In 1618 Ben Jonson told Drummond "that Done's Anniversarie was profane and full of blasphemies: that he told Mr. Done, if it had been written of the Virgin Marie, it had been something; to which he answered that he described the Idea of a Woman, and not as she was." (_Conversations with Drummond, III._)
To Sir Henry Goodyer. The mention of "place and season" and the references to suffering of mind, body, and estate, enable us to date this letter from Mitcham in the spring of 1608, when Donne was in his thirty-fifth year.
William Fowler, to whom we have already had a jesting reference (XIX) was Secretary to Queen Anne. It is not clear whether the place to which Donne aspired was the secretaryship, which, as he was informed, Fowler was about to resign, or some other position in the Secretary's gift which Donne was anxious to secure before Fowler went out of office. In either case, his hope was not realized.
To Sir Henry Goodyer, and written in the summer of 1623 when the Prince and Buckingham were in Spain.
The current news from Bohemia must have been of especial interest to Donne in the light of his experience as the companion of Viscount Doncaster's journey to that unhappy country six years before. (See note to VII.)
To Sir Henry Goodyer. If the allusion to the "French Prince" refers to the visit of the Prince de Joinville who was "despatched back again" in June, 1607, this letter may be assigned to the summer of that year. "These two problems" are probably part of the _Iuvenilia, or Certaine Paradoxes and Problems, written by I. Donne_ and published posthumously in 1633. The "ragge of verses" survives as the "Verse Letter to Sir Henry Goodyer," printed in Donne's Poems (ed. Chambers, Vol. II, p. 10). In the _Poems_ of 1633 there is a copy of this letter following a text so much better than that of the _Letters_ of 1651, that it has seemed worth while to reprint it in its entirety.