No More Learning

The letters have
no signatures appended, which is the case with the letters in the
1633 edition of Donne's poems. Wotton and Goodyere did not need to be
reminded of the authors, and perhaps did not wish others to know. The
reason then for the rather odd inclusion of nine prose letters in a
collection of poems is probably, that the principal manuscript used
by the printer was an 'old book'[20] which had belonged to Sir Henry
Goodyere and in which his secretaries had transcribed poems and
letters by Donne. Goodyere's collection of Donne's poems would not
necessarily be exhaustive, but it would be full; it would not like the
collections of others include poems that were none of Donne's; and its
text would be accurate, allowing for the carelessness, indifference,
and misunderstandings of secretaries and copyists.

After _D_, _H49_, _Lec_, the most carefully made collection of Donne's
poems is one represented now by four distinct manuscripts:

_A18. _ Additional MS. 18646, in the British Museum.

_N. _ The Norton MS. in Harvard College Library, Boston, of which an
account is given by Professor Norton in a note appended to the Grolier
Club edition.

_TCC. _ A manuscript in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge.

_TCD. _ A large manuscript in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin,
containing two apparently quite independent collections of poems--the
first a collection of Donne's poems with one or two additional poems
by Sir John Roe, Francis Beaumont, Sir Thomas Overbury, and Corbet;
the second a quite miscellaneous collection, put together some time in
the thirties of the seventeenth century, and including some of Donne's
poems. It is only the first of these which belongs to the group in
question.
These four manuscripts are closely connected with one another, but a
still more intimate relation exists between _A18_ and _TCC_ on the
one hand, _N_ and _TCD_ on the other. _N_ and _TCD_ are the larger
collections; _A18_ and _TCC_ contain each a smaller selection from the
same body of poems. Indeed it would seem that _N_ is a copy of _TCD,
A18_ of _TCC_.


_TCD_, to start with it, is a beautifully written collection
of Donne's poems beginning with the _Satyres_, passing on to an
irregularly arranged series of elegies, letters, lyrics and epicedes,
and closing with the _Metempsychosis_ or _Progresse of the Soule_ and
the _Divine Poems_, which include the hymns written in the last years
of the poet's life. _N_ has the same poems, arranged in the same
order, and its readings are nearly always identical with those of
_TCD_, so far as I can judge from the collation made for me. The
handwriting, unlike that of _TCD_, is in what is known as secretary
hand and is somewhat difficult to read. What points to the one
manuscript being a copy of the other is that in 'Sweetest Love, I do
not go' the scribe has accidentally dropped stanza 4, by giving its
last line to stanza 3, and passing at once to the fifth stanza. Both
manuscripts make this mistake, whereas _A18_ and _TCC_ contain the
complete poem. In other places _N_ and _TCD_ agree in their readings
where _A18_ and _TCC_ diverge. If the one is a copy of the other,
_TCD_ is probably the more authoritative, as it contains some marginal
indications of authorship which _N_ omits.


_TCC_ is a smaller manuscript than _TCD_, but seems to be written
in the same clear, fine hand. It does not contain the _Satyres_, the
Elegy (XI. in this edition) _The Bracelet_, and the epistles _The
Storme_ and _The Calme_, with which _N_ and _TCD_ open. It looks,
however, as though the sheets containing these poems had been torn
out. Besides these, however, _TCC_ omits, without any indication
of their being lost, an _Elegie to the Lady Bedford_ ('You that are
she'), the Palatine Epithalamion, a long series of letters[21]
which in _N_, _TCD_ follow that _To M. M.