[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] your issue of April
9th, " A Communicant " quotes the lines " Christ was the Word," itc., and refers to the
doubtful ascription of them to Queen Elizabeth. The follow- ing letter (addressed, I think, to the Guardian) by the late Dr. Smythe Palmer in 1911, may be worth quoting. Dr.
Sanday had attributed the lines to Elizabeth. Dr. Palmer says : " In a little volume which lies before me, Poems, by J. D., 1635, that is by Mr. John Donne, the famous Dean of St. Paul's, who died in 1631, they are printed as being by him-
On the Sacrament.
" Hoe was the word that spake it, Hee took the Bread and brake it ; And what that word did make it, I doe believe and take it."
It is not likely (Dr. Palmer continues) that Donne would presume to appropriate, or the publisher to attribute to him, lines which must have been known to belong to Elizabeth, and that only thirty years after her death. Thomas Fuller, how- ever, quotes them as hers in his Holy State, 1648.—I am, Sir, R. S. DEWING.
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