[In the following essay, Pebworth and Summers analyze a sequence of verse epistles between Wotton and John Donne, emphasizing the historical and biographical contexts for the letters.]

John Donne's profession of friendship as his “second religion” is well known, as is his concomitant belief that the writing of letters to a friend is “a kind of extasie, and a departure and secession and suspension of the soul, which doth then comunicate it self to two bodies.”¹ Donne wrote to his friends in prose, of course, but he also wrote to some of them in verse, and his collected verse letters are rightly considered the first major achievement in that mode in English. An important group of Donne's verse letters consists of those to male friends, and of these, the one to Henry Wotton beginning “Sir, more then kisses, letters mingle Soules” may be the earliest fully realized Horatian moral epistle in the language. Since 1911, thanks to a discovery made by Herbert J. C. Grierson, scholars and critics have known that this letter of Donne's is directly related to a verse letter from Wotton to Donne beginning “'Tis not a coate of gray, or Shepheards life.” But owing to an error Grierson made in dating these two letters, what has gone unnoted is the fact that another of Donne's verse letters to Wotton, a satiric attack on the court beginning “Here's no more newes, then vertue,” is part of the exchange as well. Indeed, a close study of these poems reveals that “Here's no more newes” begins the exchange. It is answered in Wotton's “'Tis not a coate of gray,” which in turn is answered in Donne's “Sir, more then kisses.”

Allen Barry Cameron has persuasively argued that Donne conceived of the verse letter “as a dynamic and efficacious form of discourse.” According to Cameron, the verse epistle is an instrument of “conceptual communication” rather than a self-contained literary artifact.² Thus, the epistolary mode is rhetorical as well as lyrical, and more persuasive—or paraenetic—than contemplative. Fundamentally referential and occasional, the verse letter is necessarily rooted in external reality. Hence, full appreciation of any particular verse letter requires knowledge of the contexts from which it arises. Unfortunately, the contexts that inform Donne's “Here's no more newes” and “Sir, more then kisses” and Wotton's “'Tis not a coate of gray” have been obscured by misdating and by a misunderstanding of the order in which they were written and their sequential nature. Recovering the historical and biographical contexts of the exchange between Donne and Wotton is crucial, for these contexts shape the rhetorical strategies employed by both poets. Written in the midst of the ominous breach between Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Essex that lasted through July and August of 1598 and threatened to paralyze the government, the three verse letters illuminate the personalities of ambitious young men, each of whom is attached to a principal actor in the high drama at court. Seen in context and in their proper sequence, the verse epistles emerge as a dynamic exchange between close friends who are immersed in a political crisis that colors their relationship to each other and to events that may determine their futures but over which they have little control. Seen from such a perspective, the individual poems in the sequence acquire an immediacy and force and subtlety heretofore unrecognized, and the relationship between Donne and Wotton is clarified.

I

Recognition of the poems' sequential nature and appreciation of their contexts have been hindered by a mistaken notion of Grierson's that effectively cut off “'Tis not a coate of gray” and “Sir, more then kisses” from “Here's no more newes.” In an article published in Modern Language Review in 1911 and reflected in the commentary on “Sir, more then kisses” in his 1912 edition of Donne's poetry, Grierson claims that Francis Bacon's poem “The World” sparked a literary debate over the relative merits of city, court, and country; that “'Tis not a coate of gray” and “Sir, more then kisses” were part of that debate, both being answers to Bacon's poem; and that the debate took place in late 1597 since it was referred to in an epigram addressed to Wotton in Thomas Bastard's Chrestoleros, which was entered in the Stationers' Register on April 3, 1598, and published shortly thereafter.³

But Grierson is wrong in his assertion that Bastard's epigram to Wotton refers specifically to “'Tis not a coate of gray” and “Sir, more then kisses” and in his use of that epigram's appearance in Chrestoleros as the terminus ad quem for the composition of Wotton's and Donne's verse letters. Bastard (1566-1618), who had known Wotton since their days together at Winchester School, was rector of Beer Regis in Dorsetshire. He addressed two epigrams of his collection to his friend, the second of which (bk. 4, epigram 39) praises the Dorset countryside and seems designed to entice Wotton—an inveterate angler—into a visit with the promise of good trout fishing. The other epigram to Wotton, the one on which Grierson based his theory of a poetic debate and his dating of Wotton's “'Tis not a coate of gray” and Donne's “Sir, more then kisses,” occurs in the second book:

                                        Epigr. 4. Ad Henricum Wottonum.
Wotton, the country and the country swayne,
How can they yeelde a Poet any sense?
How can they stirre him up, or heat his vaine?
How can they feede him with intelligence?
You have that fire which can a witt enflame,
In happy London Englands fayrest eye:
Well may you Poets have of worthy name,
Which have the foode and life of poetry.
          And yet the country or the towne may swaye,
          Or beare a part, as clownes doe in a play.(4)

The only direct argument offered by Grierson that this poem is part of a city/court/country debate and that it refers to the poems in question by Bacon, Wotton, and Donne is this one assertion: “What Bastard means by the ‘fire which can a witt enflame,’ ‘the foode and life of poetry,’ is the Court, otherwise the last two lines would lack point.”⁵

Surely Grierson misreads this epigram. While Bastard obviously thinks highly of London, calling it “Englands fayrest eye,” what he praises most thoroughly in the poem is not the city or the court but Wotton himself as a source of poetic inspiration. Indeed, the implication is that London is “happy” because Wotton is there, and not the other way round. And as the last two lines of the epigram clearly indicate, the country may “swaye, / Or beare a part” in poetry as well as the city since even a country poet, namely Bastard himself, can participate with his city counterparts “of worthy name” in being inspired by Wotton. Even if one reads the poem more generally, as a tribute to the city, Bastard's praise of London in comparison with the Dorset countryside is conveyed in terms common to complaints of rusticated poets throughout history. In any case, there simply is no evidence within the text of the epigram to indicate that Bastard is referring to a group of poems that includes Wotton's “'Tis not a coate of gray” and Donne's “Sir, more then kisses.”

