No More Learning

With _The Dampe_ the manuscript which I am supposing the editor to
have followed in the main probably came to an end. The poems which
follow in _1633_ are of a miscellaneous character and strangely
conjoined. _The Dissolution_ (p. 64), _A Ieat Ring sent_ (p. 65),
_Negative Love_ (p. 66), _The Prohibition_ (p. 67), _The Expiration_
(p. 68), _The Computation_ (p. 69), complete the tale of lyrics. A few
odd elegies follow ('Language thou art,' 'You that are she,' 'To
make the doubt clear') with _The Paradox_. _A Hymne to Christ, at the
Authors last going into Germany_ is given a page to itself, and is
followed by _The Lamentations of Jeremy_, _The Satyres_, and _A Hymne
to God the Father_. Thereafter come the prose letters and the _Elegies
upon the Author_.

What this comparison of the order of the poems points to is borne out
by an examination of the text. The critical notes afford the materials
for a further verification, and I need not tabulate the resemblances
at length. In _Elegie IV_, for example, ll.
7, 8, which occur in all
the other manuscripts and editions, are omitted by _1633_ and by
_D_, _H49_, _Lec_. Again, when a song has no title in _1633_ it
has frequently none in the manuscript. When there are evidently two
versions of a poem, as e. g. in _The Good-morrow_ and _The Flea_, the
version given in _1633_ is generally that of _D_, _H49_, _Lec_. Later
editions often contaminate this with another version of the poem. At
the same time there are ever and again divergences between the edition
and the manuscript which are not to be ignored, and cannot always be
explained. Some are due to error in one or the other, but some point
either to divergence between the text of the editor's manuscript and
ours, or to the use by the editor of other sources as well as this.
In the fifth elegy (_The Picture_), for example, _1633_ twice seems
to follow, not _D_, _H49_, _Lec_, but another source, another group of
manuscripts which has been preserved; and in _The Aniversarie_ ll. 23,
24, the version of _1633_ is not that of _D_, _H49_, _Lec_ but of
the same second group, which will be described later. On the whole,
however, it is clear that a manuscript closely resembling that now
represented by these three manuscripts supplied the editor of _1633_
with the bulk of the shorter poems, especially the older and more
privately circulated poems, the _Songs and Sonets_ and _Elegies_. When
he is not following this manuscript he draws from miscellaneous and
occasionally inferior sources.

It would be interesting if we could tell whence this manuscript was
obtained, and whether it was _a priori_ likely to be a good one. On
this point we can only conjecture, but it seems to me a fairly tenable
conjecture (though not to be built on in any way) that the nucleus of
the collection, at any rate, may have been a commonplace-book which
had belonged to Sir Henry Goodyere. The ground for this conjecture is
the inclusion in the edition of some prose letters addressed to this
friend, one in Latin and seven in English. There is indeed also one
addressed to the Countess of Bedford; but in the preceding letter to
Goodyere Donne says, 'I send you, with this, a letter which I sent to
the Countesse.