In 1652 the younger Donne, in the course of his exploitation of his father’s writings, prepared an authorized edition of the _Juvenilia_, which was printed by Thomas Newcomb for Humphrey Moseley. The number of the Paradoxes was now increased to twelve and of the Problemes to seventeen, the offensive passages in the first Probleme being allowed to remain. To these were added two ‘Characters’, ‘An Essay of Valour’, ‘A Sheaf of Miscellany Epigrams’, a reprint of _Ignatius his Conclave_, and, finally, the _Essays in Divinity_. The Epigrams purport to have been written by the elder Donne in Latin and to have been translated into English by Jasper Mayne, D.D. They may have been printed by the younger Donne in good faith, as it seems to be certain that his father’s _Epigrammata mea Latina_ once existed; but the epigrams attributed to him in this volume are, as Mr. Gosse has shown (_Life and Letters of Donne, i. 16_), certainly spurious, and may well have been composed, as well as translated, by Mayne, who was an unprincipled, though witty, divine. The _Essays in Divinity_ had been printed in 1651 for a different publisher, but they are very rarely found as a separate volume in a contemporary binding, for the younger Donne, as he made clear in his preface, sought to temper the secularity of the _Juvenilia_ by issuing them in company with the _Essays in Divinity_, and in this way to invest the volume with an altogether fictitious respectability.
Even in 1652 the Paradoxes and Problemes were not printed entire. Another Probleme concerning Sir Walter Raleigh has been preserved in the Bodleian Library (Tanner MSS. 299, f. 32), the copier stating that it ‘was so bitter that his son, Jack Donne, LL.D., thought fit not to print it with the rest’. Yet another has recently been discovered in a manuscript containing Donne’s poems.
The _Juvenilia_ have not been reprinted since 1652. In the present edition the text follows that of the second edition of 1633, amplified from the third edition of 1652 and with the additional Probleme from the Bodleian manuscript, already printed by Mr. Edmund Gosse in his _Life and Letters of Donne, 1899, ii. 52_. The spurious epigrams have not been included.