The long fourth
_Satyre_
is in the Hawthornden MS.
John Donne
'
ll. 204-5. _As he that sees, &c. _ 'I have sometimes wondered in the
reading what was become of those glaring colours which amazed me in
_Bussy D'Ambois_ upon the theatre; but when I had taken up what I
supposed a fallen star, I found I had been cozened with a jelly;
nothing but a cold, dull mass, which glittered no longer than it was
a-shooting. ' Dryden, _The Spanish Friar_. In another place Dryden uses
the figure in a more poetic or at least ambitious fashion:
The tapers of the gods,
The sun and moon, run down like waxen globes;
The shooting stars end all in purple jellies,
And chaos is at hand.
_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. 1616_, 'but as God hath blessed you in your ways, and in your
callings, so put your children into ways and courses too, in which God
may bless them. . . . The Fathers' former labours shall not excuse their
Sons future idleness. ' The sons of wealthy citizens might grow idle
and extravagant; they could not be styled 'Patricians'. It is not
of them that Donne is thinking, but of the young noblemen who are
accompanying their friend on his wedding-day. They are, or are willing
to be, the sons, by marriage not by blood, of 'these Senators', or
rather of their money-bags. In a word, they marry their daughters for
money, as the hero of the _Epithalamion_ is doing. It is fortunate for
the Senators if the young courtiers do not find in their wives as well
as their daughters, like Fastidious Brisk in Jonson's comedy, 'Golden
Mines and furnish'd Treasurie. ' But they are 'Sunnes' as well as
Sonnes'--suns which drink up the deep oceans of these Senators'
wealth:
it rain'd more
Then if the Sunne had drunk the sea before.
_Storme_, 43-4.
Hence the metaphor 'deep oceans', and hence the appropriateness of the
predicate 'Here shine'. This pun on 'sunne' and 'sonne' is a favourite
with Donne:
Mad paper stay, and grudge not here to burne
With all those sonnes [sunnes _B_, _S96_] whom my braine did create.
_To Mrs. M. H. H. _, p. 216.
I am thy sonne, made with thyself to shine.
_Holy Sonnets_, II. 5.
Sweare by thyself, that at my death thy sonne
Shall shine as hee shines now, and heretofore.
_A Hymn to God the Father. _
'This day both Gods Sons arose: The Sun of his Firmament, and the Son
of his bosome. ' _Sermons_ 80. 26. 255. 'And when thy Sun, thy soule
comes to set in thy death-bed, the Son of Grace shall suck it up into
glory. ' Ibid. 80. 45. 450.
Correctly read the line has a satiric quality which Donne's lines
rarely want, and in which this stanza abounds. I have chosen the
spelling 'Sonns' as that which is most commonly used in the MSS. for
'sonnes' and 'sunnes'.
PAGE =143=, l. 57. _His steeds nill be restrain'd. _ I had adopted
the reading 'nill' for 'will' conjecturally before I found it in _W_.
There can be no doubt it is right. As printed, the two clauses (57-8)
simply contradict each other. The use of 'nill' for 'will' was one
of Spenser's Chaucerisms, and Donne comes closer to Spenser in the
_Epithalamia_ than anywhere else. Sylvester uses it in his translation
of Du Bartas:
For I nill stiffly argue to and fro
In nice opinions, whether so or so.
And it occurs in Davison's _Poetical Rhapsody_:
And therefore nill I boast of war.
In Shakespeare, setting aside the phrase 'nill he, will he', we have:
in scorn or friendship, nill I construe whether.
ll. 81-2. _Till now thou wast but able
To be what now thou art_;
She has realized her potentiality; she is now actually what hitherto
she has been only [Greek: en dynamei], therefore she 'puts on
perfection'. 'Praeterea secundum Philosophum . . . _qualibet potentia
melior est eius actus_; nam forma est melior quam materia, et actio
quam potentia activa: est enim finis eius. ' Aquinas, _Summa_, xxv. i.
See also Aristotle, _Met. _ 1050 _a_ 2-16. This metaphysical doctrine
is not contradicted by the religious exaltation of virginity, for it
is not virginity as such which is preferred to marriage by the Church,
but the virgin's dedication of herself to God: 'Virginitas inde
honorata, quia Deo dicata. . . . Virgines ideo laudatae, quia Deo
dicatae. Nec nos hoc in virginibus praedicamus, quod virgines sunt;
sed quod Deo dicatae pia continentia virgines. Nam, quod non temere
dixerim, felicior mihi videtur nupta mulier quam virgo nuptura: habet
enim iam illa quod ista adhuc cupit. . . . Illa uni studet placere cui
data est: haec multis, incerta cui danda est,' &c. ; August. _De Sanct.
Virg. _ I. x, xi. Compare Aquinas, _Summa_ II. 2, Quaest. clii. 3.
Wedded to Christ the virgin puts on a higher perfection.
SATYRES.
The earliest date assignable to any of the _Satyres_ is 1593, or more
probably 1594-5. On the back of the Harleian MS. 5110 (_H51_), in the
British Museum, is inscribed:[1]
Jhon Dunne his Satires
Anno Domini 1593
The handwriting is not identical with that in which the poems are
transcribed, and it is impossible to say either when the poems were
copied or when the title and date were affixed. One may not build too
absolutely on its accuracy; but there are in the three first _Satires_
(which alone the MS. contains) some indications that point to 1593-5
as the probable date. Mr. Chambers notes the reference in 1. , 80, 'the
wise politic horse,' to Banks' performing horse, and says: 'A large
collection of them' (i. e. allusions to the horse) 'will be found in
Mr. Halliwell-Phillips's Memoranda on _Love's Labour's Lost_. Only one
of these allusions is, however, earlier than 1593. It is in 1591, and
refers not to an exhibition in London, but in the provinces, and not
to Morocco, which was a bay, but to a white horse. It is probable,
therefore, that by 1591 Banks had not yet come to London, and if so
the date 1593 on the Harl. MS. 5110 of Donne's _Satires_ cannot be far
from that of their composition. ' But this is not the only allusion.
The same lines run on:
Or thou O Elephant or Ape wilt doe.
This has been passed by commentators as a quite general reference; but
the Ape and Elephant seem to have been animals actually performing,
or exhibited, in London about 1594. Thus in _Every Man out of his
Humour_, acted in 1599, Carlo Buffone says (IV. 6): ''S heart he keeps
more ado with this monster' (i. e. Sogliardo's dog) 'than ever Banks
did with his horse, or the fellow with the elephant. ' Further, all
three are mentioned in the _Epigrams_ of Sir John Davies, e. g. :
In Dacum.
