The Grolier Club edition[37] was constructed on a different principle. For all those poems which _1633_ contains, that edition was accepted as the basis; for other poems, the first edition, whichever that might be. The text of _1633_ is reproduced very closely, even when the editor leans to the acceptance of a later reading as correct. Only one or two corrections are actually incorporated in the text. But the punctuation has been freely altered throughout, and no record of these changes is preserved in the textual notes even when they affect the sense. In more than one instance the words of _1633_ are retained in this edition but are made to convey a different meaning from that which they bear in the original. The edition of Donne's poems prepared by Mr. E. K. Chambers[38] for the _Muses Library_ was not based, like Dr. Grosart's, on a casual use of individual manuscripts and editions, nor like the Grolier Club edition on a rigid adherence to the first edition, but on an eclectic use of all the seventeenth-century editions, supplemented by an occasional reference to one or other of the manuscript collections, either at first hand or through Dr. Grosart. Of these three methods, that of the Grolier Club editor is, there can be no doubt, the soundest. The edition of 1633 comes to us, indeed, with no _a priori_ authority. It was not published, or (like the sermons) prepared for the press[39] by the author; nor (as in the case of the first folio edition of Shakespeare's plays) was it issued by the author's executors. But if we apply to _1633_ the _a posteriori_ tests described by Dr. Moore in his work on the textual criticism of Dante's _Divina Commedia_, if we select a number of test passages, passages where the editions vary, but where one reading can be clearly shown to be intrinsically the more probable, by certain definite tests,[40] we shall find that _1633_ is, taken all over, far and away superior to any other single edition, and, I may add at once, to any _single_ manuscript. Moreover, any careful examination of the later editions, of their variations from _1633_, and of the text of the poems which they print for the first time, shows clearly that some method more trustworthy than individual preference must be found if we are to distinguish between those of their variations which have, and those which have not, some authority behind them; those which are derived from a fresh reference to manuscript sources, and those which are due to carelessness, to misunderstanding, or to unwarrantable emendation. Apart from some such sifting, an edition of Donne based, like Mr. Chambers', on an eclectic use of the editions is exactly in the same position as would be an edition of Shakespeare based on an eclectic use of the Folios, helped out by a quite occasional and quite eclectic reference to a quarto. A plain reprint of _1633_ like Alford's (of such poems as he publishes) has fewer serious errors than an eclectic text.