I will divide the manuscripts into four classes, of which the first two, it will be seen at a glance, are likely to be the most important for the textual critic.
(1) Manuscript collections of portions of Donne's poems, e.g. the _Satyres_. The 'booke' to which Freeman refers in the epigram quoted above was probably a small collection of this kind, and we have seen that Jonson sent the _Satyres_ to Lady Bedford, and Francis Davison lent them to his brother. Of such collections I have examined the following:
_Q._ This is a small quarto manuscript, bound up with a number of other manuscripts, in a volume (MS. 216) in the library of Queen's College, Oxford. It is headed _Mr. John Dunnes Satires_, and contains the five Satires (which alone I have accepted as Donne's own) followed by _A Storme_, _A Calme_, and one song, _The Curse_ (see p. 41), here headed _Dirae_. As Mr. Chambers says (_Poems of John Donne_, i, p. xxxvi), this is probably just the kind of 'booke' which Freeman read. The poems it contains are probably those of Donne's poems which were first known outside the circle of his intimate friends.
What seems to be a duplicate of _Q_ is preserved among the Dyce MSS. in the South Kensington Museum. This contains the five _Satyres_, and the _Storme_ and _Calme_. The MSS. are evidently transcribed from the same source, but one is not a copy of the other. They agree in such exceptional readings as e.g. _Satyres_, I. 58 'Infanta of London'; 94 'goes in the way' &c.; II. 86 'In wringing each acre'; 88 'Assurances as bigge as glossie civill lawes'. The last suggests that the one is a copy of the other, but again they diverge in such cases as III. 49 'Crants' _Dyce MS._; 'Crates' _Q_; and IV. 215-16 'a Topclief would have ravisht him quite away' _Q_, where the _Dyce MS._ preserves the normal 'a Pursevant would have ravisht him quite away'.
If manuscripts like _Q_ and the _Dyce MS._ carry us back, as they seem to do, to the form in which the _Satyres_ circulated before any of the later collections of Donne's poems were made (between 1620 and 1630), they are clearly of great importance for the editor. The text of the _Satyres_ in _1633_ and the later editions, which closely resembles that of one of the later MS. collections, presents many variants from the older tradition. It is a difficult matter to decide how far these may be the corrections of the author himself, or of the collector and editor.