(3) In the third class I place manuscripts which are not primarily collections of Donne's poems but collections of seventeenth-century poems among which Donne's are included. It is not easy to draw a hard and fast line between this class and the last because, as has been seen, most of the manuscripts at the end of the last list contain poems which are not, or probably are not, by Donne. Still, in these collections Donne's work predominates, and the tendency of the collector is to bring the other poems under his aegis. Initials like J. R., F. B., J. H. disappear, or J. D. takes their place. In the case of these last collections this is not so. Poems by Donne are included with poems which the collector assigns to other wits. Obviously this class could be made to include many different kinds of collections, ranging from those in which Donne is a prominent figure to those which include only one or two of his poems. But such manuscripts have comparatively little value and no authority for the textual critic, though they are not without importance for the student of the canon of Donne's poetry. I shall mention only one or two, though I have examined a good many more.
_A25._ Additional MS. 25707, in the British Museum, is a large and interesting collection, written in several different hands, of early seventeenth-century poems, Jacobean and Caroline. It contains an _Elegie_ by Henry Skipwith on the death of King Charles I, but most of the poems are early Jacobean, and either the bulk of the collection was made before this and some other poems were inserted, or it is derived from older collections. Indeed, most of the poems by Donne were probably got from some older collection or collections not unlike some of those already described. They consist of twelve elegies arranged in the same order as in _JC_, _W_, and to some extent _O'F_, which is not the order of _D_, _H49_, _Lec_ and _1633_; a number of _Songs_ with some _Letters_ and _Obsequies_ following one another sometimes in batches, at times interspersed with poems by other writers; the five _Satyres_, separated from the other poems and showing some evidences in the text of deriving from a collection like _Q_ or its duplicate in the Dyce collection.[31] The only one of the _Divine Poems_ which _A25_ contains is _The Crosse_. No poem which can be proved to have been written later than 1610 is included.