SOURCE: Leishman, J. B. “‘You Meaner Beauties of the Night’: A Study in Transmission and Transmogrification.” The Library, fourth series 26, Nos. 2-3 (September-December 1945): 99-121.

[In following essay, Leishman analyzes several versions of Wotton's “You Meaner Beauties of the Night,” arguing that changes in the poem were made as it circulated in manuscript and print, and that there was no definitive version during Wotton's lifetime.]

‘I expect Sir Henry Wotton at Dover’, wrote, on the 12th of June 1620, the reformed pirate Sir Henry Mainwaring to Lord Zouche; ‘I expect Sir Henry Wotton at Dover the latter end of this week. Being in Greenwitch Parke he made a sonnet to the Queen of Bohemia which he sent by me to the Lady Wotton; the copy I have sent your Lordship. It will be a good exercise for your lordship's two choiristers, Mr. Fooks and Mr. North, to set it to a sound.’¹ The ‘sonnet’, as Mainwaring called it, one of the most beautiful and popular of seventeenth-century poems, was eventually ‘set to a sound’ by Michael Est, in whose Sixt Set of Bookes, wherein are Anthemes, &c., it rather oddly and inexplicably made its first appearance in print in 1624, four years after it had been composed, in a form which must be regarded either as very corrupt or very unrevised. A substantially similar version, but with the unmetrical omission of four words and other corruptions, appeared, a year after Wotton's death, in Wits Recreations, 1640. Its next appearance in print, by far the best single version, although it requires to be supplemented from Est's, was in the Reliquiae Wottonianae, published by Wotton's friend and biographer Izaak Walton in 1651.

I had never seriously considered the problem of the text and transmission of this famous poem until, hunting other quarry through various seventeenth-century manuscript commonplace-books in the Bodleian, I came upon four versions, two of which contained one, and two of which contained two, additional stanzas, besides various corruptions of what I had been accustomed to regard as the authentic readings. I at once decided that it would be interesting to consider how the poem had fared in the various seventeenth-century miscellanies, but I had not pursued my researches very far when I found (as no doubt many such excited discoverers have done) that my supposed discovery had been discovered before, and had led to a considerable correspondence in The Times Literary Supplement during 1924. On 4th September of that year Miss Agnes Conway quoted a five-stanza version, beginning ‘You glorious trifles of the East’, from a seventeenth-century manuscript belonging to Sir Francis Wyatt, a descendant of the poet, and reported that the stanza ‘You glorious trifles of the East’ also began the poem in a collection written for Robert Killigrew in 1644 (B.M. Sloane MS. 1792, p. 2), and that in this version the poem ended with a second additional stanza, beginning ‘The rose, the violett, the whole spring’. She also reported that these two additional stanzas occurred in another seventeenth-century manuscript in the British Museum, Sloane MS. 1446. From further correspondence I learnt that Ebsworth, in his reprint of the Westminster Drollery, had noticed yet another six-stanza version in a British Museum MS. (Addit. MS. 22, 118), which, although signed ‘Sir Henry Wotton’, was not, as he had supposed, in Wotton's hand; and I also learnt of the existence of (though not of the true relationship between) the versions in Forbes's Cantus, Watts's Musical Miscellany, Ramsay's Tea-Table Miscellany, and Herd's and Chambers's Scottish Songs.

Confining myself (with the exception of the version in the Wyatt MS., quoted in full by Miss Conway) to those manuscript and printed versions which were accessible to me in the Bodleian, I have carefully considered the variants from the authentic four-stanza version (which, as I shall attempt to show, is that of the Reliquiae Wottonianae, 1651, p. 518, corrected in three places from that in Michael Est's Sixt Set of Bookes, wherein are Anthemes, &c., 1624) in five seventeenth-century manuscript commonplace-books, and in seven printed texts of the seventeenth, three of the eighteenth, and one of the nineteenth-century, viz.:

MS. Ashmole 38, p. 118

MS. Ashmole 788, f. 21^v

MS. Tanner 465, f. 43

MS. Malone 19, f. 37

Wyatt MS.

Wits Recreations, 1640, No. 472.

John Playford's Select Musically Ayres, 1653, p. 23.

Wits Interpreter, 1655, p. 263.

Parnassus Biceps, 1656, ed. Thorn Drury, p. 34.

A Crew of Kind London Gossips … To which is added Ingenious Poems or Wit and Drollery, 1663 (A reprint, with large additions, of Samuel Rowlands's A Whole Crew of Kind Gossips, 1609), p. 76.

Westminster-Drollery, 1671, p. 54.

Forbes's Cantus, Songs and Fancies, 3rd ed., 1682, no. liv.

Watts's Musical Miscellany, 1731, vol. vi, p. 80.

Ramsay's Tea-Table Miscellany, 10th ed., 1740, p. 403.

Herd's Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs, 1776, vol. i, p. 281.

Chambers's Scottish Songs, 1829, vol. ii, p. 562.

From this comparison I have reached certain conclusions (which further collation could scarcely, I think, make it necessary to modify) about the circulation of favourite poems among poetry-lovers during the seventeenth century and about the origin and importance of variants in manuscript and printed miscellany versions of such poems. These conclusions, for which in due course I will attempt to supply the evidence, are, briefly: (1) That the author was not accustomed, either with his own hand or with his secretary's, to write out copy after copy at the request of friends, each time incorporating some small revision or correction, but that, after one or two authentic versions, perhaps with not inconsiderable variants between them, had been circulated, the author's (or the poem's) friends got the poem by heart, unconsciously modified it in their memories, repeated it or wrote it out for their friends, and that the various versions in commonplace-books and miscellanies have, in varying degrees, a relationship to the original similar to that of the various versions of traditional ballads (which, I will venture to say, I believe to have been written by individual poets, not spontaneously generated among the ‘folk’); (2) That very often, where no fully authenticated version of a poem was published during the author's life-time, and where several manuscript or printed versions are available, even after the most careful collations have been made, no mechanical or supposedly scientific method will enable an editor to decide which readings are corrupt and which are authentic and, of these, which are original and which are revisions. He must dare to exercise his own taste and judgement, and to appeal to those of his readers, admitting, as Aristotle so often does when pressed, that, after all, the final decision must be ώς ἅν ὁ φρόνιμος ὁρίsειεν. These conclusions, I may add, seem to me to justify the printing of what have often been contemptuously dismissed as ‘eclectic’ texts of traditional ballads.

