No More Learning

But this is not at all clear. Apparently there is no more in the line
than a somewhat vaguely expressed hyperbole: 'she had all the cardinal
virtues of which we hear in Ethics'.

PAGE =286=, l. 44. _Wee'had had a Saint, have now a holiday_: i. e.
'We should have had a saint and should have now a holiday'--her
anniversary. The MS. form of the line is probably correct:

We had had a Saint, now a holiday.

l. 48. _That what we turne to_ feast, _she turn'd to_ pray. As printed
in the old editions this line, if it be correctly given, is one of the
worst Donne ever wrote:

That what we turne to feast, she turn'd to pray,

i. e. apparently 'That, the day which we turn into a feast or festival
she turned into a day of prayer, a fast'.
But 'she turn'd to pray'
in such a sense is a hideously elliptical construction and cannot,
I think, be what Donne meant to write. Two emendations suggest
themselves. One occurs in _HN_:

That when we turn'd to feast, she turn'd to pray.

When we turn'd aside from the routine of life's work to keep holiday,
she did so also, but it was to pray. This is better, but it is
difficult to understand how, if this be the correct reading, the error
arose, and only _HN_ reads 'when'. The emendation I have introduced
presupposes only careless typography or punctuation to account for
the bad line. I take it that Donne meant 'feast' and 'pray' to be
imperatives, and that the line would be printed, if modernized, thus:

That what we turn to 'feast! ' she turn'd to 'pray! '

That the command to keep the Sabbath day holy, which we, especially
Roman Catholics and Anglicans of the Catholic school, interpret as
to the Christian Church a command to feast, to keep holiday, she
interpreted as a command to fast and pray. Probably both Lady Markham
and Lady Bedford belonged to the more Calvinist wing of the Church.
There is a distinctly Calvinist flavour about Lady Bedford's own
_Elegy_, which reads also as though it were to some extent a rebuke to
Donne for the note, either too pagan or too Catholic for her taste, of
his poems on Death. See p. 422, and especially:

Goe then to people curst before they were,
Their spoyles in triumph of thy conquest weare.

l. 58. _will be a Lemnia.