LETTERS TO SEVERALL
PERSONS OF HONOUR
This edition is limited to six hundred copies
LETTERS TO SEVERALL
PERSONS OF HONOUR
BY
JOHN DONNE
THE TEXT EDITED, WITH NOTES, BY
CHARLES EDMUND MERRILL, Jr.
NEW YORK
STURGIS & WALTON COMPANY
1910
Copyright, 1910
By Sturgis & Walton Company
TO
PAYSON MERRILL
QUALEM NEQUE CANDIDIOREM
TERRA TULIT, NEQUE CUI ME SIT DEVINCTIOR ALTER
NOTE
The Letters to Severall Persons of Honour, now for the first timereprinted in their original form, were collected and published by JohnDonne, Jr., in 1651, twenty years after the death of the author.Apparently the sales were not large, for three years later the originalsheets were rebound with a new title page and put on the market as asecond edition. Not many copies of the earlier, and still fewer of thelater date, have come down to us.
In the present volume changes from and additions to the original text areindicated by brackets, with a single exception: errors in punctuation havebeen corrected without comment when, and only when, they seem seriously toimpair the intelligibility of the text. In the case of a few letters thereading followed is that of the original manuscripts, for which I amindebted to the great kindness of Mr. Edmund Gosse.
Readers of Mr. Gosse’s brilliant study, The Life and Letters of JohnDonne (London: Heinemann, 1899) will not need to be reminded of theobligations under which he has placed all later students of Donne’s lifeand work. I have, in addition, to thank him for generous encouragement andfor many helpful suggestions, specific and general.
C. E. M., Jr.
Huntington, Long Island
October 14, 1910.
LETTERS TO SEVERALL
PERSONS OF HONOUR
JOHN DONNE
From an engraving by Pierre Lombart, prefixed to the Poems of 1633,
after a portrait of Donne at the age of forty.
(Facsimile of Title Page of Original Edition.)
LETTERS
TO
SEVERALL PERSONS
OF HONOUR:
WRITTEN BY
JOHN DONNE
Sometime Deane of
St Pauls London.
Published by John Donne Dr. of
the Civill Law.
LONDON,
Printed by J. Flesher, for Richard Marriot, and are
to be sold at his shop in St Dunstans Church-yard
under the