No More Learning

The paper on which it is printed is a trifle smaller than the
rest of the book. ]

[Footnote 6: One or two copies seem to have got into
circulation without the _Errata_. One such, identical in other
respects with the ordinary issue, is preserved in the library
of Mr. Beverley Chew, New York. I am indebted for this
information to Mr. Geoffrey Keynes, of St. Bartholomew's
Hospital, who is preparing a detailed bibliography of Donne's
works. ]

[Footnote 7: Some such arrangement may have been intended by
Donne himself when he contemplated issuing his poems in 1614,
for he speaks, in a letter to Sir Henry Goodyere (see II.
pp. 144-5), of including a letter in verse to the Countess
of Bedford 'amongst the rest to persons of that rank'. The
manuscripts, especially the later and more ambitious, e. g.
_Stephens_ and _O'Flaherty_, show similar groupings; and in
_1633_, though there is no consistent sequence, the poems
fall into irregularly recurring groups. The order of the poems
within each of these groups in _1633_ is generally retained in
_1635_. In the _1633_ arrangement there were occasional errors
in the placing of individual poems, especially _Elegies_,
owing to the use of that name both for love poems and for
funeral elegies or epicedes.
These were sometimes corrected in
later editions.

Modern editors have dealt rather arbitrarily and variously
with the old classification. Grosart shifted the poems about
according to his own whims in a quite inexplicable fashion.
The Grolier Club edition preserves the groups and their
original order (except that the _Epigrams_ and _Progresse of
the Soule_ follow the _Satyres_), but corrects some of the
errors in placing, and assigns to their relevant groups the
poems added in _1650_. Chambers makes similar corrections and
replacings, but he further rearranges the groups. In his first
volume he brings together--possibly because of their special
interest--the _Songs and Sonets_, _Epithalamions_, _Elegies_,
and _Divine Poems_, keeping for his second volume the _Letters
to Severall Personages_, _Funerall Elegies_, _Progresse of the
Soul_, _Satyres_, and _Epigrams_. There is this to be said
for the old arrangement, that it does, as Walton indicated,
correspond generally to the order in which the poems were
written, to the succession of mood and experience in Donne's
life. In the present edition this original order has been
preserved with these modifications: (1) In the _Songs and
Sonets_, _The Flea_ has been restored to the place which it
occupied in _1633_; (2) the rearrangement of the misplaced
_Elegies_ by modern editors has been accepted; (3) their
distribution of the few poems added in _1650_ (in two sheets
bound up with the body of the work) has also been accepted,
but I have placed the poem _On Mr. Thomas Coryats Crudities_
after the _Satyres_; (4) two new groups have been inserted,
_Heroical Epistles_ and _Epitaphs_. It was absurd to
class _Sappho to Philaenis_ with the _Letters to Severall
Personages_. At the same time it is not exactly an _Elegy_.
There is a slight difference again between the _Funerall
Elegy_ and the _Epitaph_, though the latter term is sometimes
loosely used. Ben Jonson speaks of Donne's _Epitaph on Prince
Henry_. (5) The _Letter, to E. of D. with six holy Sonnets_
has been placed before the _Divine Poems_.