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the Promethean breath' should be 'thy Promethean breath'; 'precedents' (p. 20) should be 'precedence'; the lines:

Till verse refin'd by thee, in this last age
Turned ballad rime, to those old Idols be
Adored again, with new apostacy,

lines which yield no apparent sense, should run:

Till verse refin'd by thee, in this last Age
Turne ballad rime, Or those old Idolls bee
Ador'd againe, with new apostasie.

On p. 21 'I will not draw the envy' should be 'I will not draw thee envy. The phrase recalls Jonson's:

To draw no envy, Shakespeare, on thy name.

In the Sandys lines (p. 24) the ridiculous 'she reach thy dark' is in 1636 'she reach thy Lark.' On p. 23 hatched a Cherubim' should surely be hatched a Cherubin.'

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Cowley and Crashaw have suffered too, though Mr Waller's Cambridge editions were available. In Cowley's Ode on the Death of Mr Crashaw we read (p. 43) ' And build' for ' And built '; 'thou...Have' for 'thou...Hast'; on p. 44 lie our fates' for 'tie our fates' and 'corrupt our Muses then' for 'corrupt our Muses thus' as the rhyme requires. In the fine Hymn to the Light (as Cowley calls it), p. 46, With them there hasten' should be 'With them there hastes,' and, p. 47, 'Thou cloth'st in it' is 'Thou cloth'st it in.' This fine poem has lost some of its best stanzas, e.g.:

The guilty Serpents, and obscener Beasts
Creep conscious to their secret rests:

Nature to thee does reverence pay,

Ill Omens, and Ill Sights remove out of thy way,

a stanza which one might fancy to be echoed in Shelley's:

The sunbeams are my shafts, with which I kill

Deceit, that loves the night and fears the day;

All men who do, or even imagine ill,

Fly me, and from the glory of my ray

Good minds and open actions take new might,
Until diminished by the reign of Night.

Crashaw has fared rather worse than Cowley, though Waller's edition (if the notes are also consulted) would have given a good text. I note some of the errors. In Music's Duel the lines (p. 56)

his hand does go

Those parts of sweetness, etc.

are as in all the editions but are quite unmeaning. The Sancroft MS. gives the true text paths' for 'parts.' In lxiv (p. 57) Upon Bishop Andrews, 1. 8, the comma should follow 'home'; with an holy strength qualifies Snatched herself hence to Heaven.' So 'till' (1. 12) should be still.' Of lxv The Weeper (p. 58) the first stanza is more intelligible with the original punctuation:

Thawing crystals! Snowy hills,

Still spending, never spent! I mean, etc.

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In Loves Horoscope (p. 60) 'Love's motive hours' should be 'Love's native hours,' and lower down their best aspects twined upon' should, in a modernised text, run their best aspects twinned upon.' The verb is not 'twine' but 'twin,' an astrological term meaning to combine, unite.' On p. 61 for 'Lay back' read Lay black' and for this funeral nest' read his funeral nest.' Of the Saint Teresa lyric (pp. 61-5) the punctuation needs reconsideration in places. In the fourth stanza of A Hymn to the Nativity I can find no authority for

I saw the obsequious Cherubim.

The 1648 and 1652 editions read:

I saw the obsequious Seraphims
Their rosy fleece of fire bestow.

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It is the Seraphim who burn in love. The 1649 edition and Sancroft. MS. give an earlier text:

I saw the officious Angels bring

The down that their soft breast did strow.

The unintelligible lines in On a Foul Morning (p. 67):
Shall rise in a sweet harvest, which discloses
To every blushing bed of new born roses

are made clear by the Sancroft MS. (Waller's notes) which reads:
Two ever-blushing beds of new-blown roses.

In the last line (p. 67) To sit and cool' is a quaint error for To sit and scowl.' In his notes on Crashaw (p. 330) Mr Massingham writes as though he had forgotten that Music's Duel is a paraphrase from the Latin of Famianus Strada's Prolusiones Academicae (1617). The notes on nightingales near Rome is irrelevant. It was not till after this poem was written that Crashaw went to Italy. It might have been well to give Ford's version also, if either was to be included.

