No More Learning

There is no evidence that any of them was used by the
seventeenth-century editors.


_B_ is a handsome, vellum-bound manuscript belonging to the Earl of
Ellesmere's library at Bridgewater House. I am, I think, the first
editor who has examined it. The volume bears on the fly-leaf
the autograph signature ('J. Bridgewater') of the first Earl of
Bridgewater, the son of Donne's early patron, Elizabeth's Lord Keeper
and later Lord Chancellor. On the title-page 'Dr Donne' is written in
the same hand. John Egerton, it will be remembered, was, like Donne, a
volunteer in Essex's expedition to the Azores in 1597. In 1599 he and
his elder brother Thomas were in Ireland, where the latter was killed,
leaving John to be his father's heir. The book-number, inscribed
on the second leaf, is in the handwriting of the second Earl of
Bridgewater, the Elder Brother of Milton's _Comus_. The manuscript has
thus interesting associations, and links with Donne's earliest patron.
I had hoped that it might prove, being made for those who had known
Donne all his life, an exceptionally good manuscript, but can hardly
say that my expectations were fulfilled. It was probably put together
in the twenties, because though it contains the _Holy Sonnets_ it
does not contain the hymns written at the close of the poet's life. It
resembles _O'F_, _S_, _S96_, and _P_, rather than either of the first
two collections which I have described, _D_, _H49_, _Lec_ and _A18_,
_N_, _TC_, in that it includes with Donne's poems a number of poems
not by Donne,[24] but most of them apparently by his contemporaries,
Sir John Roe, Francis Beaumont, Jonson, and other of the wits of the
first decade of the seventeenth century, the men who collaborated in
writing witty poems on Coryat, or _Characters_ in the style of Sir
Thomas Overbury. In the case of some of these initials are added, and
a later, but not modern, hand has gone over the manuscript and denied
or queried Donne's authorship of others. Textually also _B_ tends to
range itself, especially in certain groups of poems, as the _Satyres_
and _Holy Sonnets_, with _O'F_, _S96_, _W_ when these differ from _D_,
_H49_, _Lec_ and _A18_, _N_, _TC_.
In such cases the tradition which
it represents is most correctly preserved in _W_. In a few poems the
text of _B_ is identical with that of _S96_. On the whole _B_ cannot
be accepted in any degree as an independent authority for the text.
It is important only for its agreements with other manuscripts, as
helping to establish what I may call the manuscript tradition, in
various passages, as against the text of the editions.

Still less valuable as an independent textual authority is


_P_. This manuscript is a striking example of the kind of collections
of poems, circulating in manuscript, which gentlemen in the
seventeenth century caused to be prepared, and one cannot help
wondering how they managed to understand the poems, so full is the
text of gross and palpable errors. _P_ is a small octavo manuscript,
once in the Phillipps collection, now in the possession of Captain C.
Shirley Harris, Oxford. On the cover of brown leather is stamped the
royal arms of James I. On p. 1 is written, '1623 me possidet Hen.
Champernowne de Dartington in Devonia, generosus. ' Two other members
of this old, and still extant, Devonshire family have owned the
volume, as also Sir Edward Seymour (Knight Baronett) and Bridgett
Brookbrige. The poems are written in a small, clear hand, and in
Elizabethan character. Captain Harris has had a careful transcript of
the poems made, and he allowed me after collating the original with
the transcript to keep the latter by me for a long time.

The collection is in the nature of a commonplace-book, and includes
a prose letter to Raleigh, and a good many poems by other poets than
Donne, but the bulk of the volume is occupied with his poems,[25] and
most of the poems are signed 'J.