No More Learning

1603_. They are inserted together in _1635_, and are strikingly
similar in heading, in style, and in verse. Nor has any critic, so far
as I know, taken up the larger question raised by rejecting one of the
poems ascribed to Donne in _1635_, namely, are not all the poems
then added made thereby to some extent suspect, and if so can we
distinguish those which are from those which are not genuine? I
propose then to discuss, in the light afforded by a wider and more
connected survey of the seventeenth-century manuscript collections,
the authenticity of the poems ascribed to Donne in the old editions,
and to ask what, if any, poems may be added to those there published.

For this discussion an invaluable starting-point is afforded by the
edition of 1633, the manuscript group _D_, _H49_, _Lec_, and the
manuscript group _A18_, _N_, _TCC_, _TCD_. Taken together, and used to
check one another, these three collections provide us with a _corpus_
of indubitable poems which may be used as a test by which to try other
claimants. Of course, it must be clearly understood that the only
proof which can be offered that Donne is the author of many poems is,
that they are ascribed to him in edition after edition and manuscript
after manuscript, and that they bear a strong family resemblance.
There is no edition issued by himself or in his lifetime. [3]

Bearing this in mind we find that in the edition of 1633 there are
only two poems--Basse's _Epitaph on Shakespeare_ and the _Psalme 137_,
both already mentioned--for the genuineness of which there is not
strong evidence, internal and external. But these two poems are the
_only_ ones not contained in _D_, _H49_, _Lec_ or in _A18_, _N_, _TC_.
In _D_, _H49_, _Lec_, on the other hand, there are no poems which are
not, on the same evidence, genuine. There are, however, some which
are not in _1633_, seven in all. But of these, five are the _Elegies_
which, we have seen above, the editor of _1633_ was prohibited from
printing. The others are the _Lecture upon the Shadow_ (why omitted in
_1633_ I cannot say) and the lines 'My fortune and my choice'. There
are poems in _1633_ which are not in_ D_, _H49_, _Lec_.
These, with
the exception of poems previously printed, as the _Anniversaries_ and
the _Elegie on Prince Henry_, are all in _A18_, _N_, _TC_. This last
collection does contain some twelve poems not by Donne, but of
these the majority are found only in _N_ and _TCD_, and they make no
pretence to be Donne's. Three are initialled 'J. R. ' (in _TCD_), and
two of these, with some poems by Overbury and Beaumont, are not part
of the Donne collection but are added at the end. Another poem is
initialled 'R. Cor. ' The only poems which are included among Donne's
poems as though by him are _The Paradox_ ('Whoso terms Love a fire')
and the Letter or Elegy, 'Madam soe may my verses pleasing be. ' Of
these, the first is in all four manuscripts, the second only in _N_
and _TCD_. Neither is in _D_, _H49_, _Lec_, or _1633_. The last is by
Beaumont, and follows immediately a letter by Donne to the same lady,
the Countess of Bedford. Doubtless the two poems have come from some
collection in which they were transcribed together, ultimately from
a commonplace-book of the Countess herself. The former _may_ be by
Donne, but has probably adhered for a like reason to his paradox, 'No
lover saith' (p. 302), which immediately precedes it.

We have thus three collections, each of which has kept its canon pure
or very nearly so, and in which any mistake by one is checked by the
absence of the poem in the other two. It cannot be by accident that
these collections are so free from the unauthentic poems which other
manuscripts associate with Donne's.