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6
Plays
85. her autumnall face. The grotesque suggestion has been made that
Jonson in this phrase was sneering at the beautiful opening lines of
Donne's ninth Elegie, ' The Autumnall':
No Spring, nor Summer Beauty hath such grace,
As I haue seen in one Autumnall face.
The context of the two passages is a sufficient refutation. Both beauty
and decay can be associated with autumn. Donne's thought is expressed
in the Greek proverb 'Of beautiful things the
autumn, too, is beautiful'. The poet Agathon, for instance, was complimented
by Euripides at the table of Archelaus of Macedon,
(Aelian, Vana
Historia, xiii. 4). Jonson has a faint suggestion of this idea in D. is A.
I. vi. 129-30, 'Thinke All beauty doth not last vntill the autumne'.
Under the aspect of decay he uses the phrase ' autumrie-iudgements'
in E.M.O. iii. vi. 203.
92-102. Modelled on a poem in the Anthologia Latina, found in the
Codex Vossianus, Q 86, at Leyden:
Semper munditias, semper, Basilissa, decores,
Semper compositas arte recente comas,
Et comptos semper cultus, unguentaque semper,
Omnia solhcita compta videre manu
Non amo. Neglectim mihi se quae comit arnica
Se det, et ornatus simplicitate valet.
Vincula ne cures capitis discussa soluti,
Nee ceram in faciem: mel habet ilia suum.
Fingere se semper non est confidere amori ;
Quid quod saepe decor, cum prohibetur, adest ?
It was first published by Julius Caesar Scahger in Publn Virgiln Maronis
Appendix, Lyons, 1572, p. 208. From this, or from Pithou's Epigrammata
et Poemata Vetera, Paris, 1590, or from the versions appended to
some of the early editions of Petromus' Satyncon (e g. Paris, 1585 and
1587) Jonson took it. Gifford wrongly attributed the poem to Jean
Bonnefons (1554-1614), a native of Clermont in Auvergne; it is not in
his Panchans, 1587, or Gruter's collection of his poems Dehtiae Poetarum
Gallorum, 1609. The real source was pointed out in a scholarly article
by Mr. Kirby Flower Smith in The American Journal of Philology,
no. 114, April-June 1908.
Herrick's beautiful expansion of the thought of the poem is in the
Hespendes, 'Delight in Disorder' (Works, ed. Moorman, p. 28):
A sweet disorder in the dresse
Kindles in cloathes a wantonnesse,
with its reference to the 'winning wave' 'In the tempestuous petti -
coate', and the ' wilde civility' ' bewitching' him more
then when Art
Is too precise in every part.