Grierson may be correct in seeing an echo of lines 15-16 of Bacon's “The World” (“And where's a City from all vice so free, / But may be term'd the worst of all the three?”) in line 19 of “Sir, more then kisses” (“Cities are worst of all three”).⁶ But in his eagerness to construct an interrelated group containing all the poems cited in his article, Grierson minimizes the importance of the best reason for seeing similarities among them, namely, that the poems reflect their authors' current study of the Planudean Anthology. Indeed, Bacon's “The World” is based on an epigram in that anthology attributed to Posidippus. Bastard probably divided the epigrams of Chrestoleros into seven books in imitation of the Planudean model. And—though the suggestion seems not to have been made before now—the first sentence of Donne's poem (“Sir, more then kisses, letters mingle Soules; / For, thus friends absent speake”) was probably inspired by an epigram in the Planudean Anthology ascribed to the frequently choleric Palladas of Alexandria (fourth century a.d.):

‘H φύsις ἐξευ̑ρεν φιλίης θεsμοὐς ἀγαπω̑sα,
          τω̑ν ἀποδημούντων ὄργανα sυντυχίης,
τòν κάλαμον, χάρτην, τò μέλαν, τὰ χαράγματα χειρός,
          sύμβολα τη̑ς ψυχη̑ς τηλόθεν ἀχνυμένης.
(Nature, enamored of the rites of friendship, invented
          instruments that absent ones can use to converse,
the pen, the paper, the ink, the hand's writing itself,
          seals of the soul as it grieves at a distance.)(7)

In constructing a literary debate out of poems that have in common only their authors' mining of the Planudean Anthology and their employment of topoi ubiquitous in the decade, Grierson obscured the real relationship between the poems by Donne and Wotton.

Once the error in Grierson's dating of “'Tis not a coate of gray” and “Sir, more then kisses” is recognized, there is no impediment to seeing these two poems as the second and third letters of an exchange that begins with “Here's no more newes,” an exchange that can be dated to the late summer of 1598. Indeed, “Here's no more newes” is unique among Donne's verse letters to his male friends in having survived in manuscript with a date attached. The poem is headed (with some variants in accidentals) “To M^r H. W. 20 July 1598 At Court” in three manuscripts: the Westmoreland (New York Public Library, Berg Collection), the Hawthornden (National Library of Scotland MS. 2067), and the Wedderburn (National Library of Scotland MS. 6504). The testimony of the Westmoreland is particularly significant, for this manuscript is now known to have a close association with both Donne and Wotton. It is a volume of Donne's poems, along with ten of his paradoxes, in the hand of Rowland Woodward.⁸ Woodward (1573-1636/7) was a friend of Donne's from their days together at Lincoln's Inn, and Donne addressed five verse epistles to him. Moreover Woodward served with Wotton in Venice from 1605 to 1607. Although the contents of the Westmoreland manuscript were transcribed about 1620, the section containing the verse letters is generally thought to reflect a collection of Donne's poems made no later than 1600. On the basis of this important manuscript, in addition to the internal evidence of the poems themselves, we can confidently date the exchange of verse letters between Donne and Wotton to July and August 1598. The exchange must have been completed before early September, when the political crisis that inspired the poems subsided and Essex returned to court and began to make plans for the Irish expedition.

II

A crucial context for understanding the verse exchange between Henry Wotton (1568-1639) and John Donne (1572-1631) is their friendship, which for Donne was almost literally lifelong.⁹ The two probably met in 1584, when the sixteen-year-old Wotton transferred from New College, Oxford, to Hart Hall, joining there the newly matriculated twelve-year-old John Donne and his eleven-year-old brother Henry; and after Donne's death it was to Wotton, then the revered provost of Eton College, that their mutual friends and acquaintances looked to write the first life of the poet-priest, a biography finally realized by the procrastinating Wotton's friend and literary protégé, Izaak Walton. Between 1586, when Donne left Oxford, and the mid-1590s, the paths of the two friends diverged. Wotton moved to Queen's College, where he studied until at least 1588, and then spent the five years between 1589 and 1594 in a far-ranging tour of the Continent, preparing himself for a career in public service. On his return to England, he was appointed one of the chief secretaries to the Earl of Essex, who in the mid-1590s was, in Walton's words, “one of the darlings of fortune and in greatest favour with Queen Elizabeth.”¹⁰ What Donne was doing in the four years after leaving Oxford is uncertain; he may have spent some of that time attending Cambridge and some traveling on the Continent. In 1591 he began legal studies at Thavies Inn, and in May 1592 he entered Lincoln's Inn, where he was to stay until at least 1595.

Although no correspondence between Donne and Wotton is known to survive from this lengthy period of separation, their friendship must have continued. Surely, as Bald has argued, Donne means to include Wotton in “that short Roll of friends writ in my heart” referred to in the first of the two verse letters addressed “To Mr. I. L.”¹¹ Of Donne's acquaintances in the early 1590s, Wotton was the most widely traveled, and it is no doubt he whom Donne describes as drinking from the “Po, Sequan [Seine], or Danubie” rivers in line 4 of that early verse letter. Near the beginning of 1596, the friends were reunited, as Donne then also entered the service of Essex, perhaps under the sponsorship of Wotton. Both took part in the Cadiz expedition of 1596 and in the Azores (or Islands) expedition of 1597. In the fall of 1597, their careers diverged again. Donne entered the service of Thomas Egerton, newly appointed Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, while Wotton remained in the employ of Essex through the ill-fated Irish campaign of 1599. It is during this second period of separation, specifically during the summer of 1598, that the exchange of verse letters between Donne and Wotton occurs.

Donne began the verse correspondence with “Here's no more newes,” a letter from court, probably the queen's palace at Greenwich, which—as noted earlier—may with precision be dated July 20, 1598. Although it is satiric, “Here's no more newes” may be appreciated, when seen in context, as surprisingly intimate and pointedly topical despite its discretion in avoiding direct references to Wotton's predicament at the time of its composition. As Cameron observes, the poem “does not begin with a salutation, and Donne does not particularize the address to Wotton until the seventh stanza.”¹² But the second line does contain a personalizing reminder of the writer's and recipient's shared experiences at “Calis” (i.e., the Cadiz expedition of 1596) and “St Michaels” (i.e., the Azores or Islands expedition of 1597), and an understanding of the circumstances that inspired the poem allows us to detect a particularized and intimate concern on the part of Donne toward Wotton. As Bald has noted, “Here's no more newes” is, “in effect, a consolatory epistle, designed to raise Wotton's mind above the pleasures of the court in which he cannot share.”¹³ More accurately, however, Bald's final clause should read “in which he might not share again.”

