_B_ is a handsome, vellum-bound manuscript belonging to the Earl of Ellesmere's library at Bridgewater House. I am, I think, the first editor who has examined it. The volume bears on the fly-leaf the autograph signature ('J. Bridgewater') of the first Earl of Bridgewater, the son of Donne's early patron, Elizabeth's Lord Keeper and later Lord Chancellor. On the title-page 'Dr Donne' is written in the same hand. John Egerton, it will be remembered, was, like Donne, a volunteer in Essex's expedition to the Azores in 1597. In 1599 he and his elder brother Thomas were in Ireland, where the latter was killed, leaving John to be his father's heir. The book-number, inscribed on the second leaf, is in the handwriting of the second Earl of Bridgewater, the Elder Brother of Milton's _Comus_. The manuscript has thus interesting associations, and links with Donne's earliest patron. I had hoped that it might prove, being made for those who had known Donne all his life, an exceptionally good manuscript, but can hardly say that my expectations were fulfilled. It was probably put together in the twenties, because though it contains the _Holy Sonnets_ it does not contain the hymns written at the close of the poet's life. It resembles _O'F_, _S_, _S96_, and _P_, rather than either of the first two collections which I have described, _D_, _H49_, _Lec_ and _A18_, _N_, _TC_, in that it includes with Donne's poems a number of poems not by Donne,[24] but most of them apparently by his contemporaries, Sir John Roe, Francis Beaumont, Jonson, and other of the wits of the first decade of the seventeenth century, the men who collaborated in writing witty poems on Coryat, or _Characters_ in the style of Sir Thomas Overbury. In the case of some of these initials are added, and a later, but not modern, hand has gone over the manuscript and denied or queried Donne's authorship of others. Textually also _B_ tends to range itself, especially in certain groups of poems, as the _Satyres_ and _Holy Sonnets_, with _O'F_, _S96_, _W_ when these differ from _D_, _H49_, _Lec_ and _A18_, _N_, _TC_. In such cases the tradition which it represents is most correctly preserved in _W_. In a few poems the text of _B_ is identical with that of _S96_. On the whole _B_ cannot be accepted in any degree as an independent authority for the text. It is important only for its agreements with other manuscripts, as helping to establish what I may call the manuscript tradition, in various passages, as against the text of the editions. Still less valuable as an independent textual authority is