Moreover, Donne's word is 'graces', not 'grace'. 'Your graces and commendations are my work', i.e. either the commendations you receive, or, more probably, the refined and elegant flatteries with which you can now cajole a lover, though once your whole stock of conversation did not extend beyond 'broken proverbs and torne sentences'. Compare, in _Elegie IX: The Autumnall_, the description of Lady Danvers' conversation: In all her words, unto all hearers fit, You may at Revels, you at Counsaile, sit. And again, _Elegie XVIII: Loves Progresse_: So we her ayres contemplate, words and heart, And virtues. l. 28. _Frame and enamell Plate._ Compare: 'And therefore they that thinke to gild and enamell deceit, and falsehood, with the additions of good deceit, good falshood, before they will make deceit good, will make God bad.' _Sermons_ 80. 73. 742. 'Frame' means, of course, 'shape, fashion', and 'plate' gold or silver service. The elaborate enamelling of such dishes and cups was, I presume, as common as in the case of gold watches and clocks. See F. J. Britten's _Old Clocks and Watches and their Makers_, 1904. PAGE =90=. ELEGIE VIII. l. 2. _Muskats_, i.e. 'Musk-cats.' The 'muskets' of _1669_ is only a misprint. ll. 5-6. In these lines as they stand in the editions and most of the MSS. there is clearly something wrong: And on her neck her skin such lustre sets, They seeme no sweat drops but pearle coronets. A 'coronet' is not an ornament of the neck, but of the head. The obvious emendation is that of _A25_, _C_, _JC_, and _W_, which Grosart and Chambers have adopted. A 'carcanet' is a necklace, and carcanets of pearl were not unusual: see O.E.D., _s. v._ But why then do the editions and so many MSS. read 'coronets'? Consideration of this has convinced me that the original error is not here but in the word 'neck'. Article by article, as in an inventory, Donne contrasts his mistress and his enemy's. But in the next line he goes on: Ranke sweaty froth thy Mistresse's _brow_ defiles, contrasting her brow with that of his mistress, where the sweat drops seem 'no sweat drops but pearle coronets'. The explanation of the error is, probably, that an early copyist passed in his mind from breast to neck more easily than to brow. Another explanation is that Donne altered 'brow' to 'neck' and forgot to alter 'coronets' to 'carcanets'. I do not think this likely. The force of the poem lies in its contrasts, and the brow is proverbially connected with sweat. 'In the sweat of thy brow,' &c. Possibly Donne himself in the first version, or a copy of it, wrote 'neck', meaning to write 'brow', misled by the proximity and associations of 'breast'. Mr. J. C. Smith has shown that Spenser occasionally wrote a word which association brought into his mind, but which was clearly not the word he intended to use, as it is destructive of the rhyme-scheme. Oddly enough the late Francis Thompson used 'carcanet' in the sense of 'coronet':