Amongst the poets Dacus numbered is
Yet could he never make an English rime;
But some prose speeches I have heard of his,
Which have been spoken many an hundred time:
The man that keepes the Elephant hath one,
Wherein he tells the wonders of the beast:
Another Bankes pronounced long agon,
When he his curtailes qualities exprest:
Hee first taught him that keepes the monuments
At Westminster his formall tale to say:
And also him which Puppets represents,
And also him that w^{th} the Ape doth play:
Though all his poetry be like to this,
Amongst the poets Dacus numbred is.
And again:
In Titum
Titus the brave and valorous young gallant
Three years together in the town hath beene,
Yet my Lo. Chancellors tombe he hath not seene,
Nor the new water-worke, nor the Elephant.
I cannot tell the cause without a smile:
Hee hath been in the Counter all the while.
Colonel Cunningham has pointed out another reference in Basse's
_Metamorphosis of the Walnut Tree_ (1645), where he tells how 'in our
youth we saw the Elephant'. Grosart's suggestion that the Elephant was
an Inn is absurd.
Davies' _Epigrams_ were first published along with Marlowe's version
of Ovid's _Elegies_, but no date is affixed to any of the three
editions which followed one another. But a MS. in the Bodleian
which contains forty-five of the Epigrams describes them as _English
Epigrammes much like Buckminsters Almanacke servinge for all England
but especially for the meridian of the honourable cittye of London
calculated by John Davies of Grayes Inne gentleman An^o 1594 in
November_. [2] This seems much too exact to be a pure invention, and
if it be correct it is very unlikely that the allusions would be to
ancient history. Banks' Horse, the performing Ape, and the Elephant
were all among the sights of the day, like the recently erected tomb
of Lord Chancellor Hatton, who died in 1591. The atmosphere of the
first _Satyre_, as of Davies' _Epigrams_, is that of 1593-5.
The phrase 'the Infanta of London, Heire to an India', in which
commentators have found needless difficulty, contains possibly,
besides its obvious meaning, an allusion to the fact that since 1587
the Infanta of Spain had become in official Catholic circles heir to
the English throne. In 1594 Parsons' tract, _A Conference about the
next Succession to the Crown of England. By R. Doleman_, defended her
claim, and made the Infanta's name a byword in England.
If _H51_ is thus approximately right in its dating of the first Satire
it may be the better trusted as regards the other two, and there is at
least nothing in them to make this date impossible. The references to
poetry in the second acquire a more vivid interest when their date or
approximate date is remembered. In 1593 died Marlowe, the greatest of
the brilliant group that reformed the stage, giving
ideot actors means
(Starving 'themselves') to live by 'their' labour'd sceanes;
and Shakespeare was one of the 'ideot actors'. Shakespeare, too, was
one of the many sonneteers who 'would move Love by rithmes', and in
1593 and 1594 he appeared among those 'who write to Lords, rewards to
get'.
It would be interesting if we could identify the lawyer-poet, Coscus,
referred to in this Satire. Malone, in a MS. note to his copy of
_1633_ (now in the Bodleian Library), suggested John Hoskins or
Sir Richard Martin. Grosart conjectured that Donne had in view the
_Gullinge Sonnets_ preserved in the Farmer-Chetham MS. , and ascribed
with probability to Sir John Davies, the poet of the _Epigrams_
just mentioned. Chambers seems to lean to this view and says, 'these
sonnets are couched in legal terminology. ' Donne is supposed to have
mistaken Davies' 'gulling' for serious poetry. This is very unlikely.
Moreover, only the last two of Davies' sonnets are 'couched in legal
terminology':
My case is this, I love Zepheria bright,
Of her I hold my harte by fealty:
and
To Love my lord I doe knights service owe
And therefore nowe he hath my wit in ward.
Nor, although Davies' style parodies the style of the sonneteers (not
of the anonymous _Zepheria_ only), is it particularly harsh. It is
much more probable that Donne, like Davies, has chiefly in view this
anonymous series of sonnets--_Zepheria_. _Ogni di viene la sera. Mysus
et Haemonia juvenis qui cuspide vulnus senserat, hac ipsa cuspide
sensit opem. At London: Printed by the Widow Orwin, for N. L.
and John Busby. _ 1594. The style of _Zepheria_ exactly fits Donne's
description:
words, words which would teare
The tender labyrinth of a soft maids eare.
'The verbs "imparadize", "portionize", "thesaurize", are some of
the fruits of his ingenuity. He claims that his Muse is capable
of "hyperbolised trajections"; he apostrophizes his lady's eyes as
"illuminating lamps" and calls his pen his "heart's solicitor". '
Sidney Lee, _Elizabethan Sonnets_. The following sonnet from the
series illustrates the use of legal terminology which both Davies and
Donne satirize:
Canzon 20.
How often hath my pen (mine heart's Solicitor)
Instructed thee in Breviat of my case!
While Fancy-pleading eyes (thy beauty's visitor)
Have pattern'd to my quill, an angel's face.
How have my Sonnets (faithful Counsellors)
Thee without ceasing moved for Day of Hearing!
While they, my Plaintive Cause (my faith's Revealers! ),
Thy long delay, my patience, in thine ear ring.
How have I stood at bar of thine own conscience
When in Requesting Court my suit I brought!
How have the long adjournments slowed the sentence
Which I (through much expense of tears) besought!
Through many difficulties have I run,
Ah sooner wert thou lost, I wis, than won.
We do not know who the author of _Zepheria_ was, so cannot tell how
far Donne is portraying an individual in what follows. It can hardly
be Hoskins or Martin, unless _Zepheria_ itself was intended to be
a burlesque, which is possible. Quite possibly Donne has taken the
author of _Zepheria_ simply as a type of the young lawyer who writes
bad poetry; and in the rest of the poem portrays the same type when
he has abandoned poetry and devoted himself to 'Law practice for
mere gain', extorting money and lands from Catholics or suspected
Catholics, and drawing cozening conveyances. If _Zepheria_ be the
poems referred to, then 1594-5 would be the date of this Satire.
The third _Satyre_ has no datable references, but its tone reflects
the years in which Donne was loosening himself from the Catholic
Church but had not yet conformed, the years between 1593 and 1599,
and probably the earlier rather than the later of these years. On the
whole 1593 is a little too early a date for these three satires. They
were probably written between 1594 and 1597.
