BY

JOHN DONNE,

late Dean of St. Pauls.

WITH

ELEGIES

ON THE

AUTHORS DEATH.

To which is added
Divers Copies under his own hand,
Never before Printed.

In the SAVOY,

Printed by T. N. for Henry Herringman, at the sign of
the Anchor, in the lower-walk of the
New-Exchange. 1669.

Title Page

[pg lxxiii]

The last edition of Donne's poems which bears evidence of recourse to manuscript sources, and which enlarged the canon of the poems, was that of 1669. The younger Donne died in 1662, and this edition was purely a printer's venture. Its title-page runs as opposite.

This edition added two elegies which a sense of propriety had hitherto excluded from Donne's printed works, though they are in almost all the manuscript collections, and a satire which most of the manuscripts assign not to Donne but to Sir John Roe. The introductory material remains as in 1650-54 and unpaged; but the Elegies to the Author are now paged, and the poems with the prose letters inserted in 1633 and added to in 1635 (see above, p. lxiii, note 8), the Elegies to the Author, and the additional sheets inserted in 1650, occupy pp. 1-414. The love Elegies were numbered as in earlier editions, but the titles which some had borne were all dropped. Elegie XIIII (XII in this edition) was enlarged. Two new Elegies were added, one (Loves Progress) as Elegie XVIII, the second (Going to Bed) unnumbered and simply headed To his Mistress going to bed. The text of the poems underwent considerable alteration, some of the changes showing a reversion to the text of 1633, others a reference to manuscript sources, many editorial conjecture.

The edition of 1669 is the last edition of Donne's poems which can be regarded as in any degree an authority for the text of the poems, because it is the last which affords evidence of access to independent manuscript sources. All subsequent editions, till we come to those of Grosart and Chambers, were based on these. If the editor preferred one reading to another it was on purely internal evidence, a result of his own decision as to which was the more correct or the preferable reading. In 1719, for example, a new edition was brought out by the well-known publisher Jacob Tonson. The title-page runs as over.