Our inquiry will consist of four main parts: first, by comparing the texts of the Reliquiae and of Est, I shall attempt to reach the best possible version of Wotton's poem and to decide how far it is possible to say that this best version is also the most authentic; secondly, I shall attempt to explain how some of the many inferior or corrupt readings in Est and other texts and manuscripts probably arose; thirdly, I shall consider the two additional stanzas which are found in some texts and manuscripts, and try to decide which is the best version of them and whether or no they may be regarded as authentic; fourthly, and lastly, I shall try to establish the relationship between ten of the printed texts, and in so doing, shall describe the amusing and instructive history of Wotton's poem after it had crossed the Border. Nevertheless, although in the literal sense our inquiry will be fourfold, in a more philosophical and general sense it will only be twofold, for I, and, I hope, you also, shall be continually asking, explicitly or implicitly, two questions: By what means, and by the exercise of what faculties, is it possible to establish the text of Wotton's poem? How is it possible to explain the corruptions in the various manuscript and printed versions of it?

THE AUTHENTIC FORM OF THE ORIGINAL FOUR STANZAS

What I am willing to call either the ‘best’ or the ‘authentic’ version of the original four stanzas is that of the Reliquiae corrected in three places from Est. It may be confidently said that whenever any of the other printed or manuscript versions differ from this they differ for the worse. Here, then, in [sequence] (and, in order that we may concentrate upon essentials, in modern spelling) are the Reliquiae and Est versions, together with a table showing how the readings which my judgement considers as ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ are distributed between them.

RELIQUIAE

You meaner beauties of the night,
That poorly satisfy our eyes
More by your number than your light,
You common people of the skies,
What are you when the sun shall rise?
You curious chanters of the wood,
That warble forth Dame Nature's lays,
Thinking your voices understood
By your weak accents, what 's your praise
When Philomel her voice shall raise?
You violets, that first appear,
By your pure purple mantles known,
Like the proud virgins of the year,
As if the Spring were all your own,
What are you when the rose is blown?
So when my Mistress shall be seen
In form and beauty of her mind,
By virtue first, then choice a Queen,
Tell me if she were not designed
Th' eclipse and glory of her kind?

EST

You meaner beauties of the night,
That poorly satisfy our eyes
More by your number than your light,
You common people of the skies,
What are you when the moon doth rise?
You violets, which first appear,
By those your purple mantles known,
Much like proud virgins of the year,
As if the Spring were all your own,
What are you when the rose is blown?
You wand'ring chanters of the wood
Who fill the ears with Nature's lays,
Thinking your passions understood
By weaker accents, what 's your praise
When Philomel her voice doth raise?
So when my Princess shall be seen
In sweetness of her looks and mind,
By virtue first, then choice a Queen,
O tell if she were not designed
Th' eclipse and glory of her kind?

SUPERIOR READING

when the moon (Est)
shall rise (R.)
You curious chanters of the wood (R.)
That warble forth Dame Nature's lays (R.)
Thinking your passions understood (E.)
By your weak accents (R.)
her voice shall raise (R.)
You violets, that first (R.)
By your pure purple mantles (R.)
Like the proud virgins (R.)
So when my Mistress (R.)
In sweetness of her looks and mind (E.)
Tell me if (R.)

INFERIOR READING

when the sun (R)
doth rise (E.)
You wand'ring chanters (E.)
Who fill the ears with Nature's lays (E.)
Thinking your voices understood (R.)
By weaker accents (E.)
her voice doth raise (E.)
You violets, which first (E.)
By those your purple mantles (E.)
Much like proud virgins (E.)
So when my Princess (E.)
In form and beauty of her mind (R.)
O tell if (E.)

What I regard as the authentic version is that of the Reliquiae with the following three corrections from Est: (1) in the last line of the first stanza ‘when the moon shall rise’ for ‘when the sun shall rise’; (2) in the third line of the second stanza ‘Thinking your passions understood’ for ‘Thinking your voices understood’; (3) in the second line of the fourth stanza ‘In sweetness of her looks and mind’ for ‘In form and beauty of her mind’.