The long fourth _Satyre_ is in the Hawthornden MS. (_HN_) headed
_Sat. 4. anno 1594_. But this is a mistake either of Drummond, who
transcribed the poems probably as late as 1610, or of Donne himself,
whose tendency was to push these early effusions far back in his life.
The reference to 'the losse of Amyens' (l. 114) shows that the poem
must have been written after March 1597, probably between that date
and September, when Amiens was re-taken by Henry IV. These lines _may_
be an insertion, but there is no extant copy of the _Satyre_ without
them. It belongs to the period between the 'Calis-journey' and the
'Island-voyage', when first Donne is likely to have appeared at court
in the train of Essex.
The fifth _Satyre_ is referred by Grosart and Chambers to 1602-3 on
the ground that the phrase 'the great Carricks pepper' is a reference
to the expedition sent out by the East India Company under Captain
James Lancaster to procure pepper, the price of which commodity was
excessively high. Lancaster captured a Portuguese Carrick and sent
home pepper and spice. There is no proof, however, that this ship was
ever known as 'the Carrick' or 'the great Carrick'. That phrase _was_
applied to 'that prodigious great carack called the _Madre de Dios_ or
_Mother of God_, one of the greatest burden belonging to the crown of
Portugal', which was captured by Raleigh's expedition and brought to
Dartmouth in 1592. 'This prize was reckoned the greatest and richest
that had ever been brought into England' and 'daily drew vast numbers
of spectators from all parts to admire at the hugeness of it' (Oldys,
_Life of Raleigh_, 1829, pp. 154-7). Strype states that she 'was seven
decks high, 165 foot long, and manned with 600 men' (_Annals_, iv.
177-82). That pepper formed a large part of the Carrick's cargo is
clear from the following order issued by the Privy Council: _A letter
to Sir Francis Drake, William Killigrewe, Richard Carmarden and Thomas
Midleton Commissioners appointed for the Carrique_. 'Wee have received
your letter of the 23^{rd} of this presente of your proceeding in
lading of other convenient barkes with the pepper out of the Carrique,
and your opinion concerning the same, for answere whereunto we do
thinke it meete, and so require you to take order, so soone as the
goods are quite dischardged, that Sir Martin Frobisher be appointed to
have the charge and conduction of those shippes laden with the pepper
and other commodities out of the Carrique to be brought about to
Chatham. ' 27 Octobris, 1592. See also under October 1. The reference
in 'the great Carricks pepper' is thus clear. The words 'You Sir,
whose righteousness she loves', &c. , ll. 31-3, show that the poem was
written after Donne had entered Sir Thomas Egerton's service,
i. e. between 1598, if not earlier, and February 1601-2 when he was
dismissed, which makes the date suggested by Grosart and Chambers
(1602-3) impossible. The poem was probably written in 1598-9. There is
a note of enthusiasm in these lines as of one who has just entered
on a service of which he is proud, and the occasion of the poem was
probably Egerton's endeavour to curtail the fees claim'd by the Clerk
of the Star Chamber (see note below). With Essex's return from
Ireland in 1599 began a period of trouble and anxiety for Egerton, and
probably for Donne too. The more sombre cast of his thought, and
the modification in his feelings towards Elizabeth, after the fatal
February of 1600-1, are reflected in the satirical fragment _The
Progresse of the Soule_.
The so-called sixth and seventh _Satyres_ (added in 1635 and 1669)
I have relegated to the _Appendix B_, and have given elsewhere my
reasons for assigning them to Sir John Roe. That Donne wrote only five
regular _Satyres_ is very definitely stated by Drummond of Hawthornden
in a note prefixed to the copy of the fourth in _HN_: 'This Satyre
(though it heere have the first place because no more was intended
to this booke) was indeed the authors fourth in number and order
he having written five in all to using which this caution will
sufficientlie direct in the rest. '
[Footnote 1: Attention was first called to this inscription by
J. Payne Collier in his _Poetical Decameron_ (1820). He uses
the date to vindicate the claim for Donne's priority as a
satirist to Hall. 'Dunne' is of course one of the many ways
in which the poet's name is spelt, and 'Jhon' is a spelling
of 'John'. The poet's own signature is generally 'Jo. Donne. '
'Jhon Don' is Drummond's spelling on the title-page of _HN_.
In _Q_ the first page is headed 'M^r John Dunnes Satires'. ]
[Footnote 2: Of the forty-five which the MS. contains, some
thirty-three were published in the edition referred to above.
On the other hand the edition contains some which are not
in the MS. Of these, one, 47, 'Meditations of a gull,' alone
refers to events which are certainly later than 1594. As this
is not in the MS. there is nothing to contradict the assertion
that it (and the Epigrams cited above) belong to 1594.
Davies' Epigrams are referred to in Sir John Harrington's
_Metamorphosis of Ajax_, 1596. ]
PAGE =145=. SATYRE I.
This _Satyre_ is pretty closely imitated in the _Satyra Quinta_ of
_SKIALETHEIA. or, A shadowe of Truth in certaine Epigrams and Satyres.
1598_. attributed to Edward Guilpin (or Gilpin), to whom extracts from
it are assigned in _Englands Parnassus_ (1600). Who Guilpin was we
do not know. Besides the work named he wrote two sonnets prefixed to
Gervase Markham's _Devoreux. Vertues tears for the losse of the most
Christian King Henry, third of that name; and the untimely death of
the most noble and heroical Gentleman, Walter Devoreux, who was slain
before Roan in France. First written in French by the most excellent
and learned Gentlewoman, Madame Geneuefe Petan Maulette. And
paraphrastically translated into English by Jervis Markham. _ 1597. See
Grosart's Introduction to his reprint of _Skialetheia_ in _Occasional
Issues_. 6. (1878). Donne addresses a letter to _Mr. E. G. _ (p. 208),
which Gosse conjectures to be addressed to Guilpin. That Guilpin
knew Donne is probable in view of this early imitation of a privately
circulated MS. poem. Guilpin's poem begins:
Let me alone I prethee in thys Cell,
Entice me not into the Citties hell;
Tempt me not forth this _Eden_ of content,
To tast of that which I shall soone repent:
Prethy excuse me, I am hot alone
Accompanied with meditation,
And calme content, whose tast more pleaseth me
Then all the Citties lushious vanity.
