[10] I am inclined to believe that Henry King, the poet, and later Bishop of Chichester, assisted the printer. The 1633 edition bears more evidence of competent editing by one who knew and understood Donne's poems than any later edition. See p. 255.
[11] Professor Norton (Grolier Club edition, i, p. xxxviii) states that the Epistle Dedicatory and the Epigram by Jonson are omitted in this edition. This is an error, perhaps due to the two pages having been torn out of or omitted in the copy he consulted. They are in the Christ Church, Oxford, copy which I have used.
[12] In 1779 Donne's poems were included in Bell's Poets of Great Britain. The poems were grouped in an eccentric fashion and the text is a reprint of 1719. In 1793 Donne's poems were reissued in a Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain, published by Arthur Arch, London, and Bell and Bradfute, Edinburgh, under the editorship of Robert Anderson. The text and arrangement of the poems show that this is a reprint of Bell's edition. The same is true of the text, so far as I have checked it, in Chalmers's English Poets, vol. v, 1810. But in the arrangement of the poems the editor has recurred to the edition of 1669, and has reprinted some poems from that source. Southey printed selections from Donne's poems in his Select Works of the British Poets from Chaucer to Jonson (1831). The text is that of 1669. In 1839 Dean Alford included some of Donne's poems in his very incomplete edition of the Works of Donne. He printed these from a copy of the 1633 edition.
There were two American editions of the poems before the Grolier Club edition. Donne's poems were included in The Works of the British Poets with Lives of their Authors, by Ezekiel Sanford, Philadelphia, 1819. The text is based on the edition of 1719. A complete and separate edition was published at Boston in 1850. This has an eclectic text, but the editor has relied principally on the editions after 1633. Variants are sparingly and somewhat inaccurately recorded.
In 1802 F. G. Waldron printed in his Shakespeare Miscellany 'Two Elegies of Dr. Donne not in any edition of his Works'. Of these, one, 'Loves War,' is by Donne. The other, 'Is Death so great a gamster,' is by Lord Herbert of Cherbury. In 1856-7 Sir John Simeon printed in the Miscellanies of the Philobiblon Society several 'Unpublished Poems of Donne'. Very few of them are at all probably poems of Donne.
Of Grosart's edition (1873), the Grolier Club edition (1895), and Chambers's edition (1896), a full account will be given later.
[13] Huyghens sent some translations with the letter. He translated into Dutch (retaining the original metres, except that Alexandrines are substituted for decasyllabics) nineteen pieces in all. An examination of these shows that the text he used was a manuscript one, the readings he translates being in more than one instance those of the manuscript, as opposed to the printed, tradition. In a note which he prefixed to the translations when he published them many years later in his Korenbloemen (1672) he states that Charles I, having heard of his intention to translate Dr. Donne, 'declared he did not believe that anyone could acquit himself of that task with credit'—an interesting testimony to the admiration which Charles felt for the poetry of Donne. A copy of the 1633 edition now in the British Museum is said to have belonged to the King, and to bear the marks of his interest in particular passages. Huyghens's comment on Charles's criticism shows what it was in the English language which most struck a foreigner speaking a tongue of a purer Germanic strain: 'I feel sure that he would not have passed so absolute a sentence had he known the richness of our language, a moderate command of which is sufficient to enable one to render the thoughts of peoples of all countries with ease and delight. From these I must, however, except the English; for their language is all languages; and as it pleases them, Greek and Latin become plain English. But since we do not thus admit foreign words it is easy to understand in what difficulty we find ourselves when we have to express in a pure German speech, Ecstasis, Atomi, Influentiae, Legatum, Alloy, and the like. Set these aside and the rest costs us no great effort.'
At the end of his life Huyghens wrote a poem of reminiscences, Sermones de Vita Propria, in which he recalls the impression that Donne had left upon his mind:
Voortreffelyk Donn, o deugdzaam leeraer, duld
Dat ik u bovenal, daar'k u bij voorkeur noeme,