I think you will find that the editor of almost every modern anthology in which this poem appears has printed a more or less eclectic text: he has, that is to say (a fact which I must confess I had never realized until I began this investigation) anticipated me in basing his text upon the Reliquiae and in accepting into it certain readings derived (directly or indirectly) from Est. Whether these editors would have described the readings which they accepted from Est as ‘more authentic’ or simply as ‘better’, I do not know, for none of them, so far as I am aware, has explained or defended his procedure. The fact remains that they have not, as the saying is, stuck to a text, but have acted according to their own tastes and judgements, which in general, I am glad to say, though not always in detail, agree with mine. To confine ourselves merely to an inspection of the two most popular anthologies, The Golden Treasury and The Oxford Book of English Verse, Palgrave, who may perhaps have compared the Reliquiae version, not directly with Est, but with the version printed in Percy's Reliques, which Percy described as based upon the Reliquiae version ‘with some corrections from an old MS. copy’, follows Est's arrangement of the stanzas (a matter which I shall deal with later on), and accepts from Est, as I have done, the three readings ‘When the moon shall rise’, ‘Thinking your passions understood’, and ‘In sweetness of her looks and mind’. He also accepts, directly or indirectly, from Est ‘When Philomel her voice doth raise’ for the Reliquiae ‘shall raise’, and from some other source (possibly Percy's Reliques) ‘Ye’ for ‘You’ in the second and third stanzas, and ‘Which poorly satisfy’ for ‘That poorly satisfy’ in the second line of the first. Quiller-Couch agrees with me in accepting ‘When the moon shall rise’ and ‘Thinking your passions understood’ from Est, although he differs from me in preferring the Reliquiae's ‘In form and beauty of her mind’ to Est's ‘In sweetness of her looks and mind’. At first sight, perhaps, the phrase ‘In form and beauty of her mind’ might seem preferable, as being, as it were, the final antithesis to the ‘meaner beauties’ in the first line of the poem. I think, however, that the more closely one examines it the less satisfactory it appears. It does not, in fact, mean what it was intended to mean, namely, ‘In her form (used in the sense of Latin forma) and in the beauty of her mind’; and it was intended to mean something more and other than the poor tautology which is all that grammar and idiom will permit, namely, ‘In the form and in the beauty of her mind’. Clearly, an antithesis between physical and mental beauty, forma and mentis (or animae) pulchritudo, was intended. ‘In beauty of her form and mind’ would have been nearer to Wotton's intention. Indeed, it is possible that he may have thought of this improvement, and then rejected it in favour of the Est version, because, after all, forma could not be made to mean in English what it meant in Latin, because ‘looks and mind’ was a more satisfactory antithesis, at once more ardent and more respectful, than ‘form and mind’, and because ‘sweetness’, that word so dear to the Elizabethans, was, in this context, capable of a more tender, more lingering adoration than ‘beauty’.

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE ‘RELIQUIAE’ AND EST VERSIONS. VARIOUS CORRUPTIONS IN OTHER VERSIONS

It is hard to suppose that either the Reliquiae or the Est version represents what finally satisfied Wotton. At first sight, perhaps, it might be tempting to suppose that Est represents his first version and the Reliquiae his revision of it, since the Reliquiae contains ten ‘superior’ and Est ten ‘inferior’ readings. But there are difficulties in the way of this simple hypothesis. If Wotton originally wrote ‘What are you when the moon shall rise’ (Est),² is it conceivable that he should later have altered it to ‘When the sun shall rise’ (Reliquiae)? Surely, if Wotton ever did write ‘sun’ (a reading reproduced in none of the manuscript and printed versions I have examined except the Westminster Drollery, which is mainly a reprint of that in the Reliquiae), seizing at first upon the antithesis between night and day (which, incidentally, would have been better conveyed by night and dawn than by night and sun) rather than on the antithesis between the moon and the lesser stars, it must have been in his first draft; for, while it is highly probable that he should have changed ‘sun’ to ‘moon’, it is inconceivable that he should have changed ‘moon’ to ‘sun’. While, in trying to decide upon the relationship between two genuine variants in Chaucer's Troilus, we can often say ‘This is much closer to Boccaccio's Italian, and must therefore be the earlier reading’, possible sources in earlier poetry can be cited in favour of each of these two readings in Wotton's poem. If the contrast between the stars and the rising sun may have been suggested by Petrarch's 182nd sonnet—

Col suo bel viso suol dell' altre fare
Quel che fa 'l dì delle minori stelle

(‘With her fair face she's wont to make of others that which the day makes of the lesser stars’), the contrast between the stars and the rising moon may equally well have been suggested by the 12th Ode of Horace's First Book (ll. 46-8):

                                        micat inter omnis
Iulium sidus, velut inter ignis
          luna minores.

(‘shines amid all the rest the Julian star even as amid the lesser fires the moon’), or by the

Nox erat et caelo fulgebat luna sereno
          inter minora sidera,

of the 15th Epode. Again, is it conceivable that, having originally written ‘Your passions’ (Est), which is reproduced in all the above-mentioned manuscript and printed versions except the Westminster Drollery, he should have altered it to ‘Your voices’ (Reliquiae)? Finally, it is doubtful whether he would have altered ‘In sweetness of her looks and mind’ (Est), reproduced by six texts and manuscripts (the rest offering various corruptions), to the less ardent, more colourless, and, as I have attempted to show, in every respect less satisfactory ‘In form and beauty of her mind’, reproduced only by the Westminster Drollery.

With regard to the ‘inferior’ readings in Est, several of them seem much more likely to have been corruptions of the corresponding readings in the Reliquiae than Wotton's first thoughts: ‘By weaker accents’ (Est) for ‘By your weak accents’ (Reliquiae), ‘By those your purple mantles’ (Est) for ‘By your pure purple mantles’ (Reliquiae), ‘Much like proud virgins’ (Est) for ‘Like the proud virgins’ (Reliquiae), ‘O tell if’ (Est) for ‘Tell me if’ (Reliquiae). On the other hand, ‘my Princess’ (Est and eight texts and manuscripts) and ‘my Mistress’ (Reliquiae and six texts and manuscripts) may well be genuine variants.

At least two Reliquiae readings may represent either late revisions which never found their way into circulation, for neither in pure nor corrupted form do they appear in any of the manuscripts and printed texts except the Westminster Drollery (which, as I have said, is mainly a reprint of the Reliquiae version), or original readings unconsciously corrupted by some common source of Est and the other versions:

(1) You curious chanters of the wood.

This choice and charming phrase appears in Est and six texts and manuscripts as ‘wandering chanters’, in five as ‘warbling chanters’, in one as ‘lusty chanters’, and is sophisticated by Allan Ramsay into ‘charming birds that in the woods’.

(2) That warble forth Dame Nature's lays.

Est reads:

Who fill the ears with Nature's lays,

and the fact that four texts and manuscripts have found it necessary to substitute ‘our ears’ (twice), ‘men's ears’, or ‘mine ears’ for Est's ‘the ears’, while no less than eight read ‘fill the air’, suggests that Est's ‘fill the ears’ is a corruption, probably through mishearing, of ‘fill the air’ or ‘airs’, the pronunciation of the two words air and ear being at that time identical.

