No More Learning

The chief difficulty with regard to the second, _A Tale of
a Citizen and his Wife_, is to find Donne writing in this vein at
so late a period as 1609 or 1610, the date implied in several of the
allusions. He was already the author of religious poems, including
probably _La Corona_. In 1610 he wrote his _Litanie_, and, as
Professor Norton points out, in the same letter in which he tells of
the writing of the latter he refers to some poem of a lighter nature,
the name of which is lost through a mutilation of the letter, and
says, 'Even at this time when (I humbly thank God) I ask and have his
comfort of sadder meditations I do not condemn in myself that I
have given my wit such evaporations as those, if they be free from
profaneness, or obscene provocations. ' Whether this would cover the
elegy in question is a point on which perhaps our age and Donne's
would not decide alike. Donne's nature was a complex one. Jack Donne
and the grave and reverend divine existed side by side for not a
little time, and even in the sermons Donne's wit is once or twice
rather coarser than our generation would relish in the pulpit. But
once more we must add that it is possible Donne has in this case
been made responsible for what is another's. Every one wrote this
occasional poetry, and sometimes wrote it well.

There is no more difficult poem to understand or to assign to or from
Donne than the long letter headed _To the Countesse of Huntington_, 13
on the list, which, for the time being, I have placed in the Appendix
B. On internal grounds there is more to be said for ascribing it to
Donne than any other single poem in this collection. Nevertheless I
have resolved to let it stand, that it may challenge the attention it
deserves. [16] The reasons which led me to doubt Donne's authorship are
these:

(1) The poem was not included in the 1633 edition, nor is it found in
either of the groups _D_, _H49_, _Lec_ and _A18_, _N_, _TCC_, _TCD_.
It was added in _1635_ with four other spurious poems, the dialogue
ascribed to Donne and Wotton but assigned by the great majority of
manuscripts to the Earl of Pembroke and Sir Benjamin Rudyard, the two
epistles to Ben Jonson, and the Elegy addressed to Sir Thomas Roe,
which we have assigned, for reasons given above, to Sir John Roe. The
poem is found in only two manuscript collections, viz. _P_ and the
second, miscellaneous collection of seventeenth-century poems in
_TCD_.
In both of these it is headed _Sr Walter Ashton_ (or _Aston_)
_to the Countesse of Huntingtone_, and no reference whatsoever is made
to Donne. I do not attach much importance to this title. Imaginary
headings were quite common in the case of poems circulating in
manuscript. Poems are inscribed as having been written by the Earl of
Essex or Sir Walter Raleigh the night before he died, or as found in
the pocket of Chidiock Tichbourne. Editors have occasionally taken
these too seriously. Drayton's _Heroicall Epistles_ made it a fashion
to write such letters in the case of any notorious love affair or
intrigue. The manuscript _P_ contains a long imaginary letter from Sir
Philip Sidney to Lady Mary Rich and a fragment of her reply. In
the same manuscript the poem, probably by the Earl of Pembroke,
'Victorious beauty though your eyes,' is headed _The Mar: B to the
Lady Fe: Her. _, i. e. the Marquis of Buckingham to--I am not sure what
lady is intended. The only thing which the title given to the letter
in question suggests is that it was not an actual letter to the
Countess but an imaginary one.

(2) Of Donne's relations with Elizabeth Stanley, who in 1603 became
the Countess of Huntingdon, his biographers have not been able to tell
us very much. He must have met her at the house of Sir Thomas Egerton
when her mother, the dowager Countess of Derby, married that statesman
in 1600. Donne says:

I was your Prophet in your yonger dayes,
And now your Chaplaine, God in you to praise.

(p.