'hitherto', and this seems to be
implied in 'Let their flames retire'. I have therefore preferred the
perfect tense of the MSS. to the preterite of the editions. The 'hath'
of _O'F_ is a change made in the supposed interests of grammar, if not
used as a plural form, for 'their flames' implies that the fires of
lust and of envy are distinguished. In speaking of the first Donne
thinks mainly of his youth, of the latter he has in memory his years
of suitorship at Court.

VI. 7, note. _Or presently, I know not, see that Face. _ This line,
which occurs in several independent MSS. , is doubtless Donne's, but
the reading of the text is probably his own emendation. The first
form of the line suggested too distinctly a not approved, or even
heretical, doctrine to which Donne refers more than once in his
sermons: 'So _Audivimus, et ab Antiquis_, We have heard, and heard by
them of old, That in how good state soever they dye yet the souls of
the departed do not see the face of God, nor enjoy his presence, till
the day of Judgement; This we have heard, and from so many of them of
old, as that the voyce of that part is louder, then of the other. And
amongst those reverend and blessed Fathers, which straied into these
errors, some were hearers and Disciples of the Apostles themselves, as
Papias was a disciple of S.
John and yet Papias was a Millenarian,
and expected his thousand yeares prosperity upon the earth after the
Resurrection: some of them were Disciples of the Apostles, and some of
them were better men then the Apostles, for they were Bishops of Rome;
_Clement_ was so: and yet _Clement_ was one of them, who denied the
fruition of the sight of God, by the Saints, till the Judgement. '
_Sermons_ 80. 73. 739-40.

There are two not strictly orthodox opinions to which Donne seems to
have leant: (1) this, perhaps a remnant of his belief in Purgatory,
the theory of a state of preparation, in this doctrine applied even
to the saints; (2) a form of the doctrine now called 'Conditional
Immortality'. See note on Letter _To the Countesse of Bedford_, p.
196, l. 58.

PAGE =325=, VII. 6. _dearth. _ This reading of the Westmoreland MS. is
surely right notwithstanding the consensus of the editions and other
MSS. in reading 'death'. The poet is enumerating various modes in
which death comes; death itself cannot be one of these. The 'death'
in l.