No More Learning

'How great an Elephant, how small a Mouse destroys. ' _Devotions_, p.
284.

ll. 405-6. _Who in that trade, of Church, and kingdomes, there
Was the first type. _

The _1635_ punctuation of this passage is right, though it is better
to drop the comma after 'Kingdoms' and obviate ambiguity. The trade is
the shepherd's; in it Abel is type both of Church and Kingdom, Emperor
and Pope. As a type of Christ Donne refers to Abel in _The Litanie_,
p. 341, l. 86.

PAGE =312=, l. 419. _Nor <make> resist. _ I have substituted 'make' for
the 'much' of the editions, confident that it is the right reading and
explains the vacillation of the MSS.
The proper alternative to 'show'
is 'make'. The error arose from the obsolescence of 'resist' used as
a noun. But the O. E. D. cites from Lodge, _Forbonius and Priscilla_
(1585), 'I make no resist in this my loving torment', and other
examples dated 1608 and 1630. Donne is fond of verbal nouns retaining
the form of the verb unchanged.

l. 439. _soft Moaba. _ 'Moaba', 'Siphatecia' (l. 457), 'Tethlemite' (l.
487), and Themech' (l. 509) are not creatures of Donne's invention,
but derived from his multifarious learning. It is, however, a little
difficult to detect the immediate source from which he drew. The
ultimate source of all these additions to the Biblical narrative and
persons was the activity of the Jewish intellect and imagination in
the interval between the time at which the Old Testament closes and
the dispersion under Titus and Vespasian, the desire of the Jews in
Palestine and Alexandria to 'round off the biblical narrative, fill
up the lacunae, answer all the questions of the inquiring mind of the
ancient reader'.