This last observation brings us to what seems to me perhaps the most interesting result of this investigation, namely, that all, or nearly all, of the corruptions in the various manuscript and printed versions outside the Reliquiae seem more likely to have been due to mishearing or misremembering, conscious or unconscious alteration, by persons who had got some more or less authentic version by heart and repeated it to or transcribed it for their friends, than to the carelessness of that critical and editorial whipping-boy, the scribe. A fact too seldom recognized by editors is that the scribes of that day, like the typists of this, did not commit all possible errors with equal facility, and that, except where their author's handwriting was exceptionally difficult, the errors they were most likely to commit were mainly of two kinds: the first, due to honest ignorance, was the transformation of a ‘hard’, an unusual or unfamiliar, word into a familiar one; the second, due to carelessness, was the omission of small words such as the, of, &c. Now, in Wotton's poem there are no ‘hard’ words, and in the various unauthentic versions there are only three places where it seems at all likely that a scribe (or scribes) may have introduced corruption by the familiar method of omitting small words: (1) for the Reliquiae's

By your weak accents

(which the editor of the Westminster Drollery has taken it upon himself to improve into ‘By their weak accents’) three versions read ‘By weak accents’, which (for such, if the error originated with a scribe, would seem to have been the process) five have sophisticated into ‘By accents weak’, one (Est) into ‘By weaker accents’, one into ‘In weaker accents’, and two into ‘By meaner accents’. (2) For the Reliquiae's

By your pure purple mantles known

four versions (omitting ‘pure’) read ‘By your purple mantles’, while all the rest (including Est) attempt to mend the metre by various kinds of sophistication: ‘By those your purple’ (Est), ‘And by your purple’ (three), ‘By your fine purple’ (three), &c. (3) For the Reliquiae's

Like the proud virgins of the year

eight versions give the authentic reading, while five omit ‘the’, reading ‘Like proud virgins of the year’, of which it is difficult not to regard Est's ‘Much like proud virgins of the year’ as a sophisticated correction.

These, I have said, are the only three places where it seems at all likely that the original errors were perpetrated by a scribe (or scribes), but even here (as elsewhere) it seems to me at least as likely that the corruption originated in the memories of reciters, dictators, or transcribers whose ears were less fine and whose prosody was more mechanical than Wotton's. For it will be observed that in each of these three lines the metre, which elsewhere in the poem is almost uniformly iambic, becomes, by a most exquisite variation, anapaestic or trochaic:

˘ ˘ ¯ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯
By your weak | accents | ; what 's your | praise …
˘ ˘ ¯ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯
By your pure | purple | mantles | known …
˘ ˘ ¯ ¯ ˘ ˘ ˘ ¯
Like the proud | virgins | of the year.

I certainly find it easier to believe that the iambic form of these lines in Est's version

˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯
By weak|er acc|ents; what 's | your praise …
˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯
By those | your purp|le mant|les known …
˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯
Much like | proud vir|gins of | the year

represents the transformation which the Reliquiae version underwent in the memory (or memories) of some less sensitive mind (or minds) than that Est's version represents what Wotton originally wrote.

It is, of course, possible to describe these metrical conventionalizations by the less harsh term of normalizations, and to assume that Est altered these three lines deliberately, in order that they might be sung without difficulty to the same notes as their more regular and conventional counterparts in the other stanzas. And this assumption is strengthened by the fact that in the version of the poem in Playford's Select Musicall Ayres, 1653 (exactly reproduced in Cotgrave's Wits Interpreter, 1655) two of the lines which Est has metrically normalized are also normalized, though in a different way:

˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘
By Ac|cents weak, | what is | your praise …
˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯
And by | your purp|le mant|les known.

Playford has indeed retained the irregular

Like the proud Virgins of the year

but, on the other hand, like Est and every other printed or manuscript version except the Reliquiae, he has transformed the trisyllabic ‘curious’ (‘You curious chanters of the wood’) into a disyllable, ‘lusty’ (other versions having either ‘wand'ring’ or ‘warbling’). Est's ‘O tell’ for the Reliquiae's ‘Tell me’ in the penultimate line of the last stanza (‘Tell me if she were not designed’) may perhaps be regarded as a deliberate alteration in order to make the musical accent fall (naturally) on ‘tell’ instead of on ‘me’; Playford, however, retaining the authentic version, is content to let it fall on ‘me’, and every other version, except the totally different Westminster Drollery, has retained ‘Tell me’. For indeed, although the hypothesis of deliberate alteration by composers in the interests of cantability will explain much, it will not explain all the corruptions of the authentic version. After all, Est's

Who fill the ears with Nature's lays

and Playford's

That fill the Ayre with natures layes

are not more singable than the Reliquiae's

That warble forth Dame Nature's lays.

Here, perhaps, I had better pause to explain why, with what may have seemed needless scrupulosity, I have been bracketing a plural with my singulars, and speaking of ‘scribe (or scribes)’, ‘memory (or memories)’, ‘mind (or minds)’. My reason is that what I have called ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ readings co-exist in the various manuscripts and printed texts in such varieties of combination that I find it difficult to suppose that each of the, let us say, twelve main corruptions could, if all the evidence were available, be traced back to one common source; that each of them, though it may have been many times repeated, was, strictly speaking, only made once, by some one particular scribe, or reciter, or rememberer; that each entered the stream of transmission at one particular time and one particular place, and was then simply carried down. Some, no doubt, were thus carried down for a certain distance, but it seems to me equally likely (I would almost venture to say, more likely) that the same errors were made quite independently by many persons at many times, just as, I suppose, hundreds have quite independently misquoted Milton's ‘fresh woods and pastures new’ as ‘fresh fields and pastures new’.

So far we have been considering only some of the thirteen variants between the Reliquiae and Est versions, and the reproduction or further corruption of some of the ten ‘inferior’ readings in other versions. There are, however, two other passages where both the Reliquiae and Est versions preserve the authentic reading, but where most of the other versions offer various kinds of corruption. Apart from the Westminster Drollery, whose editor almost certainly had the Reliquiae version in front of him, not one of the other versions retains ‘You’ in the magnificent invocation

You common people of the skies.