In the case of Donne, Mr Massingham, who speaks very generously and kindly of my edition, professes to accept my text but he has frequently not done so, and I hoped for some comment, for I make no claim to infallibility. But the departures seem to be inadvertent. The last two lines of The Good Morrow, p. 74, are unintelligible. There are two versions, each of which makes sense:

and

If our two loves be one, or thou and I

Love so alike that none do slacken, none can die,

If our two loves be one, or thou and I

Love just alike in all, none of these loves can die.

In The Relique the late reading 'Mass-devotion' should be 'Misdevotion.' In The Ecstasy, p. 81, Senses' force' should, I think, be 'forces, sense.' In Love's Infiniteness there should be a full-stop after the sixth line or no colon after the eighth. In The Dream, p. 88, it is a small thing to omit the comma after

And knew'st my thoughts,

but it is to ignore or obscure what Donne said. Why Mr Massingham should call this poem Petrarchan I do not understand. It is rather frank for Petrarch:

Enter these arms, etc.

In Soul's joy,' p. 88, which is probably by the Earl of Pembroke, Mr Massingham prints, p. 89:

For when we miss

By distance, our hopes joining bliss,
Even then our souls shall kiss.

I cannot make sense.

Lansdowne MS. 777 reads:

For when we miss

By distance our lip-joining bliss
Even then our souls shall kiss,

which seems unexceptionable.

In King's The Pink, p. 157, the old editions read in the last line, not 'your sweet creature' but

Must ever your (sweet) creature live,

where 'sweet' is of course a vocative, an address:

Must ever your, Sweet! creature live.

The couplet remains obscure. Perhaps 'she' is deliberately used for her.'

These errors in the text and punctuation, and there are many others, in the poems selected from Browne, Bunyan ('Because thou gavest such for savest such '), Burton, Robert Fletcher (refuge' for 'refuse'), Robert Heath, George Herbert, Lord Herbert, Marvell, nor have I checked all the poems, are doubtless due to setting up from imperfect texts, as Chalmers', and not revising with sufficient care. The errors of ascription are due to a peril we are all exposed to, meeting in a printed or MS. collection some poem that interests us and which we fail to recognise as already printed. The present writer included at the last moment in the third Appendix to Donne a fragment on which he had stumbled in a MS.: And though thy glass a burning one become

without recognising that it was a part of William Browne's Elegy on the Countess Dowager of Pembroke who died in 1621 (Goodwin II, 250).

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Mr Massingham must be aware that some of his ascriptions are erroneous. Herrick is omitted, but he has assigned to Corbet (p. 42, No. Iv) part of Herrick's On a Country Life and printed as anonymous his well-known lines To Robin Redbreast. The Erratum opposite p. does not cover the whole error as to No. cccxxx. This poem is a strange conglomerate of three poems by Waller, The Self-Banished (Drury's Ed. p. 101), To Amoret (ib. p. 83) and While I listen to thy voice (ib. p. 127). Drury calls attention to this version in his notes. In celxviii Mr Massingham has printed from Fragmenta Aurea what is evidently a couple of poems which have accidentally appeared as one. The first is by Lord Herbert (Churton Collins, p. 47)-i.e. three verses of a poem of six. The second is probably by Lord Herbert also. To Donne Mr Massingham

assigns with some hesitation, Absence, hear thou my protestation' and 'Soul's joy, now I am gone.' I need not discuss the question, as I have done so fully elsewhere. It is, however, hardly fair to say that I have disfranchised Donne of a poem which no editor assigned to Donne till 1721, though it had been printed as early as 1602, a date which excludes the possibility of its being written by Hall (Massingham, p. 335).

It would be worth a little trouble and expense to make the text of these poems worthy of the enthusiasm and taste which Mr Massingham has brought to the selection. He has introduced his readers to poets and to poems not readily accessible to anyone who lives remote from the greater libraries and done the work of selection which is so much needed even for readers of Professor Saintsbury's volumes.

