LONDON:
Printed for J. Tonson, and Sold by
W. Taylor at the Ship in
Pater-noster-Row. 1719.
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This edition opens with the Epistle Dedicatory as in 1650-69, which is followed by an abridgement of Walton's Life of Donne. An examination of the text of the poems shows clearly that this edition was printed from that of 1669, but is by no means a slavish reproduction. The editor has consulted earlier editions and corrected mistakes, but I have found no evidence either that he knew the editions of 1633 and 1635, or had access to manuscript collections. He very wisely dropped the Satire 'Sleep next Society', inserted for the first time by the editor of 1669, and certainly not by Donne. It was reinserted by Chalmers in 1810.[12]
These, then, are the early editions of Donne's poems. But the printed editions are not the only form in which the poems, or the great majority of the poems, have come down to us. None of these editions, we have seen, was issued before the poet's death. None, so far as we can discover (I shall discuss this point more fully later), was printed from sources carefully prepared for the press by the author, as were for example the LXXX Sermons issued in 1640. But Donne's poems were well known to many readers before 1633. One of the earliest published references to them occurs in 1614, in a collection of Epigrams by Thomas Freeman, called Runne | And a great Cast | The | Second Book.