One (Wits Recreations) has ‘The’, and no less than ten have ‘Like’—an agreement in error which seems far less likely to have been due to the mistake of some one particular scribe than to the unconscious influence of a tendency to the conventional and the commonplace upon the memories of many reciters, dictators, or transcribers. Wotton's invocation (the sort of thing Donne might have written) is, even to-day, startlingly fresh and original, but in the process of oral transmission it seems to have been quickly rubbed down into the commonplace. For the gods, although they have given many a taste for poetry, have made few poetical. In the version in Forbes's Cantus, which we shall have occasion to consider later, and in which the whole poem has suffered a Scotch change into something very strange, the reading of this line is

As common Officers in the skyes.

Of the lines

Tell me if she were not designed
Th' eclipse and glory of her kind?

where Est has ‘O tell’ for ‘Tell me’, there are six more or less correct versions, one that omits a syllable (‘Tell me, was she not design'd?’), and then a variety of corruptions: twice (Parnassus Biceps and MS. Malone 19) ‘design'd’ appears as ‘assign'd’, and once (almost meaninglessly, MS. Ashmole 38) as ‘refinde’, while ‘Th' eclipse and glory of her kind’ appears twice as ‘T' eclipse [or ‘To eclipse’] the Glory of her kind’, and twice as ‘The eclipsing glory of her kind’, one of these corruptions being in MS. Tanner 465, the commonplace-book of Archbishop Sancroft, where it appears either as a correction or as a variant of the authentic reading.

While, with the possible exception of what in Est and Playford may perhaps be regarded as metrical normalizations in the interests of cantability, the earlier corruptions were almost certainly due to faults of memory, some at least of those in the later printed versions were deliberate alterations. The editor of the Westminster Drollery almost certainly had the Reliquiae before him, but in the second stanza he has altered ‘your weak accents’ into ‘their weak accents’, which, it must be admitted, agrees better with the unique Reliquiae reading ‘your voices’, which he has retained. His omission of ‘pure’ before ‘purple’ in the third stanza may or may not have been deliberate, but his alterations in the fourth stanza almost certainly were so, probably in order to bring the poem more into harmony with the title he has given it, ‘A Gentleman on his beautiful Mistress’:

So when my Mistris shall be seen
In form and beauty of her mind,
She cannot less be than a Queen;
And I believe she was design'd
T' eclipse the Glory of her kind.

His last line (which for some reason he has italicized) he may possibly have taken from the version in Parnassus Biceps. The tamperings of Allan Ramsay may be left until we come to consider the versions with additional stanzas.

There remain two passages in the first stanza where both the Reliquiae and Est versions and most of their successors preserve the authentic reading, but where two printed versions introduce original corruptions: for ‘our eyes’ A Crew of Kind London Gossips reads ‘mens eyes’ (a reading which MS. Tanner 465 has corrected to the authentic ‘our’), and for ‘by your number’ both A Crew of Kind London Gossips and Watts's Musical Miscellany read ‘with your number’.

THE AUTHENTIC ARRANGEMENT OF THE TWO MIDDLE STANZAS

In the Reliquiae version the stanza beginning

You curious chanters of the wood

stands second, and that beginning

You violets, that first appear

stands third, an arrangement which is followed only by the Westminster Drollery, by Forbes's Cantus (where, however, a very corrupt version of the original fourth stanza is placed between the second and third), and by MS. Ashmole 38: in Est and all the other manuscript and printed versions which I have seen, this arrangement is reversed (in two of those having additional stanzas, Parnassus Biceps and the Wyatt MS., an additional stanza being interposed). What is the authentic arrangement? In spite of Ben Jonson's contempt for poems where transposition was possible, it must be admitted that it is difficult to decide on purely aesthetic grounds—and on what other grounds is it possible to decide what is the authentic version of this poem? I myself incline to prefer the Reliquiae arrangement, chiefly, perhaps, because there is an agreeable alternation between sight (the stars) and sound (the birds) in the first two stanzas, and a return (analogous to that of a minuet after a trio section in music) to sight (violets) in the third, and also because the crowning, the ‘eclipsing’ sight in the last stanza—

So when my Mistress shall be seen—

seems more appropriately led up to by a stanza invoking sights than by one invoking sounds. Since, however, our initial comparison of the Reliquiae and Est versions has suggested that, while most of the Est variants are to be regarded as corruptions of the corresponding Reliquiae readings, at least three of them are authentic, and perhaps represent later revisions, it seems possible that Wotton himself may, for a while, have been uncertain about the arrangement of the two middle stanzas: if so, I think that the Est arrangement must be regarded as representing his ‘greener’ rather than his riper judgement. Or is the Est arrangement of the two middle stanzas, like certain of the Est readings, to be regarded as an early and persistent corruption of the authentic version?

RELATIONSHIP OF THE EST AND RELIQUIAE VERSIONS TO THE AUTOGRAPH

The results of our comparison between the Est, the Reliquiae, and the other manuscript and printed versions may be briefly recapitulated as follows: (1) The Reliquiae version contains no demonstrable corruptions, but three readings almost certainly earlier than the corresponding, ones in Est, and one reading which, if the Est version of it be authentic, is almost certainly later; (2) The Est version contains many readings which are demonstrable corruptions of the corresponding readings in the Reliquiae, but, at the same time, it contains three readings which are certainly authentic and almost certainly later than the corresponding readings in the Reliquiae, together with one reading which, if it be authentic, is almost certainly earlier; (3) Except in one place,

Who fill the air with Nature's lays,

the reading of seven manuscripts and printed texts, which is almost certainly the correct version of the Est reading (which itself may or may not be authentic)

