I am loth to hear myself: and so softly, that if that good lady were in the room, with you and this letter, she might not hear. It is, that I am brought to a necessity of printing my poems, and addressing them to my Lord Chamberlain. This I mean to do forthwith; not for much public view, but at mine own cost, a few copies. I apprehend some incongruities in the resolution; and I know what I shall suffer from many interpretations; but I am at an end, of much considering that; and, if I were as startling in that kind, as I ever was, yet in this particular, I am under an unescapable necessity, as I shall let you perceive when I see you. By this occasion I am made a rhapsodist of mine own rags, and that cost me more diligence, to seek them, than it did to make them. This made me ask to borrow that old book of you, which it will be too late to see, for that use, when I see you: for I must do this as a valediction to the world, before I take orders. But this is it, I am to ask you: whether you ever made any such use of the letter in verse, à nostre comtesse chez vous, as that I may not put it in, amongst the rest to persons of that rank; for I desire it very much, that something should bear her name in the book, and I would be just to my written words to my Lord Harrington to write nothing after that. I pray tell me as soon as you can, if I be at liberty to insert that: for if you have by any occasion applied any pieces to it, I see not, that it will be discerned, when it appears in the whole piece. Though this be a little matter, I would be sorry not to have an account of it, within as little after New Year’s-tide, as you could.”
This letter is, I think, sufficient proof that Donne had not printed his poems before the end of 1614; in the absence of any extant copy it is probable that his intention to print them then was never realized. Just such another intention, indeed, he must already have had in 1601, when he wrote the Epistle to his Progress of the Soul. That is evidently intended to follow the portrait-frontispiece of a printed book. It begins, “Others at the porches and entries of their buildings set their arms; I, my picture.” But it is still more unlikely that he printed them after he had taken orders. As to this we have the evidence both of Ben Jonson and of Walton. Ben Jonson said to Drummond in 1618–19 (Conversations,
