My first proposal to the Delegates of the Clarendon Press was that I should attempt an edition of Donne's poems resting on a collation of the printed texts; that for all poems which it contains the edition of 1633 should be accepted as the authority, to be departed from only when the error seemed to be obvious and certain, and that all such changes, however minute, should be recorded in the notes. In the case of poems not contained in the edition of 1633, the first edition (whether 1635, 1649, 1650, or 1669) was to be the authority and to be treated in the same fashion. Such an edition, it was hoped, might be ready in a year. I had finished my first collation of the editions when a copy of the Grolier Club edition came into my hands, and I included it in the number of those which I compared throughout with the originals. While the results of this collation confirmed me in the opinion I had formed as to the superiority of the edition of 1633 to all its successors, it showed also that that edition was certainly not faultless, and that the text of those poems which were issued only in the later editions was in general very carelessly edited and corrupt, especially of those poems which were added for the first time in 1669. This raised the question, what use was to be made of the manuscript copies of the poems in correcting the errors of the edition? Grosart had based his whole text on one or two manuscripts in preference to the editions. Mr. Chambers, while wisely refusing to do this, and adopting the editions as the basis of his text, had made frequent reference to the manuscripts and adopted corrections from them. Professor Norton made no use of the manuscripts in preparing the text of his edition, but he added in an Appendix an account of one of these which had come into his hands, and later he described some more and showed clearly that he believed corrections were to be obtained from this source. Accordingly I resolved to examine tentatively those which were accessible in the British Museum, especially the transcript of three of the _Satyres_ in Harleian MS. 5110. A short examination of the manuscripts convinced me that it would be very unsafe to base a text on any single extant manuscript, or even to make an eclectic use of a few of them, taking, now from one, now from another, what seemed a probable emendation. On the other hand it became clear that if as wide a collation as possible of extant manuscripts were made one would be able to establish in many cases what was, whether right or wrong, the traditional reading before any printed edition appeared.