His notes are generally excellent if, like his selection, a little personal in character. If Lovelace's 'Tell me not, Sweet' seems overpraised to Mr Massingham his view will not be shared by every reader. Lovelace's two best poems are the finest expression in poetry of two sentiments which glorify even a mistaken and defeated cause, loyalty and honour. Why, with the admiration he expresses for Marvell, he should have omitted his noble religious poems it is hard to understand, as it is why Habington should be called an Anglican Puritan seeing he was (as Mr Massingham's own note indicates) a Catholic. The last refuge of puritanism is now the Catholic Church. It is interesting to note how little there is in Habington, Catholic by upbringing, of the ecstasies of converts like Crashaw or the Dutch poet Vondel. The distinctive note of Mr Massingham's volume is given, as has been said, by the place he assigns to the pious and quietist poetry of Vaughan and Wither. Vaughan, like Wordsworth, is apt to appeal to readers only by his occasional splendid felicities. Mr Massingham has recognised that these are the efflorescence of a poetic and imaginative fervour which pervades all he wrote, that the chilliness of his meditative strain, like the simplicity of Wordsworth, is an illusion due to the reader's failure to appreciate the latent ardour and mystical significance. This is perhaps the greatest service which Mr Massingham's volume has conferred on us, this reiteration of the worth of Vaughan. But a taste which selects by affinity Vaughan and Wither does not easily do justice to the more radiant heat of Crashaw, or the troubled intensity which Herbert's neat and finished art a little disguises. And even to Vaughan at p. 235, Man, Mr Massingham does the injustice of omitting a stanza necessary to complete the grammatical structure of the first, and to give the meaning of the whole poem.

As for the curiously modern poem,' No. cccxxxiv, The Child's Death', the present writer would substitute 'certainly' for 'curiously.' Nothing but the original MS. or one risen from the dead will persuade us that this poem was written at any other epoch than the reign of Queen Victoria :

1 [Mr W. Worrall of the Oxford Dictionary informs us that the curiously modern' poem is the last two sections of a juvenile piece by J. R. Lowell, Threnodia, dated 1839, and that this is at least the fourth time it has been printed as if it belonged to the seventeenth century. EDD.]

A strip of yellow sand
Mingled the waters with the land
Where he was seen no more!
O stern word, Nevermore.

'Quoth the raven, Nevermore!' Taken out of a seventeenth century setting the poem is pleasing, by no means 'exquisite.' There are errors in the text of the anonymous poems as p. 265 'Yet all the world may see' for That all the world.' In The Garland, p. 279, 1. 5, 'when' should be 'where,' and 1. 10 Selvies crest' should be 'Selinis' crest.' The allusion is to Spenser's Faerie Queene, 1, 7, 32.

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H. J. C. GRIERSON.

EDINBURGH.

Dar

Robert Burns. Leben und Wirken des schottischen Volksdichters. gestellt von HANS HECHT. Heidelberg: C. Winter. 1919. 8vo. viii+304 pp. 8 M. 40.

Dr Hecht's work was finished in June 1914. It is now published, the author tells us (preface dated July 1919), with slight additions and no important change: Soweit es mir möglich war, habe ich Neuerscheinungen noch berücksichtigt.' The book is founded on thorough and persevering study; every inch of it has been tested, and nothing admitted without scrutiny; nothing irrelevant. Dr Hecht's edition of Songs from David Herd's Manuscripts, Edinburgh, 1904, is one of the most valuable contributions in recent times to the history of Scottish poetry; his notes on the Merry Muses of Caledonia are further proofs of his diligence, in Archiv, 129, 130. Now he has told the story of Robert Burns in full, with sincere admiration and good sense. It is interesting to compare his book with Angellier, and pleasant to follow the French poet's sane judgment also over the difficult ground of Scotch manners and Scotch religion. The memory of Burns has suffered no injustice, in the one or the other book. Every reader has of course his own preferences, but no honest reader will fail to admire Dr Hecht's knowledge of the poems; his critical estimates are well argued. In dealing with personal matters he will not please everyone, but the final impression left on the mind is that of justice and true comprehension. Particularly admirable is the author's respect for Mrs Burns, towards the close of her husband's life.

The places and the local conditions' are well described and understood. The Scottish reader may wonder at the disguise of familiar objects, e.g. in Nance Tinnock's respektablem Ausschank'—but this is trivial. The ecclesiastical and theological problems, Old Light and New Light, are presented discreetly, with no too exhaustive criticism, but just sufficient to explain the poet's satire; not enough to repeat, in German prose, the blinding discharge of Holy Willie's Prayer.

Dr Hecht gives its proper place to Burns's letter on the Revolution of 1688, parliamentary government and the House of Stuart. This, addressed to the editor of the Star in 1788, is Burns's political creed; belief in the British Constitution and in progress; unbelief in the cant of the Whigs, whom he exhibits gloating over the fall of the Stuarts

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