Who fill the ears with Nature's lays

all the variants in other manuscript and printed versions must be regarded as corruptions of the corresponding Reliquiae or Est readings; (4) The authentic or final version is that of the Reliquiae corrected in three places from Est. Since the Reliquiae text contains no demonstrable corruptions, the simplest and most attractive hypothesis would be that it represents Wotton's original version, while the Est text represents a largely corrupt version of his revision thereof. So far as I can see, the only serious difficulty in the way of accepting this hypothesis is the Reliquiae reading of the first two lines of the second stanza:

You curious chanters of the wood,
That warble forth Dame Nature's lays:

is it possible to regard the Est version of these lines,

You wand'ring chanters of the wood,
Who fill the ears [? air] with Nature's lays

which, with slight variants, all the other versions follow, as being merely the unconscious vulgarization, conventionalization, or debasement, the strangling, as it were, at birth, in the memory of one of its first hearers, of Wotton's original version, rather than as an authentic version which Wotton subsequently revised? It is, I admit, difficult to believe that the Est version of these lines is merely an unconscious corruption, but it is also, I submit, far more difficult to construct any alternative hypothesis as to the relationship between the two versions as a whole. I am therefore compelled to assume that the Reliquiae version was printed from the original draft found among Wotton's papers, that his revision thereof had been lost or destroyed, and that it can only be recovered from the version which, after having suffered involuntary corruption in some memory or memories, was printed by Est in 1624. At the same time I must admit that, if any reader should feel moved to ask me sarcastically, or, as Wotton himself might have said, ‘pleasantly’, whether I do not find it quite singularly fortunate that the Est version, in spite of its many corruptions, should nevertheless have contrived to preserve Wotton's three later revisions ‘absolute in their numbers, as he conceived them’, I can only give the perhaps not very convincing reply: ‘Yes, it is very fortunate indeed, but now and then such things do happen.’

THE TWO ADDITIONAL STANZAS

One or both of these appear in all the seventeenth-century commonplace-books I have examined, but in only two of the seventeenth-century miscellanies, Parnassus Biceps, 1656, and A Crew of Kind London Gossips, 1663. When correctly placed, as they usually are, what we may call the Rose and Violet stanza concludes the poem and what we may call the Glorious Trifles stanza precedes the original fourth. The most satisfying (and therefore, probably, the most authentic) version of both stanzas is that in A Crew of Kind London Gossips (which, in the second line, has, erroneously, ‘estimations’ for ‘estimation’) and in Watts's Musical Miscellany, 1731, and of this the many variants in other printed texts and manuscripts are probably to be regarded as corruptions. Here, then, in modern spelling, is the ‘authentic’ version:

You glorious trifles of the East,
Whose estimation fancies raise,
Pearls, rubies, sapphires, and the rest
Of glittering gems, what is your praise
When the bright diamond shows his rays?
The rose, the violet, the whole spring
Unto her breath for sweetness run;
The diamond's darkened in the ring
If she appear, the moon's undone
As in the presence of the sun.

In the other versions of the first of these stanzas the only significant variants are in the last two lines: for ‘glittering gems’ we have ‘painted’, ‘sparkling’, and ‘precious’, and for

When the bright diamond shows his rays

we have

When as the diamond [shows/shall show] [his/her] rays.

MS. Tanner 465 (the Sancroft miscellany) has a completely different and much inferior version of the whole stanza:

You Rubies, that doe gemmes adorne,
And Saphyres with your azure hewe,
Like to the skies, or blushng morne;
How pale 's your brightnes in our view,
When Diamonds are mixt with you?

In the five other versions of the second of these stanzas the most considerable variants (or corruptions) are in the first two lines. Only two (three, if we may disregard an excrescent ‘and’ before ‘the whole’ in Parnassus Biceps) correctly reproduce:

The rose, the violet, the whole spring

where the iambic rhythm (as thrice in the four original stanzas) is suddenly and exquisitely varied by an anapaest:

˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ˘ ¯
The rose | the vio|let the whole | spring

a metrical variation which the rememberers in two manuscripts either unconsciously or deliberately conventionalized:

MS. Malone 19: The Violet, the Rose, the springe.
MS. Tanner 465: The rose, the violet, all the spring.

Only one (MS. Tanner 465) correctly reproduces

Unto her breath for sweetness run:

two read

For sweetness to her breath [doth/may] run;

one reads

May to her breath for sweetnesse run,

and one (MS. Ashmole 38) absurdly

From sweetnes of her brest doth runne,

which is the kind of mishearing one might expect to find in the ‘stolne and surreptitious’ copy of an Elizabethan play. In the last line three correctly read

As in the presence of the sun

while one (MS. Ashmole 788) has

All in the glorie of the sunn

and one (Parnassus Biceps)

As at the brightnesse of the sun.

I have spoken of the ‘authentic’ version of these two stanzas, but I have no unshakable conviction that the author of them was Wotton, or that, if he was, he seriously intended them to be permanently incorporated into his poem. They are certainly beautiful in themselves, and, if two of the adjectives in the first—‘glittering gems’, ‘bright diamond’—are a little commonplace, the second stanza is scarcely inferior to any in the original poem. Nevertheless, beautiful as they are in themselves, they spoil the beauty of the original poem, which is a whole greater than the sum of its parts: after

Tell me if she were not designed
Th' eclipse and glory of her kind?

nothing, not even by the greatest of poets, remained to be said. During the seventeenth century England was indeed a nest of singing birds, and there was many an occasional poet who could write stanzas little, if at all, inferior to Wotton's. In MS. Ashmole 788, which on folio 21^v contains Wotton's poem with the two additional stanzas, there appears on folio 22 an imitation of it in the same stanza, rhythm, and rhetorical pattern (‘You that … What are you when … ?’) entitled The Antiparode, lamenting the loss of Charles I and his Queen, which was certainly written after Wotton's death in 1639, and possibly during the Commonwealth, after the execution of Charles. Though less magical than Wotton's, it is still a very good poem, and, had Wotton survived the King and had the poem been attributed to him, few, I think, would have been inclined to dispute his authorship.