Wotton had attached himself earlier than had Donne to a courtier who was then more powerful than Egerton. But in July 1598, the fortunes of Essex, and consequently of his dependents, must have seemed far from secure. Thirty or so years later, in his “Parallel” lives of Essex and Buckingham written to Plutarch's model, Wotton commented on his one-time employer's mental and emotional deterioration in the late 1590s and its consequences: “I know not how, like a gathering of Clouds, … towards his latter time, when his humours grew Tart, as being now in the Lees of favour, it [Essex's progressive ‘Melancholy’] brake forth into certain suddain recesses; sometimes from the Court to Wansteed, otherwhiles unto Greenwich, often to his own Chamber, Doors shut, Visits forbidden, and which was worse, divers Contestations (between) with the Queen her self (all preambles of ruine) wherwith, though now and then he did wring out of her Majesty some petty contentments, (as a man would press sowr Grapes). …”¹⁴ One such “Contestation” between Elizabeth and Essex occurred on July 1, 1598. As Thomas Birch describes the incident, when Essex did not get his way, he “turn'd his back upon her in such a contemptuous manner, as exasperated her to so high a degree, that she gave him a box on the ear, and bid him go and be hang'd. Upon this he put his hand to his sword, and, when [Lord Admiral Howard] interposed, swore, that he neither could nor would bear such an indignity, nor would have taken it even from Henry VIII. and so left the court.”¹⁵ Essex was still sulking, probably at his country estate of Wanstead, when Donne wrote this verse letter to Wotton, and the earl refused to make peace with the queen for more than a month thereafter. In the meantime, old Lord Burghley, the chief prop of Elizabeth's throne for forty years, lay dying, and the Irish problem was rapidly moving toward another crisis. Momentous things were happening or were about to happen in the government, but Wotton, who had been near the center of events for three or four years, was for the time cut off from taking part in them by Essex's quarrel with the queen, and his future in state service must have looked uncertain at best. “Here's no more newes” both reflects Donne's awareness of Wotton's distressing situation and expresses concern over the way in which his friend might be reacting to it.

A major passion that Donne and Wotton had shared for years was the desire to “get … a place,” to “Observe his honour, or his grace” (“The Canonization” [lines 5, 6]), and on July 20, 1598, Donne appeared more successful in that quest than Wotton. He was attending Lord Keeper Egerton at court, while Wotton was awaiting, no doubt anxiously, the outcome of Essex's latest quarrel with the queen. And precisely because Donne shared Wotton's ambition, he could empathize with his friend's frustration. The standoff between Essex and Elizabeth had defied various advisors' efforts at reconciliation in the nearly three weeks since their quarrel, and perhaps on July 20 Donne actually had “no more newes” beyond what Wotton already knew. But the opening line of the verse letter may well be purposely disingenuous as well as cautious, intended to reassure Wotton that, whatever specific events might occur, they would of necessity be merely variations on the same old story: “That vice doth here habitually dwell” (line 3). Certainly the fierce attack on the court, which both Donne and Wotton had so longed to be a part of, seems disingenuous. The poem's final line—“At Court; though From Court, were the better stile”—indicates clearly the motive behind Donne's satire. Resonant with implied consolation, the conclusion advises that, given the vices “At Court,” Wotton should consider himself better off away “From Court.”

Designed to console Wotton for his exclusion from political involvement, Donne's poem attacks the corruption of the court, recommending a stance of smug detachment as the only defense against “the'extremitie / Of vice” there (lines 7-8). Donne presents himself as one who has corrected through disillusioning experience the rosy misimpressions of his “youths giddiest dayes” (line 19), explaining his own presence at court in terms consistent with his satiric function:

Yet, as to'get stomachs, we walke up and downe,
And toyle to sweeten rest, so, may God frowne,
If, but to loth both, I haunt Court, or Towne.

[Lines 4-6]

He characterizes the ambitions of other courtiers to “marshall their state” as doomed by “rugged Fate, / (Gods Commissary)” (lines 12, 10-11). Especially vulnerable are those who—like Wotton, presumably—are “arm'd with seely honesty, / … and neat integritie”: “Like Indians 'gainst Spanish hosts they bee” (lines 13-14, 15). Although Donne recognizes that in the present circumstance “'tis incongruity to smile” (line 25), he invites Wotton to join him in “jeast” at the expense of the “mimicke antiques” of the court, “Whose deepest projects … / Are but dull Moralls of a game at Chests” (lines 22, 23-24). As Shawcross has noted, one of the best-known “Moralls” of chess is that pawns are expendable.¹⁶ Hence, Donne's mockery here may very well be intended as a warning: in the particular court chess game of July 1598, Wotton, as a pawn of one of the players, is potentially in danger of being swept off the board.

There is no doubt that in “Here's no more newes” Donne has only the best of intentions toward Wotton. Nevertheless, Wotton's response suggests that Donne seriously miscalculated the effect of “Here's no more newes” on his friend. Rather than consoling, the poem apparently irritated Wotton. And not surprisingly, for despite the difficulties of his employer, Wotton was undoubtedly still nursing court ambitions. He must have found Donne's blanket condemnation of the court naive and extreme. Surely Donne's pose of world-weariness must have struck Wotton as dubious at best. After all, in 1598 Donne is a twenty-six-year-old court neophyte writing to a thirty-year-old friend who has had considerably more experience than he in the corridors of intrigue and power. And despite Donne's labored justification of his own presence in London and Greenwich, the advice that Wotton abandon his political hopes rings false and perhaps hypocritical, coming as it does from someone currently immersed in the life of the court. Wotton's response, “'Tis not a coate of gray,” tactfully checks Donne's presumption and indirectly but firmly rejects his advice.

