Page:The Poems of John Donne - 1896 - Volume 1.djvu/9



Poems were originally undertaken for The Muses Library by Dr. Brinsley Nicholson. They were handed over to me shortly after his death in 1891. I have had the advantage of the material which Dr. Nicholson had brought together; but for the book as it stands, with the exception of the Introduction, which Mr. Saintsbury has kindly contributed, I am alone responsible.

The bulk of the text is based upon the principal seventeenth-century editions, those of 1633, 1635, 1650 and 1669. No one of these is of supreme authority, and therefore I have had no choice but to be eclectic. But at the same time I have endeavoured to give all variants, other than obvious misprints, in the footnotes. Here and there one or other of the innumerable MS. copies has been of service. I have modernized the spelling and corrected the exceptionally chaotic punctuation of the old