With _The Dampe_ the manuscript which I am supposing the editor to have followed in the main probably came to an end. The poems which follow in _1633_ are of a miscellaneous character and strangely conjoined. _The Dissolution_ (p. 64), _A Ieat Ring sent_ (p. 65), _Negative Love_ (p. 66), _The Prohibition_ (p. 67), _The Expiration_ (p. 68), _The Computation_ (p. 69), complete the tale of lyrics. A few odd elegies follow ('Language thou art,' 'You that are she,' 'To make the doubt clear') with _The Paradox_. _A Hymne to Christ, at the Authors last going into Germany_ is given a page to itself, and is followed by _The Lamentations of Jeremy_, _The Satyres_, and _A Hymne to God the Father_. Thereafter come the prose letters and the _Elegies upon the Author_.

What this comparison of the order of the poems points to is borne out by an examination of the text. The critical notes afford the materials for a further verification, and I need not tabulate the resemblances at length. In _Elegie IV_, for example, ll. 7, 8, which occur in all the other manuscripts and editions, are omitted by _1633_ and by _D_, _H49_, _Lec_. Again, when a song has no title in _1633_ it has frequently none in the manuscript. When there are evidently two versions of a poem, as e.g. in _The Good-morrow_ and _The Flea_, the version given in _1633_ is generally that of _D_, _H49_, _Lec_. Later editions often contaminate this with another version of the poem. At the same time there are ever and again divergences between the edition and the manuscript which are not to be ignored, and cannot always be explained. Some are due to error in one or the other, but some point either to divergence between the text of the editor's manuscript and ours, or to the use by the editor of other sources as well as this. In the fifth elegy (_The Picture_), for example, _1633_ twice seems to follow, not _D_, _H49_, _Lec_, but another source, another group of manuscripts which has been preserved; and in _The Aniversarie_ ll. 23, 24, the version of _1633_ is not that of _D_, _H49_, _Lec_ but of the same second group, which will be described later. On the whole, however, it is clear that a manuscript closely resembling that now represented by these three manuscripts supplied the editor of _1633_ with the bulk of the shorter poems, especially the older and more privately circulated poems, the _Songs and Sonets_ and _Elegies_. When he is not following this manuscript he draws from miscellaneous and occasionally inferior sources.

The Poems of John Donne, Volume II (of 2) — Part 56