Her Edward was matriculated in 1595 at University College, Oxford,[1] for which he seemed to retain no great partiality; he bequeathed his books, like a loyal Welshman, to Jesus College, instead, and his manuscripts to the Bodleian Library. In 1598, when he was little more than seventeen, he was wedded to his cousin Mary Herbert, of St. Gillian in Monmouthshire. Her age was one-and-twenty; she was an heiress, enjoined by her father’s will to marry a Herbert or forfeit her estates; she was also almost a philosopher. There was no wild affection on either side, but the marriage promised rather well, both persons having resources; and no real catastrophe befell either in after-life. Much as she desired the match for worldly motives, the chief promoter of it was too solicitous for her tall dreamer of a son, who underwent the pleasing peril of having Queen Bess clap him on the cheek, not to take the whole weight of conjugal direction on her own shoulders. Without undue officiousness, but with the masterly foresight of a shrewd saint, she moved to Oxford from Montgomery with her younger children and their tutors, in order to handle Mistress Herbert’s husband during his minority. “She continued there with him,” says Walton, in his _Life of George Herbert_, “and still kept him in a moderate awe of herself, and so much under her own eye as to see and converse with him daily; but she managed this power over him without any such rigid sourness as might make her company a torment to her child, but with such a sweetness and compliance with the recreations and pleasures of youth as did incline him willingly to spend much of his time in the company of his dear and careful mother.” It was during this stay that she contracted the chivalrous friendship which has embalmed her tranquil memory. Dr. John Donne (not ordained until 1614, and indeed not Dr. Donne then at all, but “Jack Donne,” his profaner self) had been at Cadiz with Essex, and had wandered over the face of Europe; and he came back, accidentally, to Oxford during the most troubled year of his early prime. It was no strange place to him,[2] who had been, at eleven, the Pico della Mirandola of Hart Hall, and whose relatives seem to have resided always in the town. There and then, however, he cast his bright eye upon Excellence, and in his own phrase, “—dared love that, and say so, too, And forget the He and She.”