I had rather be encoffin'd in this chest
Amongst these bookes and papers I protest,
Then free-booting abroad purchase offence,
And scandale my calme thoughts with discontents.
Heere I converse with those diviner spirits,
Whose knowledge, and admire, the world inherits:
Heere doth the famous profound _Stagarite_,
With Natures mistick harmony delight
My ravish'd contemplation: I heere see
The now-old worlds youth in an history:
l. 1. _Away thou fondling, &c. _ The reading of the majority of
editions and MSS. is 'changeling', but this is a case not of a right
and wrong reading but of two versions, both ascribable to the author.
Which was his emendation it is impossible to say. He may have changed
'fondling' (a 'fond' or foolish person) thinking that the idea was
conveyed by 'motley', which, like Shakespeare's epithet 'patch', is a
synecdoche from the dress of the professional fool or jester. On the
other hand the idea of 'changeling' is repeated in 'humorist', which
suggests changeable and fanciful. I have, therefore, let the _1633_
text stand. 'Changeling' has of course the meaning here of 'a fickle
or inconstant person', not the common sense of a person or thing
or child substituted for another, as 'fondling' is not here a 'pet,
favourite', as in modern usage.
l. 3. _Consorted. _ Grosart, who professes to print from _H51_, reads
_Consoled_, without any authority.
l. 6. _Natures Secretary_: i. e. Aristotle. He is always 'the
Philosopher' in Aquinas and the other schoolmen. Walton speaks of 'the
great secretary of nature and all learning, Sir Francis Bacon'.
l. 7. _jolly Statesmen. _ All the MSS. except _O'F_ agree with _1633_
in reading 'jolly', though 'wily' is an obvious emendation.
Chambers adopts it. By 'jolly' Donne probably meant 'overweeningly
self-confident . . . full of presumptuous pride . . . arrogant,
over-bearing' (O. E. D. ). 'Evilmerodach, a jolly man, without Iustyse
and cruel. ' Caxton (1474). 'It concerneth every one of us . . . not
to be too high-minded or jolly for anything that is past. ' Sanderson
(1648).
l. 10. _Giddie fantastique Poets of each land. _ In a letter Donne
tells Buckingham, in Spain, how his own library is filled with Spanish
books 'from the mistress of my youth, Poetry, to the wife of mine age,
Divinity'. This line in the Satires points to the fact, which Donne
was probably tempted later to obscure a little, that his first
prolonged visit to the Continent had been made before he settled in
London in 1592 and probably without the permission of the Government.
The other than Spanish poets would doubtless be French and Italian.
Donne had read Dante. He refers to him in the fourth _Satyre_ ('who
dreamt he saw hell'), and in an unpublished letter in the Burley MS.
he dilates at some length, but in no very creditable fashion, on an
episode in the _Divina Commedia_. Of French poets he probably knew at
any rate Du Bartas and Regnier.
l. 12. _And follow headlong, wild uncertain thee? _ I have retained the
_1633_ punctuation instead of, with Chambers, comma-ing 'wild' as
well as 'headlong'. The latter is possibly an adverb here, going with
'follow'. The use of 'headlong' as an adjective with persons was not
common. The earliest example in the O. E. D. is from _Hudibras_:
The Friendly Rug preserv'd the ground,
And headlong Knight from bruise or wound.
Donne's line is, however, ambiguous; and the subsequent description of
the humorist would justify the adjective.
l. 18. _Bright parcell gilt, with forty dead mens pay. _ Compare:
'Captains some in guilt armour (unbatt'red) some in buffe jerkins,
plated o'r with massy silver lace (raz'd out of the ashes of dead
pay). ' Dekker, _Newes from Hell_, ii. 119 (Grosart). So many
'dead pays' (i. e. men no longer on the muster roll) were among the
perquisites allowed to every captain of a company, but the number was
constantly exceeded: 'Moreover where' (i. e. whereas) 'there are 15
dead paies allowed ordinarily in every bande, which is paid allwaies
and taken by the captaines, althogh theire nombers be greatly
dyminished in soche sorte as sometimes there are not fower score or
fewer in a company, her Majestys pleasure is that from hence the saide
15 dead paies shall not be allowed unlesse the companies be full and
compleate, but after the rate of two dead paies for everie twenty men
that shalbe in the saide bande where the companies are dyminished. '
Letter to Sir John Norreyes, Knighte. _Acts of the Privy Council_,
1592.
PAGE =146=, l. 27. _Oh monstrous, superstitious puritan. _ The
'Monster' of the MSS. is of course _not_ due to the substitution
of the noun for the adjective, but is simply an older form of the
adjective. Compare 'O wonder Vandermast', Greene's _Friar Bacon and
Friar Bungay_.
l. 32. _raise thy formall_: 'raise' is probably right, but 'vaile' is
a common metaphor. 'A Player? Call him, the lousie slave: what will
he saile by, and not once strike or vaile to a Man of Warre. ' Captain
Tucca in Jonson's _Poetaster_, III. 3.
l. 33. _That wilt consort none, &c. _ It is unnecessary to alter
'consort none' to 'consort with none', as some MSS. do. The
construction is quite regular. 'Wilt thou consort me, bear me
company? ' Heywood. The 'consorted with these few books' of l. 3
is classed by the O. E. D. under a slightly different sense of the
word--not 'attended on by' these books, but 'associated in a common
lot with' them.
l. 39. _The nakednesse and barenesse, &c. _ The reading 'barrennesse'
of all the editions and some MSS. is due probably to similarity of
pronunciation (rather than of spelling) and a superficial suggestion
of appropriateness to the context. A second glance shows that
'bareness' is the correct reading. The MSS. give frequent evidence of
having been written to dictation.
l. 46. The 'yet', which the later editions and Chambers drop, is quite
in Donne's style. It is heavily stressed and 'he was' is slurred, 'h'
was. '
PAGE =147=, l. 58. _The Infanta of London, Heire to an India. _ It is
not necessary to suppose a reference to any person in particular.