Ladies that guild the glittering Moone
And by reflection mend her Ray,
Whose Lustre makes the sprightly Sunn
To dance as vpon Easter day,
          What are yee now the Sunn's away?
Couragious Eagles that haue whett
Yourselues vpon Maiestick light
And thence deriued such martiall heate
That still your lookes maintaine the fight,
          What are yee since the Kings good-night?
Caualliere Babes whom nature teemes
As a reserue for England[s] Throne,
Spiritts whose dooble edge redeemes
The last age & adornes your owne,
          What are yee now the Prince is gone?
As an obstructed fountains head
Cutts the entaile of from the streames,
And Brookes are disinherited,
Honour & Beautie are but Dreames
          Since Charles and Mary lost theire beames.

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TEN OF THE PRINTED TEXTS. WOTTON OVER THE BORDER

Wits Recreations 1640	A Crew of Kind London Gossips 1663	Forbes's Cantus 1662	Reliquiae Wottonianae 1651	Playford's Select Musicall Ayres 1653
	Watts's Musical Misc. 1731		Westminster Drollery 1671	Cotgrave's Wits Interpreter 1655
	Tea-Table Miscellany 1740
Herd's Scottish Songs 1776

The above pedigree represents the relationship between ten of the printed texts. I will first briefly set forth the evidence which has enabled me to establish that between the English ones, and I will then describe the not unamusing history of Wotton's poem after it had crossed the Border.

The version in Cotgrave's Wits Interpreter was certainly copied word for word from that in Playford's Select Musicall Ayres, with which it agrees in the unique corruption ‘then choose a Queen’ (spelt ‘chuse’ in Playford) for ‘then choice a Queen’ in the last stanza, and in having ‘That weakly satisfie’ instead of ‘That poorly satisfy’, a corruption which occurs elsewhere only in Parnassus Biceps; ‘And by your purple’ for ‘By your pure purple’, a corruption which occurs elsewhere only in MS. Ashmole 38; and ‘By accents weak’ for ‘By your weak accents’, a corruption which occurs elsewhere only in Parnassus Biceps, MS. Malone 19, and the Wyatt MS.

It is almost certain, as I have already remarked, that the editor of the Westminster Drollery had the Reliquiae before him, for his version of Wotton's poem, except for the alteration of ‘your weak accents’ to ‘their weak accents’ in the second stanza, the omission of ‘pure’ before ‘purple’ in the third, and some deliberate alterations in the fourth, agrees exactly with the Reliquiae version, and, alone among all the other manuscripts and printed texts I have examined, reproduces four words and phrases found only in the Reliquiae: ‘sun’ for ‘moon’, ‘curious chanters’, ‘That warble forth Dame Nature's lays’, and ‘In form and beauty of her mind’. The six-stanza version in Watts's Musical Miscellany, 1731, is almost certainly derived from the six-stanza version in A Crew of Kind London Gossips, 1663, with which it agrees in the unique corruption ‘with your number’ for ‘by your number’ in the first stanza, and from which it only differs in having ‘Who’ for ‘Which’ and the authentic ‘our eyes’ for the corrupt ‘mens eyes’ in the first stanza, ‘our ears’ for ‘mens ears’ in the third, and the correct ‘estimation’ for the corrupt ‘estimations’ in the fourth.

In 1662 there was published in Aberdeen the first Scottish song-book, Forbes's Cantus, Songs and Fancies, where there appears as no. liv a Bottomlishly translated version of Wotton's poem (I quote from the third edition of 1682. The only known copy of the first is in the Huntington Library):

                                                            Part I
You minor beauties of the night,
Which poorly satisfies our eyes,
More by your number then your light,
As common Officers in the skyes;
What are you, when the Moon doth rise?
You wandring Chanters of the wood,
That fills mine ears with natures layes,
Thinking your passions understood
In weaker accents, what's your praise,
When Philomel her notes doth raise?
But, ah! pure(3) light, pure voice, pure smel,
What are you when my Mistris shine?
Moon, Violet and Philomel
Adore her all, cause she's divine,
The quintessence of women kind.
You violets that first appear,
Your pride in purple garments shown,
Taking possession of the year,
As if the spring were all your own;
What are you when the roses bloom?

This is followed by a ‘Part II’, a very distant variation on Wotton's theme consisting of four six-line stanzas, which is not worth transcribing. In the memory or memories of what poetry-loving but not poetically gifted Scottish cavalier or cavaliers Wotton's poem became enveloped in this Scotch mist it would be amusing to speculate. Most notable, perhaps, are the absurd transposition of the third and fourth stanzas and the attempt to reconstruct the almost forgotten fourth stanza from words and phrases (including ‘Philomel’, who provides a rhyme) of the remaining three. ‘Minor beauties’ for ‘meaner beauties’, ‘common officers’ for ‘common people’, ‘Taking possession of the year’ for ‘Like the proud virgins of the year’, ‘when the roses bloom’ for ‘when the rose is blown’ are, I need hardly insist, corruptions which can only have been due to faulty memories, not to the errors of scribes.

In the tenth edition of his Tea-Table Miscellany, 1740, p. 403, Allan Ramsay printed a seven-stanza version (or perversion) of Wotton's poem, which he had concocted partly from that in Watts's Musical Miscellany and partly from that in Forbes's Cantus. He took five other songs from Forbes's Cantus, without, or with very slight, alterations, and at the end of the last of these, on p. 409, he inserted the following not very honest note: ‘N.B. The six foregoing Songs I took out of a very old MSS. Collection, wrote by a Gentleman in Aberdeen.’ These five songs are: There Gowans are gay (Forbes, no. xix), Slighted Love sair to bide (Forbes, no. xxviii), The Invitation (Forbes, no. xiv), Cast away Care (Forbes, no. l), The fairest of her Days (Forbes, no. xxx). Since neither in Watts nor in Forbes had the poem a title, Allan Ramsay, with (to borrow a phrase from Goldsmith) ‘the national partiality’ of his countrymen, assumed that Watts's ‘Princess’ and Forbes's ‘Mistris’ could be none other than Mary Stuart, and accordingly added a title which for the next century or so other Caledonian editors did not willingly let die:

The following Song is said to be made in Honour of our Sovereign Lady MARY Queen of SCOTS.

