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Rh  some substantial remuneration for his labour, but the prospect of securing any state employment was further off than ever.

Donne's muse was very active about this time. The epistles in verse addressed to the Countess of Bedford, the Countess of Huntingdon, the Countess of Salisbury, and the two daughters of Robert, lord Rich, must all be referred to this period (1608-10), as must the funeral elegies upon Lady Markham, Lady Bedford's sister, who died in May 1609, and upon Mistress Bulstrode, who died at Twickenham in Lady Bedford's house two months later. So too the beautiful poem called 'The Litany was written and sent to his friend, Sir Henry Goodere, while the 'Pseudo-Martyr' was still only in manuscript (Letters, p. 33). The 'Divine Poems' and 'Holy Sonnets' had been written earlier; they were sent to Lady Magdalen Herbert in 1607. Donne was evidently getting sadder and more earnest as he grew older.

On 10 Oct. 1610 the university of Oxford by decree of convocation bestowed upon him the degree of M.A.: 'Causa est'—ran the grace—‘quod huic academiæ maxime ornamento sit ut ejusmodi viri optime de republica et ecclesia meriti gradibus academicis insigniantur.’ Some time after this Sir Robert Drury of Hawsted, Suffolk, one of the richest men in England, lost his only child, a daughter, in her sixteenth year. The parents were in great grief and appear to have applied to Donne to write the poor girl's epitaph. He not only did so (, Hist. and Antiq. of Hawsted, 1813, p. 52), but he wrote an elegy upon her which he entitled 'An Anatomy of the World, wherein, by occasion of the untimely Death of Mistris Elizabeth Drury, the Frailty and the Decay of this whole World is represented.' The poem was printed in 1611. Only two copies of the original edition are known to exist. It was reprinted next year with the addition of a second part, which he calls 'The Second Anniversarie, or the Progress of the Soule.' A careful collation of the two editions has been made by Mr. Grosart in his collected edition of Donne's poems. This was the first time Donne had printed any verse, and he did so with some reluctance (Letters, p. 75), but the publication served his turn very well, for it procured him the friendship of a man who was eager to show his gratitude for the service rendered. In November 1611 Sir Robert and Lady Drury resolved to travel on the continent, and they took Donne with them. Sir Robert appears to have gone abroad on a kind of complimentary mission to be present at the crowning of the Emperor Matthias at Frankfort. He was prepared to spend his money freely and make a magnificent display, but when he reached Frankfort with his cortège and found that he could be received only as a private gentleman by the courtiers, he returned hastily to England after an absence of about nine months, during which the party had passed most of their time in France and Belgium. It was while they were in Paris that Donne saw the celebrated vision of his wife with a dead infant in her arms. Mrs. Donne certainly appears to have had a miscarriage during her husband's absence. She had removed with her children to Sir Robert's huge mansion, Drury House in the Strand, when her husband left England, and here the whole family continued to reside, apparently till the death of Sir Robert in 1616. The baptism of three of Donne's children and the burial of his wife are to be found in the register of the parish of St. Clement Danes, in which parish Drury House was situated.

On his return to England in August 1612 Donne found Carr, then Viscount Rochester [see ], the foremost personage in England after the sovereign. Lord Salisbury had died in May, and Rochester had acquired unbounded influence over the king. Donne approached him through his friend Lord Hay, placed himself under his protection, and announced his intention of taking holy orders as he had been importuned to do (Tobie Matthew's Letters, p. 320). In November of this year Prince Henry died; he was buried on 7 Dec., and Donne was among those who wrote a funeral elegy upon his death. Three weeks after the funeral Frederick, the count Palatine, and the Princess Elizabeth were 'affianced and contracted' in Whitehall, and on 13 Feb. following they were married. On this occasion Donue wrote the 'Epithalamium,' which is to be found among his poems. These were mere exercises thrown off for the occasion, and probably written for the rewards which they were pretty sure to receive; but Izaak Walton must be giving us the substantial truth when he assures us that during the three years preceding his ordination Donne gave himself up almost exclusively to the study of theology; indeed, his own letters show that it was so. In one of them he tells his correspondent that he 'busied himself in a search into the eastern languages,' in another he mentions a collection of 'Cases of Conscience' which he had drawn up, and at this time too he wrote his 'Essays in Divinity,' which so curiously reveal to us the working of an inquiring spirit feeling after truth not according to the conventional methods of the age. It was again at this time