The allusion is in the first place to the wealth of the city, and the
greed of patricians and courtiers to profit by that wealth. 'No one
can tell who, amid the host of greedy and expectant suitors, will
carry off whoever is at present the wealthiest minor (and probably the
king's ward) in London, i. e. the City. ' Compare the _Epithalamion made
at Lincolns Inn_:
Daughters of London, you which be
Our Golden Mines, and furnish'd Treasury,
You which are Angels, yet still bring with you
Thousands of Angels on your marriage days
. . . . .
ll. 204-5. _As he that sees, &c. _ 'I have sometimes wondered in the
reading what was become of those glaring colours which amazed me in
_Bussy D'Ambois_ upon the theatre; but when I had taken up what I
supposed a fallen star, I found I had been cozened with a jelly;
nothing but a cold, dull mass, which glittered no longer than it was
a-shooting. ' Dryden, _The Spanish Friar_. In another place Dryden uses
the figure in a more poetic or at least ambitious fashion:
The tapers of the gods,
The sun and moon, run down like waxen globes;
The shooting stars end all in purple jellies,
And chaos is at hand.
_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. 1616_, 'but as God hath blessed you in your ways, and in your
callings, so put your children into ways and courses too, in which God
may bless them. . . . The Fathers' former labours shall not excuse their
Sons future idleness. ' The sons of wealthy citizens might grow idle
and extravagant; they could not be styled 'Patricians'. It is not
of them that Donne is thinking, but of the young noblemen who are
accompanying their friend on his wedding-day. They are, or are willing
to be, the sons, by marriage not by blood, of 'these Senators', or
rather of their money-bags. In a word, they marry their daughters for
money, as the hero of the _Epithalamion_ is doing. It is fortunate for
the Senators if the young courtiers do not find in their wives as well
as their daughters, like Fastidious Brisk in Jonson's comedy, 'Golden
Mines and furnish'd Treasurie. ' But they are 'Sunnes' as well as
Sonnes'--suns which drink up the deep oceans of these Senators'
wealth:
it rain'd more
Then if the Sunne had drunk the sea before.
_Storme_, 43-4.
Hence the metaphor 'deep oceans', and hence the appropriateness of the
predicate 'Here shine'. This pun on 'sunne' and 'sonne' is a favourite
with Donne:
Mad paper stay, and grudge not here to burne
With all those sonnes [sunnes _B_, _S96_] whom my braine did create.
_To Mrs. M. H. H. _, p. 216.
I am thy sonne, made with thyself to shine.
_Holy Sonnets_, II. 5.
Sweare by thyself, that at my death thy sonne
Shall shine as hee shines now, and heretofore.
_A Hymn to God the Father. _
'This day both Gods Sons arose: The Sun of his Firmament, and the Son
of his bosome. ' _Sermons_ 80. 26. 255. 'And when thy Sun, thy soule
comes to set in thy death-bed, the Son of Grace shall suck it up into
glory. ' Ibid. 80. 45. 450.
Correctly read the line has a satiric quality which Donne's lines
rarely want, and in which this stanza abounds. I have chosen the
spelling 'Sonns' as that which is most commonly used in the MSS. for
'sonnes' and 'sunnes'.
PAGE =143=, l. 57. _His steeds nill be restrain'd. _ I had adopted
the reading 'nill' for 'will' conjecturally before I found it in _W_.
There can be no doubt it is right. As printed, the two clauses (57-8)
simply contradict each other. The use of 'nill' for 'will' was one
of Spenser's Chaucerisms, and Donne comes closer to Spenser in the
_Epithalamia_ than anywhere else. Sylvester uses it in his translation
of Du Bartas:
For I nill stiffly argue to and fro
In nice opinions, whether so or so.
And it occurs in Davison's _Poetical Rhapsody_:
And therefore nill I boast of war.
In Shakespeare, setting aside the phrase 'nill he, will he', we have:
in scorn or friendship, nill I construe whether.
ll. 81-2. _Till now thou wast but able
To be what now thou art_;
She has realized her potentiality; she is now actually what hitherto
she has been only [Greek: en dynamei], therefore she 'puts on
perfection'. 'Praeterea secundum Philosophum . . . _qualibet potentia
melior est eius actus_; nam forma est melior quam materia, et actio
quam potentia activa: est enim finis eius. ' Aquinas, _Summa_, xxv. i.
See also Aristotle, _Met. _ 1050 _a_ 2-16. This metaphysical doctrine
is not contradicted by the religious exaltation of virginity, for it
is not virginity as such which is preferred to marriage by the Church,
but the virgin's dedication of herself to God: 'Virginitas inde
honorata, quia Deo dicata. . . . Virgines ideo laudatae, quia Deo
dicatae. Nec nos hoc in virginibus praedicamus, quod virgines sunt;
sed quod Deo dicatae pia continentia virgines. Nam, quod non temere
dixerim, felicior mihi videtur nupta mulier quam virgo nuptura: habet
enim iam illa quod ista adhuc cupit. . . . Illa uni studet placere cui
data est: haec multis, incerta cui danda est,' &c. ; August. _De Sanct.
Virg. _ I. x, xi. Compare Aquinas, _Summa_ II. 2, Quaest. clii. 3.
Wedded to Christ the virgin puts on a higher perfection.
SATYRES.
The earliest date assignable to any of the _Satyres_ is 1593, or more
probably 1594-5. On the back of the Harleian MS. 5110 (_H51_), in the
British Museum, is inscribed:[1]
Jhon Dunne his Satires
Anno Domini 1593
The handwriting is not identical with that in which the poems are
transcribed, and it is impossible to say either when the poems were
copied or when the title and date were affixed. One may not build too
absolutely on its accuracy; but there are in the three first _Satires_
(which alone the MS. contains) some indications that point to 1593-5
as the probable date. Mr. Chambers notes the reference in 1. , 80, 'the
wise politic horse,' to Banks' performing horse, and says: 'A large
collection of them' (i. e. allusions to the horse) 'will be found in
Mr. Halliwell-Phillips's Memoranda on _Love's Labour's Lost_. Only one
of these allusions is, however, earlier than 1593. It is in 1591, and
refers not to an exhibition in London, but in the provinces, and not
to Morocco, which was a bay, but to a white horse. It is probable,
therefore, that by 1591 Banks had not yet come to London, and if so
the date 1593 on the Harl. MS. 5110 of Donne's _Satires_ cannot be far
from that of their composition. ' But this is not the only allusion.
The same lines run on:
Or thou O Elephant or Ape wilt doe.
This has been passed by commentators as a quite general reference; but
the Ape and Elephant seem to have been animals actually performing,
or exhibited, in London about 1594. Thus in _Every Man out of his
Humour_, acted in 1599, Carlo Buffone says (IV. 6): ''S heart he keeps
more ado with this monster' (i. e. Sogliardo's dog) 'than ever Banks
did with his horse, or the fellow with the elephant. ' Further, all
three are mentioned in the _Epigrams_ of Sir John Davies, e. g. :
In Dacum.