I.

You meaner beauties of the night,
          Who poorly satisfy our eyes,
More by your number than your light,
          Ye are but officers of the skies;
          What are ye when the moon doth rise?

II.

You violets that first appear,
          By your fine purple colour known,
Taking possession of the year,
          As if the spring were all your own;
          What are ye when the rose is blown?

III.

You charming birds that in the woods
          Do warble forth your lively lays,
Making your passion understood
          In forest notes; what is your praise,
          When Philomel her voice doth raise?

IV.

You glancing jewels of the east,
          Whose estimation fancies raise,
Pearls, rubies, sapphires, and the rest
          Of glittering gems; what is your praise,
          When the bright diamond shews his rays?

V.

But ah! poor light, gem, voice and smell,
          What are ye if my Mary shine?
Moon, diamond, flowers, and Philomel,
          Light, lustre, scent, and musick tine,
          And yield to merit more divine.

VI.

Thus when my mistress you have seen
          In beauties of her face and mind,
First, by descent, she is a Queen;
          Judge then if she be not divine,
          And glory of all womankind.

VII.

The rose and lilly, the hale spring
          Unto her breath for sweetness speed;
The diamond darkens in the ring:
          When she appears, the moon looks dead,(4)
          As when Sol lifts his radiant head.(4)

Ramsay has taken the first stanza (including the unique ‘Who’ for ‘That’ or ‘Which’) without alteration from Watts, except that he has replaced Watts's ‘with your number’ by Forbes's ‘by your number’ and has rewritten Watts's fourth line,

Like common People of the Skies

substituting Forbes's ‘Officers’ for ‘people’; in the second stanza he has altered Watts's ‘fine purple Mantles’ to ‘fine purple colour’ and has accepted ‘Taking possession of the year’ from Forbes; his third stanza he has altered and enfeebled from Watts, who has the common but unauthentic

You warbling Chanters of the Wood,
Who fill the Ears with Nature's Lays;

his fourth stanza agrees with Watts's, except for the first line, where he has altered ‘glorious Trifles’ into ‘glancing jewels’; his fifth stanza he has altered from Forbes's third; his sixth stanza is a mixture of Watts's fifth and Forbes's third, from which he has taken the concluding rhyme, or half-rhyme; and his seventh, with its execrable last line, is a spoilt version of Watts's sixth.

The seven-stanza version in Herd's Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs, 1776, i. 281, entitled Queen Mary, is derived partly from Ramsay's Tea-Table Miscellany, partly from Wits Recreations, 1640. The three additional stanzas, Herd's fourth, fifth, and seventh, agree exactly (except that, by some error, Herd's seventh begins with ‘There’ instead of with ‘The’) with Ramsay's fourth, fifth, and seventh, while the four original stanzas are almost certainly taken, with slight alterations, from Wits Recreations, with which they twice agree in errors (‘Like proud virgins’, ‘By weak accents’) found in no other printed copy, once in an error (‘By your purple’) printed elsewhere only in the Westminster Drollery, and once in a phrase (‘That fill the ayre with nature's layes’) printed elsewhere only in Playford's Ayres, 1653, and Wits Interpreter, 1655. Four of the alterations Herd has made in the Wits Recreations version of the four authentic stanzas (‘Like common people’ for ‘The common people’, ‘doth rise’ for ‘shall rise’, ‘what is your praise’ for ‘where 's your praise’, ‘my mistris’ for ‘my Princesse’) he could have obtained from Ramsay's; his only other alterations, those of the corrupt ‘By virtues first’ into the authentic ‘By virtue first’ and of the unmetrical ‘Tell me, was she not design'd’ into ‘Tell me if she was not designde’, he may well have made without assistance, especially since his version and that of Wits Recreations are the only two, printed or manuscript, that I have seen in which ‘was’ replaces the authentic ‘were’. ‘Was’, it is true, occurs in the Westminster Drollery, but there the whole phrase has been deliberately changed from a question into a statement:

And I believe she was design'd
T' eclipse the Glory of her kind.

Herd's version, with the omission of the sixth stanza (‘So when my mistris shall be seen’) and with one or two very small alterations in the third (‘feelings’ for ‘passions’, and ‘In accents weak’ for ‘By weak accents’), fifth (‘sound’, which does not rhyme, for ‘smell’), and seventh (‘The rose’ for ‘There rose’, ‘whole spring’ for ‘hale spring’), was reproduced by Chambers in his Scottish Songs, 1829, ii. 562, with the following title:

                                                            QUEEN MARIE

[said to have been written by Lord Darnley, in praise of the beauty of Queen Mary, before their marriage]

An asterisk at the end of the last stanza directs attention to the following note:

Ramsay prints a version of this song, slightly different from the above, which he states himself to have copied from an old manuscript collection by an Aberdeenshire gentleman.

Had Ramsay been asked by whom the poem had been ‘said’ to have been made in honour of Mary, Queen of Scots, or had Chambers been asked by whom it had been ‘said’ to have been written by Darnley, they would presumably have concealed their patriotic mendacity by replying that it was ‘commonly said’, or that it had been ‘said’ to them by someone whose name they could no longer remember. For such men there is much virtue in the word ‘said’. And with this not, I hope, too ill-natured remark we must conclude our survey of the transmission and transmogrification through more than two hundred years of ‘You meaner beauties of the night’.

Notes

1. Read at a meeting of the Bibliographical Society, on Tuesday, 20 March 1945.

2. L. Pearsall Smith, The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, 1907, i. 170.

3. Est's ‘doth’ for ‘shall’ should probably be regarded as a corruption.

4. = puir (poor).

5. To be pronounced (Scotice) ‘deid’ and ‘heid’.