is by a Manchester manuscript (Farmer-Chetham MS., ed. Grosart, _Chetham Society Publications_, lxxxix, xc) assigned to 'Mr. Hoskins', and in another manuscript (_A10_) it is signed 'H' with the left leg of H so written as to suggest JH run together. Clearly at any rate the _onus probandi_ lies with those who say the poem is by Donne. Internally it has never seemed to me so since I came to know Donne well. The metaphysical, subtle strain is like Donne, as it is in _Soules Joy_, but here as there (though there is more feeling in _Absence_, the closing line has a very Donne-like note of sudden anguish, 'and so miss her') the tone is airier, the prosody more tripping. The stressed syllables are less weighted emotionally and vocally. Compare Sweetest love, I do not goe, For wearinesse of thee Nor in hope the world can show A fitter Love for me; or Draw not up seas to drowne me in thy spheare, Weepe me not dead, in thine armes, but forbeare To teach the sea, what it may doe too soone; with the more tripping measure, in which one touches the stressed syllables as with tiptoe, of By absence this good means I gaine, That I can catch her Where none can watch her, In some close corner of my braine. There are more of Hoskins' poems extant, but the manuscript volume of poems which he left behind ('bigger than those of Dr. Donne') was lost in 1653. Four poems were first printed as Donne's by Mr. Chambers (op. cit., Appendix B). They are all found in Addl. MS. 25707 (_A25_), and, so far as I know, there only. I have placed them first in Appendix C, as the only pieces in that Appendix which are at all likely to be by Donne. _A25_ is a manuscript written in a number of different hands, some six within the portion that includes poems by Donne. The relative age of these it would be impossible to assign with any confidence. What looks the oldest (I may call it A) is used only for three poems, viz. Donne's _Elegye_: 'What [_sic_] that in Color it was like thy haire,' his _Obsequies Upon the Lord Harrington yt last died_, and the _Elegie of Loves progresse_. It is in Elizabethan secretary's hand, and seems to me identical with the writing in which the same poems are copied in C, the Cambridge University Library MS. A second hand, B, inserts the larger number of the poems unquestionably by Donne in close succession, but a third hand, C, transcribes several by Donne along with poems by other wits, as Francis Beaumont. A fourth hand, D, seems to be the latest because it is the handwriting in which the Index was made out, and the poems inserted in this hand are inserted in odd spaces left by the other writers. Now of the poems in question, one, _A letter written by S^{r} H: G: and J. D. alternis vicibus_, is copied by D, and the same hand adds immediately _An Elegie on the Death of my never enough Lamented master King Charles the First_, by Henry Skipwith. The poem attributed to Donne was therefore not entered