Amongst the poets Dacus numbered is
Yet could he never make an English rime;
But some prose speeches I have heard of his,
Which have been spoken many an hundred time:
The man that keepes the Elephant hath one,
Wherein he tells the wonders of the beast:
Another Bankes pronounced long agon,
When he his curtailes qualities exprest:
Hee first taught him that keepes the monuments
At Westminster his formall tale to say:
And also him which Puppets represents,
And also him that w^{th} the Ape doth play:
Though all his poetry be like to this,
Amongst the poets Dacus numbred is.
And again:
In Titum
Titus the brave and valorous young gallant
Three years together in the town hath beene,
Yet my Lo. Chancellors tombe he hath not seene,
Nor the new water-worke, nor the Elephant.
I cannot tell the cause without a smile:
Hee hath been in the Counter all the while.
Colonel Cunningham has pointed out another reference in Basse's
_Metamorphosis of the Walnut Tree_ (1645), where he tells how 'in our
youth we saw the Elephant'. Grosart's suggestion that the Elephant was
an Inn is absurd.
Davies' _Epigrams_ were first published along with Marlowe's version
of Ovid's _Elegies_, but no date is affixed to any of the three
editions which followed one another. But a MS. in the Bodleian
which contains forty-five of the Epigrams describes them as _English
Epigrammes much like Buckminsters Almanacke servinge for all England
but especially for the meridian of the honourable cittye of London
calculated by John Davies of Grayes Inne gentleman An^o 1594 in
November_. [2] This seems much too exact to be a pure invention, and
if it be correct it is very unlikely that the allusions would be to
ancient history. Banks' Horse, the performing Ape, and the Elephant
were all among the sights of the day, like the recently erected tomb
of Lord Chancellor Hatton, who died in 1591. The atmosphere of the
first _Satyre_, as of Davies' _Epigrams_, is that of 1593-5.
The phrase 'the Infanta of London, Heire to an India', in which
commentators have found needless difficulty, contains possibly,
besides its obvious meaning, an allusion to the fact that since 1587
the Infanta of Spain had become in official Catholic circles heir to
the English throne. In 1594 Parsons' tract, _A Conference about the
next Succession to the Crown of England. By R. Doleman_, defended her
claim, and made the Infanta's name a byword in England.
If _H51_ is thus approximately right in its dating of the first Satire
it may be the better trusted as regards the other two, and there is at
least nothing in them to make this date impossible. The references to
poetry in the second acquire a more vivid interest when their date or
approximate date is remembered. In 1593 died Marlowe, the greatest of
the brilliant group that reformed the stage, giving
ideot actors means
(Starving 'themselves') to live by 'their' labour'd sceanes;
and Shakespeare was one of the 'ideot actors'. Shakespeare, too, was
one of the many sonneteers who 'would move Love by rithmes', and in
1593 and 1594 he appeared among those 'who write to Lords, rewards to
get'.
It would be interesting if we could identify the lawyer-poet, Coscus,
referred to in this Satire. Malone, in a MS. note to his copy of
_1633_ (now in the Bodleian Library), suggested John Hoskins or
Sir Richard Martin. Grosart conjectured that Donne had in view the
_Gullinge Sonnets_ preserved in the Farmer-Chetham MS. , and ascribed
with probability to Sir John Davies, the poet of the _Epigrams_
just mentioned. Chambers seems to lean to this view and says, 'these
sonnets are couched in legal terminology. ' Donne is supposed to have
mistaken Davies' 'gulling' for serious poetry. This is very unlikely.
Moreover, only the last two of Davies' sonnets are 'couched in legal
terminology':
My case is this, I love Zepheria bright,
Of her I hold my harte by fealty:
and
To Love my lord I doe knights service owe
And therefore nowe he hath my wit in ward.
Nor, although Davies' style parodies the style of the sonneteers (not
of the anonymous _Zepheria_ only), is it particularly harsh. It is
much more probable that Donne, like Davies, has chiefly in view this
anonymous series of sonnets--_Zepheria_. _Ogni di viene la sera. Mysus
et Haemonia juvenis qui cuspide vulnus senserat, hac ipsa cuspide
sensit opem. At London: Printed by the Widow Orwin, for N. L.
and John Busby. _ 1594. The style of _Zepheria_ exactly fits Donne's
description:
words, words which would teare
The tender labyrinth of a soft maids eare.
'The verbs "imparadize", "portionize", "thesaurize", are some of
the fruits of his ingenuity. He claims that his Muse is capable
of "hyperbolised trajections"; he apostrophizes his lady's eyes as
"illuminating lamps" and calls his pen his "heart's solicitor". '
Sidney Lee, _Elizabethan Sonnets_. The following sonnet from the
series illustrates the use of legal terminology which both Davies and
Donne satirize:
Canzon 20.
How often hath my pen (mine heart's Solicitor)
Instructed thee in Breviat of my case!
While Fancy-pleading eyes (thy beauty's visitor)
Have pattern'd to my quill, an angel's face.
How have my Sonnets (faithful Counsellors)
Thee without ceasing moved for Day of Hearing!
While they, my Plaintive Cause (my faith's Revealers! ),
Thy long delay, my patience, in thine ear ring.
How have I stood at bar of thine own conscience
When in Requesting Court my suit I brought!
How have the long adjournments slowed the sentence
Which I (through much expense of tears) besought!
Through many difficulties have I run,
Ah sooner wert thou lost, I wis, than won.
We do not know who the author of _Zepheria_ was, so cannot tell how
far Donne is portraying an individual in what follows. It can hardly
be Hoskins or Martin, unless _Zepheria_ itself was intended to be
a burlesque, which is possible. Quite possibly Donne has taken the
author of _Zepheria_ simply as a type of the young lawyer who writes
bad poetry; and in the rest of the poem portrays the same type when
he has abandoned poetry and devoted himself to 'Law practice for
mere gain', extorting money and lands from Catholics or suspected
Catholics, and drawing cozening conveyances. If _Zepheria_ be the
poems referred to, then 1594-5 would be the date of this Satire.
The third _Satyre_ has no datable references, but its tone reflects
the years in which Donne was loosening himself from the Catholic
Church but had not yet conformed, the years between 1593 and 1599,
and probably the earlier rather than the later of these years. On the
whole 1593 is a little too early a date for these three satires. They
were probably written between 1594 and 1597.
