A folio verse miscellany, containing 89 poems, including 43 by Donne, in several hands (ff. 21r-62r in a single accomplished secretary hand), 69 leaves, in paper wrappers.
The text of the poems by Donne derived from the same source as the Lansdowne MS (British Library, Lansdowne MS 740) and related in part to the Haslewood-Kingsborough MS II (Huntington, HM 198, Part II).
c.1620-5.
Formerly among the muniments of the Earl of Dalhousie (descendant of the Maule and Ramsay families), of Brechin Castle, on deposit in the Scottish Record Office [now National Archives of Scotland] (GD45/26/95/1). Sotheby's, 20 July 1981, lot 490.
Cited in IELM, I.i (1980), as the the Dalhousie MS I
: DnJ Δ 11. Complete reduced facsimile and transcription in The First and Second Dalhousie Manuscripts: Poems and Prose by John Donne and Others: A Facsimile Edition, ed. Ernest W. Sullivan, II (Columbia, 1988). Also discussed by Ernest W. Sullivan, II in Donne Manuscripts: Dalhousie I, John Donne Journal, 3/2 (1984), 204-19; in And, having done that, Thou hast done
: Locating, Acquiring, and Studying the Dalhousie Manuscripts, in The Donne Dalhousie Discovery: Proceedings of a Symposium on the Acquisition and Study of the John Donne and Joseph Conrad Collections at Texas Tech University, ed. Ernest W. Sullivan II and David J. Murrah (Lubbock, TX, 1987), pp. 1-10; and in The Renaissance Manuscript Verse Miscellany: Private Party, Private Text, in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, ed. W. Speed Hill (Binghamton, 1993), pp. 289-97.
Facsimiles of f. 15v in DLB, vol. 121, Seventeenth-Century British Nondramatic Poets, First Series, ed. M. Thomas Hester (Detroit, 1992), p. 13, and of f. 42r in Sotheby's sale catalogue and in Peter Beal, A Dictionary of English Manuscript Terminology 1450-2000 (Oxford, 2008), p. 431, Illus. 91. A complete microfilm of the MS is in the National Archives of Scotland.
Sullivan suggests that the miscellany derives from sources preserved by members of the Earl of Essex's circle, their most likely conduit
to the Dalhousie family being John Ramsay (1580-1626), Viscount Haddington and Earl of Holderness.