This is probably the
original
form of the line, corrected later to
avoid the clashing of the 'but's.
avoid the clashing of the 'but's.
John Donne
The design of this last picture and of the marble monument made from
it is not very clear. He was painted, Walton says, standing on the
figure of the urn. But the painter brought with him also 'a board
of the just height of his body'. What was this for? Walton does not
explain. But Mr. Hamo Thornycroft has pointed out that the folds of
the drapery show the statue was modelled from a recumbent figure. Can
it be that Walton's account confuses two things? The incident of the
picture is not in the 1640 _Life_, but was added in 1658. How could
Donne, a dying man, stand on the urn, with his winding-sheet knotted
'at his head and feet'? Is it not probable that he was painted lying
in his winding-sheet on the board referred to; but that the monument,
as designed by himself, and executed by Nicholas Stone, was intended
to represent him rising at the Last Day from the urn, habited as he
had lain down--a symbolic rendering of the faith expressed in the
closing words of the inscription
Hic licet in Occiduo Cinere
Aspicit Eum
Cuius nomen est Oriens.
PAGE =37=, l. 14. The textual note should have indicated that in most
or all of the MSS. cited the whole line runs:
(Thou lovest Truth) but an Angell at first sight.
This is probably the original form of the line, corrected later to
avoid the clashing of the 'but's.
PAGE =96=, l. 6, note. The _R212_ cited here is Rawlinson Poetical
MS. 212, a miscellaneous collection of seventeenth-century prose and
poetry (e. g. Davies' _Epigrams_. See II. p. 101). I had cited it once
or twice in my first draft. The present instance escaped my eye. It
helps to show how general the reading 'tyde' was.
PAGE =115=, l. 54. _goeing on it fashions_.