The long fourth _Satyre_ is in the Hawthornden MS. (_HN_) headed
_Sat. 4. anno 1594_. But this is a mistake either of Drummond, who
transcribed the poems probably as late as 1610, or of Donne himself,
whose tendency was to push these early effusions far back in his life.
The reference to 'the losse of Amyens' (l. 114) shows that the poem
must have been written after March 1597, probably between that date
and September, when Amiens was re-taken by Henry IV. These lines _may_
be an insertion, but there is no extant copy of the _Satyre_ without
them. It belongs to the period between the 'Calis-journey' and the
'Island-voyage', when first Donne is likely to have appeared at court
in the train of Essex.
The fifth _Satyre_ is referred by Grosart and Chambers to 1602-3 on
the ground that the phrase 'the great Carricks pepper' is a reference
to the expedition sent out by the East India Company under Captain
James Lancaster to procure pepper, the price of which commodity was
excessively high. Lancaster captured a Portuguese Carrick and sent
home pepper and spice. There is no proof, however, that this ship was
ever known as 'the Carrick' or 'the great Carrick'. That phrase _was_
applied to 'that prodigious great carack called the _Madre de Dios_ or
_Mother of God_, one of the greatest burden belonging to the crown of
Portugal', which was captured by Raleigh's expedition and brought to
Dartmouth in 1592. 'This prize was reckoned the greatest and richest
that had ever been brought into England' and 'daily drew vast numbers
of spectators from all parts to admire at the hugeness of it' (Oldys,
_Life of Raleigh_, 1829, pp. 154-7). Strype states that she 'was seven
decks high, 165 foot long, and manned with 600 men' (_Annals_, iv.
177-82). That pepper formed a large part of the Carrick's cargo is
clear from the following order issued by the Privy Council: _A letter
to Sir Francis Drake, William Killigrewe, Richard Carmarden and Thomas
Midleton Commissioners appointed for the Carrique_. 'Wee have received
your letter of the 23^{rd} of this presente of your proceeding in
lading of other convenient barkes with the pepper out of the Carrique,
and your opinion concerning the same, for answere whereunto we do
thinke it meete, and so require you to take order, so soone as the
goods are quite dischardged, that Sir Martin Frobisher be appointed to
have the charge and conduction of those shippes laden with the pepper
and other commodities out of the Carrique to be brought about to
Chatham. ' 27 Octobris, 1592. See also under October 1. The reference
in 'the great Carricks pepper' is thus clear. The words 'You Sir,
whose righteousness she loves', &c. , ll. 31-3, show that the poem was
written after Donne had entered Sir Thomas Egerton's service,
i. e. between 1598, if not earlier, and February 1601-2 when he was
dismissed, which makes the date suggested by Grosart and Chambers
(1602-3) impossible. The poem was probably written in 1598-9. There is
a note of enthusiasm in these lines as of one who has just entered
on a service of which he is proud, and the occasion of the poem was
probably Egerton's endeavour to curtail the fees claim'd by the Clerk
of the Star Chamber (see note below). With Essex's return from
Ireland in 1599 began a period of trouble and anxiety for Egerton, and
probably for Donne too. The more sombre cast of his thought, and
the modification in his feelings towards Elizabeth, after the fatal
February of 1600-1, are reflected in the satirical fragment _The
Progresse of the Soule_.
The so-called sixth and seventh _Satyres_ (added in 1635 and 1669)
I have relegated to the _Appendix B_, and have given elsewhere my
reasons for assigning them to Sir John Roe. That Donne wrote only five
regular _Satyres_ is very definitely stated by Drummond of Hawthornden
in a note prefixed to the copy of the fourth in _HN_: 'This Satyre
(though it heere have the first place because no more was intended
to this booke) was indeed the authors fourth in number and order
he having written five in all to using which this caution will
sufficientlie direct in the rest. '
[Footnote 1: Attention was first called to this inscription by
J. Payne Collier in his _Poetical Decameron_ (1820). He uses
the date to vindicate the claim for Donne's priority as a
satirist to Hall. 'Dunne' is of course one of the many ways
in which the poet's name is spelt, and 'Jhon' is a spelling
of 'John'. The poet's own signature is generally 'Jo. Donne. '
'Jhon Don' is Drummond's spelling on the title-page of _HN_.
In _Q_ the first page is headed 'M^r John Dunnes Satires'. ]
[Footnote 2: Of the forty-five which the MS. contains, some
thirty-three were published in the edition referred to above.
On the other hand the edition contains some which are not
in the MS. Of these, one, 47, 'Meditations of a gull,' alone
refers to events which are certainly later than 1594. As this
is not in the MS. there is nothing to contradict the assertion
that it (and the Epigrams cited above) belong to 1594.
Davies' Epigrams are referred to in Sir John Harrington's
_Metamorphosis of Ajax_, 1596. ]
PAGE =145=. SATYRE I.
This _Satyre_ is pretty closely imitated in the _Satyra Quinta_ of
_SKIALETHEIA. or, A shadowe of Truth in certaine Epigrams and Satyres.
1598_. attributed to Edward Guilpin (or Gilpin), to whom extracts from
it are assigned in _Englands Parnassus_ (1600). Who Guilpin was we
do not know. Besides the work named he wrote two sonnets prefixed to
Gervase Markham's _Devoreux. Vertues tears for the losse of the most
Christian King Henry, third of that name; and the untimely death of
the most noble and heroical Gentleman, Walter Devoreux, who was slain
before Roan in France. First written in French by the most excellent
and learned Gentlewoman, Madame Geneuefe Petan Maulette. And
paraphrastically translated into English by Jervis Markham. _ 1597. See
Grosart's Introduction to his reprint of _Skialetheia_ in _Occasional
Issues_. 6. (1878). Donne addresses a letter to _Mr. E. G. _ (p. 208),
which Gosse conjectures to be addressed to Guilpin. That Guilpin
knew Donne is probable in view of this early imitation of a privately
circulated MS. poem. Guilpin's poem begins:
Let me alone I prethee in thys Cell,
Entice me not into the Citties hell;
Tempt me not forth this _Eden_ of content,
To tast of that which I shall soone repent:
Prethy excuse me, I am hot alone
Accompanied with meditation,
And calme content, whose tast more pleaseth me
Then all the Citties lushious vanity.