Probably written from his family manor of Bocton Malherb in Kent, where throughout his life Wotton periodically sought refuge from the cares of public responsibility, “'Tis not a coate of gray” is a direct and immediate answer to Donne's “Here's no more newes.” Wotton's poem outlines his own formula for coping with the current uncertainties and indicates his view of Donne's unsought counsel:

Worthie Sir,
'Tis not a coate of gray, or Shepheards life,
'Tis not in feilds or woods remote to lyve,
That adds or takes from one that peace or strife
Which to our dayes such good or ill doth give:
          It is the mynde that makes the mans estate,
          For ever happy, or unfortunate.
Then first the mynd of passions must be free
Of him that would to happines aspire,
Whether in Princes Pallaces he bee,
Or whether to his cottage hee retire:
          For our desires that on extreames are bent
          Are frends to care and traitors to content.
Nor should wee blame our frends though false they bee,
Since ther are thousands false, for one thats true,
But our owne blindnes, that wee can not see
To chuse the best, although they be but few:
          For he that ev'rie fayned frend will trust,
          Proves true to frend, but to himself unjust.
The falts wee have, are they that make our woe,
Our Virtues are the motives of our joye,
Then is it vayne, if wee to desarts goe
To seek our bliss, or shroud us from annoy:
          Our place need not be changed, but our Will,
          For every where wee may doe good or ill.
But this I doe not dedicate to thee
As one that holds himself fitt to advise,
Or that my lynes to him should precepts be
That is less ill then I, and much more Wise:
          Yet 'tis noe harme mortality to preach,
          For men do often learne when they do teach.(17)

Responding directly to the major premise of “Here's no more newes”—that Wotton is better off morally where he is than he would be at court—Wotton's reply declares instead that it is not place that makes for morality or immorality but one's state of mind. “'Tis not a coate of gray,” in sum, reiterates the theme of one of the most popular Elizabethan lyrics, “My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is.”¹⁸ Wotton's reply thus rejects Donne's implicit advice that he abandon courtly ambitions by outlining an alternative means of coping with possible disappointment, one that does not necessarily require him to be away “From Court.” Judging it “vayne, if wee to desarts goe / To seek our bliss, or shroud us from annoy” (lines 21-22), Wotton advocates instead a moderation of the “extreames” of “desires” by a deliberate change of “Will” directed toward freeing the “mynd of passions” (lines 11, 23, 7). In short, “'Tis not a coate of gray” upholds as more efficacious than retirement from the public arena the time-honored Stoic recipe for contentment in the face of inevitable adversity, the cultivation of an indifference toward both fortunate and unfortunate worldly events. Moreover, the calm reasonableness of Wotton's poem and its emphasis on the need to free the mind of passions may be intended as tactful rebukes to the nervous extremes and impassioned tone of “Here's no more newes.” Whereas Donne's elliptical manner and hypermetrical lines give his staccato triplets a sense of harried urgency, Wotton's clarity of statement and smoothness of meter infuse his six-line stanzas—each culminating in a sententious couplet—with an impression of measured deliberation.

The space afforded the subject of friendship in Wotton's verse letter to Donne—six full lines (lines 13-18) out of a total of thirty—is striking. Perhaps his comments on the choice of friends are at least partially a response to Donne's despair of finding an honest and trustworthy friend at court, implied in the sixth stanza of “Here's no more newes,” where “all” there are criticized as being “Tender to know, tough to acknowledge wrongs” committed by their fellows and rivals (lines 17, 18). But in context, Wotton's conclusion that blame lies not with the falsity of those chosen as friends but with “our owne blindnes, that wee can not see / To chuse the best” (lines 15-16) may be in addition a guardedly stated self-criticism for having allied himself with the unstable Essex. And also in context, Wotton's general emphasis on friendship in “'Tis not a coate of gray” may be intended as well to serve as a subtle caution to Donne not to overstep the proper bounds of a friend's concern into officious meddling.

Such a warning certainly seems to be one import of the poem's final stanza. Wotton's praise of Donne there is no doubt genuine, up to a point. But the humilitas topos he employs in offering that praise may also be intended to reflect on Donne's lack of humility in “Here's no more newes.” In denying his own fitness “to advise” Donne (line 26), Wotton simultaneously hints that his younger friend has been presumptuous in counseling him unasked, in effect subtly rejecting Donne's assumption of moral superiority in “Here's no more newes.” Moreover, there is at least the suggestion of irony in Wotton's positioning his praise of Donne as “much more Wise” than himself (line 28), tacked on as the phrase is to the end of a string of exaggeratedly humble, negatively stated clauses. This suggestion that the tribute to Donne's putative wisdom may be ironic is supported by the contrast between the mature wisdom of Wotton's self-assured and composed persona in “'Tis not a coate of gray” and the adolescent naivety of Donne's brilliant but nervous persona in “Here's no more newes.” And finally, Wotton's concluding couplet—“Yet 'tis noe harme mortality to preach, / For men do often learne when they do teach”—may be intended to apply to Donne's advice as well as to Wotton's resolution. Thus Wotton not only rejects Donne's advice but also tells the young man, “Physician, heal thyself.” It is all well and good for Donne to counsel Wotton to give up courtly ambitions, provided that same advice is also applied to the one doing the advising. As Wotton no doubt knows, Donne is not likely to give up willingly his own ambitions in the public arena, regardless of how much corruption he finds at court.

That Donne recognized at least a mild rebuke—and a just one—in “'Tis not a coate of gray” is evident from “Sir, more then kisses,” his reply to Wotton. One of the most remarkable features of “Sir, more then kisses” is its redirection of both the persona and the thesis of “Here's no more newes,” and these changes in Donne's approach and attitude are directly attributable to the explicit and implicit correctives offered in Wotton's “'Tis not a coate of gray.” Indeed, in context Donne's beautiful and justly praised opening figure of letters mingling souls may be seen not simply as a Platonic compliment but also as an apology for the presumptuous persona of his earlier verse letter to Wotton, since two souls cannot merge unless they are precisely equal and at ease with each other. Similarly, Donne's protestation that “But for” the letters of friends “I could ideate nothing, which could please” (lines 3, 4) is a graceful acknowledgment that he failed to please Wotton in “Here's no more newes” and an implicit promise that now—with Wotton's letter to inspire him—he intends to do better. Moreover, Donne immediately sets out to “please” Wotton by modifying the thesis of “Here's no more newes”—that Wotton should consider himself fortunate to be away from the corrupt court—in the direction of Wotton's position in “'Tis not a coate of gray.” Donne's assertion that “Countries, Courts, Towns” are equally hazardous in their potential to “staine” (lines 8, 10) is another way of stating that place in and of itself is immaterial to morality, and his admission that “wee must touch” these three arenas of life (line 10) is an acceptance of Wotton's premise that retirement from the world is vain as an answer to its evils. Thus when late in “Sir, more then kisses” Donne writes to Wotton, “I'advise not you, I rather doe / Say o'er those lessons, which I learn'd of you” (lines 63-64), he both acknowledges the justice of Wotton's implied rebuke in “'Tis not a coate of gray” and states, to a significant degree, the literal truth. Wotton's poem has caused Donne to rethink and as a consequence to alter the position he expounded in “Here's no more newes.”

