No More Learning

Mris Boulstred (pp. 282, 284), Aug. 4, 1609.
Prince Henry (p. 267), Nov. 6, 1612.
Lord Harington (p. 271), Feb. 27, 1614.
Marquis Hamilton (p. 288), March 22, 1625.

Those about whose date and subject there is uncertainty are that
entitled in 1635 _Elegie on the L. C. _ and that headed _Death_. If
with Chambers and Norton we assume that the former poem is an Elegy on
the death of the Lord Chancellor, Baron Ellesmere, it will have been
written in 1617.
The conjecture is a natural one and may be correct,
but there are difficulties, (1) This title is affixed to _Elegie_ in
_1635_ for the first time. The poem bears no such heading in _1633_ or
in any MS. in which I have found it. Probably 'L. C. ' stands for Lord
Chancellor (though this is not certain); but on what authority was
the poem given this reference? (2) The position which it occupies in
_1633_ is due to its position in the MS. from which it was printed.
Now in _D_, _H49_, _Lec_, and in _W_, it is included among the
_Elegies_, i. e. Love Elegies. But in the last of these, _W_, it
appears with a collection of poems (Satyres, Elegies, the Lincoln's
Inn Epithalamium, and a series of letters to Donne's early friends)
which has the appearance of being, or being derived from, an early
collection, a collection of poems written between 1597 and 1608 to
1610 at the latest. (3) The poem is contained, but again without any
title, in _HN_, the Hawthornden MS. in Edinburgh. Now we know that
Drummond was in London in 1610, and there is no poem, of those which
he transcribed from a collection of Donne's, that is demonstrably
later than 1609, though the two _Obsequies_, 'Death, I recant' and
'Language, thou art too narrowe and too weak', must have been written
in that year. Drummond _may_ have been in London at some time between
1625 and 1630, during which years his movements are undetermined
(David Masson: _Drummond of Hawthornden_, ch.