I had rather be encoffin'd in this chest
Amongst these bookes and papers I protest,
Then free-booting abroad purchase offence,
And scandale my calme thoughts with discontents.
Heere I converse with those diviner spirits,
Whose knowledge, and admire, the world inherits:
Heere doth the famous profound _Stagarite_,
With Natures mistick harmony delight
My ravish'd contemplation: I heere see
The now-old worlds youth in an history:
l. 1. _Away thou fondling, &c. _ The reading of the majority of
editions and MSS. is 'changeling', but this is a case not of a right
and wrong reading but of two versions, both ascribable to the author.
Which was his emendation it is impossible to say. He may have changed
'fondling' (a 'fond' or foolish person) thinking that the idea was
conveyed by 'motley', which, like Shakespeare's epithet 'patch', is a
synecdoche from the dress of the professional fool or jester. On the
other hand the idea of 'changeling' is repeated in 'humorist', which
suggests changeable and fanciful. I have, therefore, let the _1633_
text stand. 'Changeling' has of course the meaning here of 'a fickle
or inconstant person', not the common sense of a person or thing
or child substituted for another, as 'fondling' is not here a 'pet,
favourite', as in modern usage.
l. 3. _Consorted. _ Grosart, who professes to print from _H51_, reads
_Consoled_, without any authority.
l. 6. _Natures Secretary_: i. e. Aristotle. He is always 'the
Philosopher' in Aquinas and the other schoolmen. Walton speaks of 'the
great secretary of nature and all learning, Sir Francis Bacon'.
l. 7. _jolly Statesmen. _ All the MSS. except _O'F_ agree with _1633_
in reading 'jolly', though 'wily' is an obvious emendation.
Chambers adopts it. By 'jolly' Donne probably meant 'overweeningly
self-confident . . . full of presumptuous pride . . . arrogant,
over-bearing' (O. E. D. ). 'Evilmerodach, a jolly man, without Iustyse
and cruel. ' Caxton (1474). 'It concerneth every one of us . . . not
to be too high-minded or jolly for anything that is past. ' Sanderson
(1648).
l. 10. _Giddie fantastique Poets of each land. _ In a letter Donne
tells Buckingham, in Spain, how his own library is filled with Spanish
books 'from the mistress of my youth, Poetry, to the wife of mine age,
Divinity'. This line in the Satires points to the fact, which Donne
was probably tempted later to obscure a little, that his first
prolonged visit to the Continent had been made before he settled in
London in 1592 and probably without the permission of the Government.
The other than Spanish poets would doubtless be French and Italian.
Donne had read Dante. He refers to him in the fourth _Satyre_ ('who
dreamt he saw hell'), and in an unpublished letter in the Burley MS.
he dilates at some length, but in no very creditable fashion, on an
episode in the _Divina Commedia_. Of French poets he probably knew at
any rate Du Bartas and Regnier.
l. 12. _And follow headlong, wild uncertain thee? _ I have retained the
_1633_ punctuation instead of, with Chambers, comma-ing 'wild' as
well as 'headlong'. The latter is possibly an adverb here, going with
'follow'. The use of 'headlong' as an adjective with persons was not
common. The earliest example in the O. E. D. is from _Hudibras_:
The Friendly Rug preserv'd the ground,
And headlong Knight from bruise or wound.
Donne's line is, however, ambiguous; and the subsequent description of
the humorist would justify the adjective.
l. 18. _Bright parcell gilt, with forty dead mens pay. _ Compare:
'Captains some in guilt armour (unbatt'red) some in buffe jerkins,
plated o'r with massy silver lace (raz'd out of the ashes of dead
pay). ' Dekker, _Newes from Hell_, ii. 119 (Grosart). So many
'dead pays' (i. e. men no longer on the muster roll) were among the
perquisites allowed to every captain of a company, but the number was
constantly exceeded: 'Moreover where' (i. e. whereas) 'there are 15
dead paies allowed ordinarily in every bande, which is paid allwaies
and taken by the captaines, althogh theire nombers be greatly
dyminished in soche sorte as sometimes there are not fower score or
fewer in a company, her Majestys pleasure is that from hence the saide
15 dead paies shall not be allowed unlesse the companies be full and
compleate, but after the rate of two dead paies for everie twenty men
that shalbe in the saide bande where the companies are dyminished. '
Letter to Sir John Norreyes, Knighte. _Acts of the Privy Council_,
1592.
PAGE =146=, l. 27. _Oh monstrous, superstitious puritan. _ The
'Monster' of the MSS. is of course _not_ due to the substitution
of the noun for the adjective, but is simply an older form of the
adjective. Compare 'O wonder Vandermast', Greene's _Friar Bacon and
Friar Bungay_.
l. 32. _raise thy formall_: 'raise' is probably right, but 'vaile' is
a common metaphor. 'A Player? Call him, the lousie slave: what will
he saile by, and not once strike or vaile to a Man of Warre. ' Captain
Tucca in Jonson's _Poetaster_, III. 3.
l. 33. _That wilt consort none, &c. _ It is unnecessary to alter
'consort none' to 'consort with none', as some MSS. do. The
construction is quite regular. 'Wilt thou consort me, bear me
company? ' Heywood. The 'consorted with these few books' of l. 3
is classed by the O. E. D. under a slightly different sense of the
word--not 'attended on by' these books, but 'associated in a common
lot with' them.
l. 39. _The nakednesse and barenesse, &c. _ The reading 'barrennesse'
of all the editions and some MSS. is due probably to similarity of
pronunciation (rather than of spelling) and a superficial suggestion
of appropriateness to the context. A second glance shows that
'bareness' is the correct reading. The MSS. give frequent evidence of
having been written to dictation.
l. 46. The 'yet', which the later editions and Chambers drop, is quite
in Donne's style. It is heavily stressed and 'he was' is slurred, 'h'
was. '
PAGE =147=, l. 58. _The Infanta of London, Heire to an India. _ It is
not necessary to suppose a reference to any person in particular.
The allusion is in the first place to the wealth of the city, and the
greed of patricians and courtiers to profit by that wealth. 'No one
can tell who, amid the host of greedy and expectant suitors, will
carry off whoever is at present the wealthiest minor (and probably the
king's ward) in London, i. e. the City. ' Compare the _Epithalamion made
at Lincolns Inn_:
Daughters of London, you which be
Our Golden Mines, and furnish'd Treasury,
You which are Angels, yet still bring with you
Thousands of Angels on your marriage days
. . . . .