Although Donne modifies the persona and thesis of his initial verse letter to Wotton in “Sir, more then kisses,” he does so without sacrificing his own integrity. He does not capitulate to Wotton unconditionally by meekly renouncing his original harsh attack on the court, but instead broadens the target of his satiric scorn to include the city and the country as well (lines 7-34), ultimately finding “(O knottie riddle) each is worst equally” (line 20). Nor does Donne abandon the role of advisor to his friend; rather, he tacitly acknowledges and accepts Wotton's worldly ambition—and by inference his own—by offering counsel directed toward continued court employment. His advice to “Follow” the example of the “snaile” (line 51), a traditional emblem of Stoicism, notes and endorses the philosophic bent of “'Tis not a coate of gray.” Tellingly, that model of self-containment does not retire from the world but on the contrary “every where doth rome” (line 49). The related injunction “Bee thine owne Palace, or the world's thy gaile” (line 52) certainly glances at the dangers of courtly ambitions, but in a way consistent with Wotton's position that a mind free of passion is essential, whether one retires to a cottage or serves in “Princes Pallaces.” Similarly, the counsel to go “as / Fishes glide, leaving no print where they passe, / Nor making sound” (lines 55-57) is directed toward involvement rather than retirement, since those exemplary fishes are swimming not in a quiet country pool or stream but “in the worlds sea” (line 53).

The fishing conceit in “Sir, more then kisses” deserves special attention. Gracefully recognizing Wotton's avid interest in angling, the conceit functions to establish intimacy. But it also offers advice, as Wotton is compared first with the cork on the world's sea, then with a lead without a line, and finally with the elusive fishes themselves. As a general caution, Donne's counsel to Wotton that he should blend in with his surroundings is at least as old as classical Greek tragedy, where those who call attention to themselves risk incurring the envy or wrath of the gods or fate. But the hyperbolic nature of Donne's application of his simile to Wotton's prospective behavior—“so, closely thy course goe, / Let men dispute, whether thou breathe, or no” (lines 57-58)—suggests that such advice is here more than the reiteration of a classical precept. Rather, it bespeaks an insider's awareness, gained at court, that Essex's future is perilous and, as a consequence, so is Wotton's. Indeed, in the days since the composition of “Here's no more newes” on July 20, Essex's fortune could be interpreted by court insiders as having taken an even steeper downward turn, and because of his own rashness.

On July 18, Donne's employer Lord Egerton had written a lengthy letter to the still sulking earl, protesting at the outset, “I will not presume to advise you, but I will shoot my bolt, and tell you what I thinke,” then going on to offer some very strongly worded advice: “Policy, duty, and religion, enforce you to sue, yeelde, and submit, to your Soveraigne, betweene whom and you there can bee no proportion of duty. When God requires it as a principall duty and service to himselfe; and when it is evident, that great good may ensue of it to your friends, your selfe, your Country, and your Soveraigne, and extreame harme by the contrary: there can bee no dishonour or hurt to yeelde, but in not doing of it, is dishonour and impiety.” A few days later, in a petulant reply of equal length, Essex asked: “When the vilest of all indignities are done unto mee, doth Religion enforce me to serve? doth God require it? is it impiety not to doe it? why? cannot Princes erre? cannot subjects receive wrong? is an earthly power or authority infinite? Pardon me, pardon mee my Lord, I can never subscribe to these principles. …”¹⁹ These are dangerous sentiments, and nearly two years later, in an official censure of Essex's conduct during the Irish campaign of 1599, this letter to Egerton was “objected to the earl, … mr. Francis Bacon, who was council for the queen against him, stiling it bold and presumptuous, and derogatory to her majesty.”²⁰

Certainly Donne, as Egerton's secretary, was in an excellent position to have seen this letter from Essex as soon as his employer received it and months before it became public knowledge, that is, only a matter of days before he wrote “Sir, more then kisses.” In context, then, his simile of the fishes in his verse letter to Wotton can be seen as a knowledgeable and solicitous warning to his friend not to draw attention to himself, and especially to his relationship with Essex, while the earl persists in committing lese majesty and now flirts with outright treason.

The final piece of advice in “Sir, more then kisses” makes explicit mention of the court and of ambition to it and implies endorsement of both when pursued correctly. In a metaphor drawn from a contemporaneous conflict in medical theory, Donne warns Wotton:

Onely'in this one thing, be no Galenist. To make
Courts hot ambitions wholesome, do not take
A dramme of Countries dulnesse; do not adde
Correctives, but as chymiques, purge the bad.

[Lines 59-62]

Although these two couplets caution against trying to offset one evil by applying its opposite as a corrective, they acknowledge as well the possibility that self-knowing, virtuous human beings may “purge the bad” from their worldly hopes and pursuits. As proof that such purging can be accomplished, Donne happily can cite the example of Wotton himself,

Whom, free from German schismes, and lightnesse
Of France, and faire Italies faithlesnesse,
Having from these suck'd all they had of worth,
And brought home that faith, which you carried forth,
I throughly love.

[Lines 65-69]

Having successfully maintained his integrity in the face of many temptations during his lengthy Continental tour earlier in the decade, Wotton is in no danger now of being corrupted by city, court, or country. Nor—by extension—is Donne himself in any such peril. He, too, may remain at the corrupt court without sacrificing his integrity. Having absorbed Wotton's rules for remaining virtuous in a corrupting environment, Donne has made them “my rules” (line 70), and through the pun on his own name at the letter's conclusion, he identifies completely with his friend.²¹ Now sharing the same moral stance, the two men have become that ideal of classical friendship, “one soul in bodies twain.”

It is Wotton, then, who emerges as the controlling moral force and the teacher in this exchange of verse letters, not Donne. And it is Wotton's “'Tis not a coate of gray” that calls forth some of the most ethically and rhetorically pleasing features of Donne's “Sir, more then kisses.” While it is true, as Patricia Thomson has noted, that “Sir, more then kisses” is characterized by a “Horatian intimacy, the easy intercourse of kindly minds and of men equal in education and experience,”²² this quality is achieved only after a presumptuous false start in “Here's no more newes” and a necessary apology on Donne's part. The same is true of the poem's Platonism. As Cameron has observed, “The epistle begins with a Platonic identification of writer and recipient … and ends with that identification significantly reaffirmed. Wotton's exemplary behavior and wisdom have become the Platonic mirror into which the poet has gazed until he has become more and more like his friend.”²³ Such Platonic identification is not simply a happy stroke of inspiration on Donne's part, however; it is also a deliberate attempt to make amends for an earlier faux pas. Clearly Donne fears losing Wotton's friendship and therefore actively strives in “Sir, more then kisses” to recommend himself as one who has learned his lesson and has thereby become worthier of Wotton's love. That urgent motive spurs him to produce one of his finest verse epistles.

