No More Learning

Why should intent or reason, borne in mee,
Make sinnes, else equall, in mee more heinous?
_Holy Sonnets_, IX, p. 326.

And in this same letter, ll. 41-2, he develops the thought further.

PAGE =182=, ll. 59-62. _Only in this one thing, be no Galenist, &c. _
The Galenists perceived in the living body four humours; hot, cold,
moist, and dry, and held that in health these were present in fixed
proportions. Diseases were due to disturbance of these proportions,
and were to be cured by correction of the disproportion by drugs,
these being used as they were themselves hot, cold, moist, or dry; to
add to whichever humours were defective. The chymiques or school of
Paracelsus, held that each disease had an essence which might be got
rid of by being purged or driven from the body by an antagonistic
remedy.


PAGE =183=. TO S^r HENRY GOODYERE.

Goodyere and Walton form between them the Boswell to whom we owe
our fullest and most intimate knowledge of the life of Donne. To
the former he wrote apparently a weekly letter in the years of his
residence at Pyrford, Mitcham, and London.
And Goodyere preserved
his letters and his poems. Of the letters published by Donne's son
in 1651-4, the greatest number, as well as the most interesting and
intimate, are addressed to Goodyere. Some appeared with the first
edition of the poems, and it is ultimately to Goodyere that we
probably owe the generally sound text of that edition.

Sir Henry Goodyere was the son of Sir William Goodyere of Monks Kirby
in Warwickshire, who was knighted by James in 1603, and was the nephew
of Sir Henry Goodyere (1534-95) of Polesworth in Warwickshire. The
older Sir Henry had got into trouble in connexion with one of the
conspiracies on behalf of Mary, Queen of Scots, but redeemed his good
name by excellent service in the Low Countries, where he was knighted
by Leicester. He married Frances, daughter of Hugh Lowther of Lowther,
Westmoreland, and left two daughters, Frances and Anne. The latter,
who succeeded the Countess of Bedford as patroness to the poet Michael
Drayton and as the 'Idea' of his sonnets, married Sir Henry Raynsford.
The former married her cousin, the son of Sir William, and made
him proprietor of Polesworth, to which repeated allusion is made in
Donne's _Letters_. He was knighted, in 1599, in Dublin, by Essex. He
is addressed as a knight by Donne in 1601, and appears as such in
the earliest years of King James. (See Nichol's _Progresses of King
James_. )

He was a friend of wits and poets and himself wrote occasional
verses in rivalry with his friends. Like Donne he wrote satirical
congratulatory verses for _Coryats Crudities_ (1611) and an elegy
on Prince Henry for the second edition of Sylvester's _Lachrymae
Lachrymarum_ (1613), and there are others in MS. , including an
_Epithalamium_ on Princess Elizabeth.

The estate which Goodyere inherited was apparently encumbered, and he
was himself generous and extravagant. He was involved all his life in
money troubles and frequently petitioned for relief and appointments.