No More Learning

Many rich fruits from
the green branches of his wit[14] have lain mellowing among
the lovers of art, which now, when _nearly rotten with age_,
they _are distributing_. Into my hands have fallen, by the
help of my special friends among the gentlemen of that nation,
some five and twenty of the best sort of medlars. Among
our people, I cannot select anyone to whom they ought to be
communicated sooner than to you,[15] as this poets manner of
conceit and expression are exactly yours, Sir. '

This is a very interesting piece of evidence as to the manner in which
Donne's poems had been preserved by his friends, and the form in which
they were being distributed. There is no reference to publication. It
is doubtless due to this activity in collecting and transcribing the
poems of the now famous preacher that we owe the number of manuscript
collections dating from the years before and immediately after 1630.

Had Donne undertaken the publication of his own poems, such of these
manuscript collections as have been preserved--none of which
are autograph, and few or none of which have a now traceable
history--would have little importance for a modern editor. The most
that they could do would be to show us occasionally what changes a
poem had undergone between its earliest and its latest appearance.
But Donne's poems were not published in this way, and the manuscripts
cannot be ignored. They must have for his editor at least the
same interest and importance as the Quartos have for the editor
of Shakespeare. Whatever opinion he may hold, on _a priori_ or _a
posteriori_ grounds, regarding the superior authority of the First
Folio of Shakespeare's plays, no editor, not 'thirled to' a theory,
will deny that a right reading has been preserved for us often by the
Quartos and the Quartos only. No wise man will neglect the assistance
even of the more imperfect of them. Before therefore discussing the
relative value of the different editions, and the use that may be made
of the manuscripts, it will be well to give a short description of the
manuscripts which the present editor has consulted and used, of their
relation to one another, their comparative value, and the relation of
_some_ of them to the editions. It is, of course, possible that there
are manuscripts of Donne's poems which have not yet come to light; and
among them may be some more correctly transcribed than any which
has come into the present editor's hands. He has, however, examined
between twenty and thirty, and with the feeling recently of moving
in a circle--that new manuscripts were in part or whole duplicates of
those which had been already examined, and confirmed readings already
noted but did not suggest anything fresh.
I will divide the manuscripts into four classes, of which the first
two, it will be seen at a glance, are likely to be the most important
for the textual critic.

(1) Manuscript collections of portions of Donne's poems, e. g. the
_Satyres_. The 'booke' to which Freeman refers in the epigram quoted
above was probably a small collection of this kind, and we have seen
that Jonson sent the _Satyres_ to Lady Bedford, and Francis Davison
lent them to his brother. Of such collections I have examined the
following:


_Q. _ This is a small quarto manuscript, bound up with a number of
other manuscripts, in a volume (MS. 216) in the library of Queen's
College, Oxford. It is headed _Mr. John Dunnes Satires_, and contains
the five Satires (which alone I have accepted as Donne's own) followed
by _A Storme_, _A Calme_, and one song, _The Curse_ (see p. 41), here
headed _Dirae_. As Mr. Chambers says (_Poems of John Donne_, i, p.
xxxvi), this is probably just the kind of 'booke' which Freeman read.
The poems it contains are probably those of Donne's poems which were
first known outside the circle of his intimate friends.

What seems to be a duplicate of _Q_ is preserved among the Dyce MSS.