Donne's merging of Wotton's thesis in “'Tis not a coate of gray” with that of “Here's no more newes” in “Sir, more then kisses” is paralleled by a blending in the third verse letter of the tones of the first and second poems of the sequence. “Here's no more newes” is unrelentingly acerbic in its satire; “'Tis not a coate of gray” is a poem of calm reflection; and “Sir, more then kisses” combines the two moods. While the satiric portion of the last (lines 14-34) is no less harsh and vigorous than the attack on the court in “Here's no more newes,” it is enclosed and thereby rendered less shrill by opening and closing passages of quiet intimacy that mirror the tone of “'Tis not a coate of gray.” The “aggressive” satire of Donne's initial letter is thus modulated by the calming example of Wotton's reply into what K. W. Gransden has aptly termed the “reflective satire” of “Sir, more then kisses.”²⁴

III

The failure to recognize the historical context and sequential nature of the exchange of verse letters between Donne and Wotton has resulted in criticism that presents a false image of Donne's purpose and persona in these poems. Previous criticism has characterized Donne's contributions to the exchange as little more than exercises in a classical mode appropriate for the exploration of the classical themes of friendship and virtue. For instance, Laurence Stapleton in her pioneering essay on the verse letters remarks that in them Donne is but “fashioning an attitude of detachment which might save him from corruption in the world of affairs.” Similarly, Margaret Maurer sees the verse letter as primarily a vehicle for self-examination and comments that “in ‘Sir, more then kisses’ … the reflections on letter-writing seem to be merely a frame for a literary exercise.” In the same vein, Gary Storhoff observes of the same work that “the sense of occasion is created by the subject of the poem itself. The poem asks which is the best place to live: the country, the court, or the city.”²⁵ Even Cameron's useful study of the rhetorical structures of “Sir, more then kisses” and “Here's no more newes” begins with the premise that the modus vivendi topos offers “an almost perfect opportunity for the exercise of one's skill in disputation.”²⁶ And although David Aers and Gunther Kress astutely perceive that “Sir, more then kisses” is “organised as a dialogue,” their interesting analysis proceeds from the mistaken belief that Donne “assumes a simple version of the self, one having a virtually autonomous existence, identity without social relationships, and certainly without ‘creators.’”²⁷

Such criticism seriously oversimplifies the poems by separating them from the concrete events that give them life and by consequently ignoring the tensions and the urgency that these contexts provide. Detached from the political situations from which they issue, the poems do indeed appear to be generalized exercises on classical themes. But when the verse letters are placed in their proper sequence and in their historical and biographical settings, even their penchant for generalizations and their obliquity may be explained as reactions to the dangers and difficulties of the uncertain political climate of late summer 1598. These qualities undoubtedly reflect the necessity of discretion rather than a lack of engagement. Indeed, Donne and Wotton may have deliberately disguised their poems as contributions to a modus vivendi debate in order to protect themselves at a time of peril. In any case, when read sequentially and in light of the contexts that inform them, the verse letters acquire heretofore unsuspected subtlety and force and intimacy.

The exchange is a dynamic communication between friends of different temperaments. Hence, full appreciation of the poems depends on recognition of the differences in persona presented from poem to poem and of how the position staked out in the first poem is modified in the third by the presence of the second. In light of this dynamism, Barbara Lewalski's assertion that “a comparatively simple and perhaps a single persona presents the verse letters to [Donne's] men friends” must also be qualified.²⁸ The shallow and fashionable world-weariness that characterizes the persona in “Here's no more newes” disappears in “Sir, more then kisses,” where he is equally nimble but more solicitous. As we have seen, this alteration is directly attributable to the interposition of Wotton's mature and reasonable presence in “'Tis not a coate of gray.” The persona of Donne's verse letters, then, is more flexible and more complex than Lewalski's comment admits. The persona in “Sir, more then kisses” is particularly interesting. Agile in argument yet courteous and intimate, he adds unexpected depth and wider vision to the self-conscious brilliance he exhibits in “Here's no more newes.”

The development of Donne's persona from his first to his second poem also helps clarify the relationship between Donne and Wotton. The difference between the two men is not, as Maurer alleges, that Wotton's is an active personality and Donne's a reflective one. Nor is it accurate to say, as Thomson does, that in the security of their friendship Donne “is perfectly at ease when, without condescension, he proffers Wotton advice.”²⁹ Rather, the differing temperaments of the men seem to reflect their differences in age and experience. In the exchange of verse letters, Donne emerges as brash and impetuous, while Wotton appears tactful and serene. Indeed, Wotton's voice in “'Tis not a coate of gray” is consistent with Walton's description of him as a young man: “He was of a choyce shape, tall of stature, and of a most perswasive behaviour: which was so mix'd with sweet discourse, and Civilities, as gained him much love with all persons with whom he entered into an acquaintance … ; by time, travell, and Conversation, [he] was so polish'd and made usefull, that his Company seem'd to be one of the delights of mankinde.”³⁰ Donne's first letter is astonishingly assured in its command of language and technique but insensitive to the implications of its advice for Wotton's long-cherished career hopes as well as facile in the extremity of its invective. In his carefully considered and judicious response, Wotton tempers Donne's youthful cynicism and implicitly rebukes his presumption, thus prompting Donne to modify his initial, untenable position into a more reasonable though no less virtuoso performance. But if Wotton here seems more mature than Donne, both men are equally devoted to each other. Even as Wotton rebukes the inconsistent stance Donne assumes in “Here's no more newes,” he does so with tact and courtesy. And in his response, Donne evinces disarming sensitivity, acknowledging the justice of Wotton's implied rebuke while maintaining his own integrity. Both men are equally concerned with performing the offices of friendship, and—for all its tensions—the sequence is finally a tribute to the triumph of friendship over temperamental differences.

Seen within their proper biographical and historical contexts and in their proper relationship to each other, then, the poems of the exchange can be appreciated as far more than mere exercises on abstract issues. They are firmly rooted in the political uneasiness of the declining years of Elizabeth's long reign. Far more topical and more subtle than previously realized, the poems are the product of a particular crisis in the late summer of 1598. Although they approach such issues obliquely, the three verse letters speak to specific questions of survival in a corrupt and potentially corrupting environment. Once their referential nature is recognized, they can be seen as immediate and forceful poems, chronicling not the hypothetical musings of retirement and leisure but the pointed and urgent contemplations of involvement and action. And their very topicality conveys a sense of realism that contributes to the universality of their insights.

