_Help with your
presence
and devise to praise.
John Donne
_Oedipus_, II. i.
The idea was a common one, but I have no doubt that Dryden owed his
use of it as an image to Donne. There is no poet from whom he pilfers
'wit' more freely.
PAGE =140=, ll. 215-16. _Now, as in Tullias tombe_, i. e. Cicero's
daughter. 'According to a ridiculous story, which some of the moderns
report, in the age of Pope Paul III a monument was discovered on the
Appian road with the superscription _Tulliolae filiae meae_; the body
of a woman was found in it, which was reduced to ashes as soon as
touched; there was also a lamp burning, which was extinguished as soon
as the air gained admission there, and which was supposed to have been
lighted above 1500 years. ' Lempriere. See Browne, _Vulgar Errors_,
iii. 21.
PAGE =141=, l. 17.
_Help with your presence and devise to praise. _
I have dropped the comma after 'presence' because it suggests to us,
though it did not necessarily do so to seventeenth-century readers,
that 'devise' here is a verb--both Dr. Grosart and Mr. Chambers have
taken it as such--whereas it is the noun 'device' = fancy, invention.
Their fancy and invention is to be shown in the attiring of the bride:
Conceitedly dresse her, and be assign'd
By you, fit place for every flower and jewell,
Make her for love fit fewell
As gay as Flora, and as rich as Inde.
'Devise to praise' would be a very awkward construction.
PAGE =142=, l. 26. _Sonns of these Senators wealths deep oceans. _ The
corruption of the text here has arisen in the first place from the
readily explicable confusion of 'sonnes' or 'sonns' as written and
'sonne', the final 's' being the merest flourish and repeatedly
overlooked in copying and printing, while 'sonne' easily becomes
'some', and secondly from a misapprehension of Donne's characteristic
pun. The punctuation of the 1633 edition is supported by almost every
MS.
The 'frolique Patricians' are of course not the sons of 'these
Senators' by birth. 'I speak not this to yourselves, you Senators
of London,' says Donne in the _Sermon Preached at Pauls Cross . . . 26
Mart.