Finally, the poems that compose the exchange illuminate the contrasting reactions of ambitious young courtiers to events over which they exercise very little control, thereby shedding light on the nature of their friendship. The restless impetuosity of Donne is countered by the Stoic calm of Wotton, which in turn evokes the Horatian intimacy of the gem of the sequence, “Sir, more then kisses.” Placing the poems in their chronological order and in their political and biographical contexts reveals both their immediacy and their authors' characteristic qualities of mind. Not surprisingly, Wotton was to persist in his courtly ambitions. He managed to distance himself from Essex and avoided implication in the earl's disgrace. He went on to a successful diplomatic and academic career, serving in various ambassadorial capacities throughout the reign of James I and as provost of Eton under Charles I. As is well known, Donne's courtly ambitions were to meet with less fulfillment. On the basis of the attitudes expressed in the exchange with Wotton, perhaps the frustration of Donne's subsequent career at court is also less than surprising.³¹

APPENDIX

The Ordering of “Here's no more newes” and “Sir, more then kisses” in Manuscripts and Early Editions of Donne's Poetry

The fact that “Sir, more then kisses” precedes “Here's no more newes” in the posthumous Poems, By J. D. of 1633 is of no consequence in dating the composition of either poem. In the 1633 printing—and in the Group I manuscripts, which share with it a common ancestor in this particular section—the two verse letters to Wotton are separated by several poems, invariably including two that can have been written no earlier than 1609: “Elegie on the Lady Marckham” (d. May 4, 1609) and “Elegie on Mris. Boulstred” (d. August 4, 1609). There is likewise a demonstrably unchronological ordering in the second (1635) and succeeding seventeenth-century editions of Poems, where the contents are arranged generically. “Sir, more then kisses” is still presented first, and fewer poems separate it from “Here's no more newes,” but one of those is invariably the verse letter “To Sr. Henry Goodyere,” which is datable to Donne's years at Mitcham (1605-9).

Despite what one might infer from looking at the textual apparatus in modern editions of Donne's poetry, its early manuscript transmission is still imperfectly understood, and at this time any attempt to date individual poems based solely on their ordering in manuscripts would be foolhardy. But it is interesting to note that the bulk of manuscripts other than those of Group I present the two verse letters to Wotton in the order “Here's no more newes” followed by “Sir, more then kisses.” The four primary manuscripts of Group II (the Denbigh, the Norton, the Puckering, and the Dublin) separate the two verse letters to Wotton by a large group of unchronologically arranged poems, including the elegies on Lady Marckham and Mistress Boulstred. But in a manuscript associated with Group II in the texts of its verse letters, Dolau Cothi, “Sir, more then kisses” follows immediately on “Here's no more newes” and is in turn followed immediately by Donne's verse letter “To Sir H. W. at his going Ambassador to Venice,” which is datable to July 1604. The same contiguous presentation of “Here's no more newes” and “Sir, more then kisses,” in that order but without the 1604 verse letter to Wotton following, is found in three of the four Group III manuscripts, which as artifacts are late (ca. 1630) and betray nonauthorial sophistications in headings, punctuation, and spelling, but which are generally thought to represent early versions of the poems that they contain. The one exception to contiguous presentation in Group III is Stowe MS. 961, which separates the two poems by almost thirty leaves but which nevertheless presents “Here's no more newes” first. The only three manuscripts that contain all three poems of the Donne-Wotton exchange are all members of that loosely affiliated group usually designated as “Associated with Group III”: the Bridgewater, the Phillipps, and the Osborn. Although none of them present all three poems contiguously, all have “Here's no more newes” preceding “Sir, more then kisses.” Finally, and most significantly, in the sole member of Group IV, the Westmoreland manuscript, Rowland Woodward presents “Here's no more newes” first, followed immediately by “Sir, more then kisses.”

Notes

1. John Donne, two letters to Sir Henry Goodyere, both probably written in 1607; quoted, with contractions expanded, from John Donne, Letters to Severall Persons of Honour (1651): A Facsimile Reproduction, intro. M. Thomas Hester (Delmar, N.Y., 1977), pp. 85, 11. The letter beginning on p. 11 is misheaded “To my honoured friend S: T. Lucey”; see Hester's introduction, pp. xviii-xix.

2. Allen Barry Cameron, “Donne's Deliberative Verse Epistles,” English Literary Renaissance 6 (1976): 370, 371. For a useful survey of the genre in the earlier seventeenth century, see D. J. Palmer, “The Verse Epistle,” in Metaphysical Poetry, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer (1970; reprint, Bloomington, Ind., 1971), pp. 73-99.

3. Herbert J. C. Grierson, “Bacon's Poem, ‘The World’: Its Date and Relation to Certain Other Poems,” Modern Language Review 6 (1911): 145-56, and Herbert J. C. Grierson, ed., The Poems of John Donne, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1912), 2:140-41. So imprecise is Grierson about the exact relationship between Wotton's “'Tis not a coate of gray” and Donne's “Sir, more then kisses” that two Donne scholars have interpreted his remarks to mean that “'Tis not a coate of gray” was written in response to “Sir, more then kisses” (see R. C. Bald, John Donne: A Life [Oxford, 1970], pp. 119-20; John Donne: The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith [1971; reprint, New York, 1974], p. 534). Cameron correctly discusses “Sir, more then kisses” as an answer to “'Tis not a coate of gray” (pp. 375-81), but he is misled by Grierson into thinking that “Here's no more newes” is later than and separate from those two verse letters (pp. 381-82).

4. Quoted from Chrestoleros. Seven bookes of Epigrames written by T. B. (London, 1598), p. 29, with u and v made to conform to modern usage.

5. Grierson, “Bacon's Poem, ‘The World,’” p. 152.

6. Throughout this essay, all quotations from Donne's poetry follow the text of The Complete Poetry of John Donne, ed. John T. Shawcross, Anchor Seventeenth-Century Series (Garden City, N.Y., 1967). In “Bacon's Poem, ‘The World,’” Grierson prints the entire text of the Bacon poem on p. 148 and notes the echo in “Sir, more then kisses” on p. 151.

7. The Greek text is quoted from The Greek Anthology, trans. W. R. Paton, Loeb Classical Library (1917; reprint, Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 3:222 (bk. 9, epigram 401). The English translation is based on a literal reading of the Greek kindly made for us by C. A. Patrides. Paton misleadingly translates psyche in line 4 as “heart.” This epigram was widely available throughout the sixteenth century both in Greek and in Latin translations; see, e.g., the entries under item 9.401 in the registers of translations in James Hutton, The Greek Anthology in Italy to the Year 1800 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1935), and The Greek Anthology in France and in the Latin Writers of the Netherlands to the Year 1800 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1946). Palmer (p. 83) suggests that the opening sentence in “Sir, more then kisses” and lines 11-14 of Donne's verse epistle to Rowland Woodward beginning “If, as mine is” are both influenced by the opening passage in one of Seneca's letters to Lucilius: “I thank you for writing to me so often; for you are revealing your real self to me in the only way you can. I never receive a letter from you without being in your company forthwith. If the pictures of our absent friends are pleasing to us, though they only refresh the memory and lighten our longing by a solace that is unreal and unsubstantial, how much more pleasant is a letter, which brings us real traces, real evidences, of an absent friend!” (Epistulae Morales, letter 40, trans. R. M. Gummere, Loeb Classical Library [1917; reprint, Cambridge, Mass., 1967], 1:263, 265). While this passage from Seneca may be echoed in the verse letter to Rowland Woodward, it is much less close than the Palladas epigram is to the wording and metaphor of the opening sentiment of “Sir, more then kisses.”

8. Alan MacColl identified the handwriting in the Westmoreland manuscript as Woodward's, and his identification was subsequently confirmed by R. E. Alton and P. J. Croft. For a description of the manuscript's contents, see John Donne: The Divine Poems, ed. Helen Gardner, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1978), pp. lxxviii-lxxxi. Nothing is known of the origin of the texts in the Hawthornden and the Wedderburn manuscripts, though it is probable that they derive from a common source. The former is in the hand of the Scottish poet William Drummond of Hawthornden and may have been transcribed as early as 1613 or as late as 1633; the latter is in an unknown hand and probably dates from the 1620s. For the ordering of “Here's no more newes” and “Sir, more then kisses” in Donne manuscripts and early editions, see the Appendix.

9. The biographical details in this and the following paragraph are based on information in Bald, and in Logan Pearsall Smith, The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1907).

10. Quoted from the first version of Izaak Walton's The Life of Sir Henry Wotton, prefaced to the first edition of Reliquiae Wottonianae (London, 1651), sig. b8v.

11. R. C. Bald, “Donne's Early Verse Letters,” Huntington Library Quarterly 15 (1952): 286.

12. Cameron (n. 2 above), p. 381.

13. Bald, John Donne, p. 103.

14. Reliquiae Wottonianae, pp. 8-9 (sigs. A4v-A5). As one of Essex's recent biographers has noted, the earl was rumored to have syphilis, and the nervous disorder that progressively plagued him after 1596 is symptomatic of a late stage of that disease (Robert Lacey, Robert, Earl of Essex [New York, 1971], pp. 201-2).

15. Thomas Birch, Memoirs of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, From the Year 1581 till her Death, 2 vols. (London, 1754), 2:384.

16. Shawcross, ed. (n. 6 above), p. 194n.

17. The text quoted is that of Ted-Larry Pebworth, taken from his forthcoming critical edition of the poems of Sir Henry Wotton. It is based on the text in the Bridgewater manuscript (Huntington Library, MS. EL. 6893), fol. 74r-v. Although Grierson purports to use Bridgewater as his copy-text for Wotton's poem both in “Bacon's Poem, ‘The World’” ([n. 3 above], p. 155) and in his edition of Donne's Poems (2:141), he badly misrepresents its readings, silently introducing accidentals from the Phillipps manuscript (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. poet. f. 9, pp. 10-11) and silently imposing a pattern of indentation from the Winchelsea manuscript (Rosenbach Foundation, MS. 243/4, pp. 112-13). In his edition, Pebworth lists all variants from the six surviving manuscript copies of Wotton's poem.

18. The lyric was long attributed to Sir Edward Dyer but is now thought probably to be by Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. See Stephen W. May, “The Authorship of ‘My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is,’” Review of English Studies 26 (1975): 385-94. The anonymous second part of the poem, first published in William Byrd's Psalms, Sonets, & Songs in 1588, may indeed have served as a model for Wotton's poem.

19. Both letters are quoted, with italics reversed and u and v made to conform to modern usage, from John Speed, The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (London, 1611), pp. 877, 878. Speed dates the Lord Keeper's letter “Iulie 18.An.1598.” (p. 877). Both letters circulated widely in manuscript, where they are most often dated October 15 and 18, 1598, respectively, and they have frequently been printed with those dates. Recent historians have accepted Speed's dating, however.

20. Birch, 2:388.

21. A point first made by Rosalie Colie in Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton, 1966), p. 365.

22. Patricia Thomson, “Donne and the Poetry of Patronage: The Verse Letters,” in John Donne: Essays in Celebration, ed. A. J. Smith (London, 1972), p. 314.

23. Cameron (n. 2 above), pp. 379-80.

24. K. W. Gransden, ed., Tudor Verse Satire, Athlone Renaissance Library (London, 1970), pp. 4, 172.

25. Laurence Stapleton, “The Theme of Virtue in Donne's Verse Epistles,” Studies in Philology 55 (1958): 189; Margaret Maurer, “John Donne's Verse Letters,” Modern Language Quarterly 37 (1976): 248; Gary P. Storhoff, “Social Mode and Poetic Strategies: Donne's Verse Letters to His Friends,” Essays in Literature 4 (1977): 14.

26. Cameron, p. 375.

27. David Aers and Gunther Kress, “‘Darke Texts Needs Notes’: Versions of Self in Donne's Verse Epistles,” in Literature, Language and Society in England, 1580-1680, by David Aers, Bob Hodge, and Gunther Kress (Totowa, N.J., 1981), pp. 43, 41.

28. Barbara K. Lewalski, “Donne's Epideictic Personae,” Southern Quarterly 14 (1976): 195.

29. Maurer, p. 249; Thomson, p. 314.

30. Reliquiae Wottonianae, sig. b8r-v.

31. We gratefully acknowledge the advice of John T. Shawcross, who commented on an early draft of this essay.