Tower, and probably a distant cousin of his own. No reverses, however, could beat the pathetic cheer out of him. “Anne Donne,[3] undone,” was one of his inveterate teary jests over the state of things at home. He wrote once, with sickness, poverty, and despair at his elbow: “If God should ease us with burials, I know not how to perform even that. But I flatter myself that I am dying, too, for I cannot waste faster than by such griefs.” Five of his twelve children passed before their father to the grave, the good domestic daughter Constance upholding him always, and keeping the house together. But just as hope dawned with his appointment to the Lectureship of Lincoln’s Inn, heavenward suddenly, with her youngest-born, in 1617, went his dear and faithful wife, whom he laid to rest in St. Clement Danes. About the time when the remorseful old queen died disdainfully on her chamber-floor at Richmond, the necessities of this family called for daily succors, and with a simple and noble delicacy they were supplied. Nor did they cease. Magdalen Herbert was a “bountiful benefactor,” Donne “as grateful an acknowledger.” His first letter to her from Mitcham in Surrey, dated July 10, 1607, is made up of terse, tender thanks, in his heart’s own odd language. He sends her an enclosure of sonnets and hymns, “lost to us,” says Walton, movingly, “but doubtless they were such as they two now sing in heaven.” Dr. Grosart, with a great show of justice, claims that the sequence called _La Corona_, and familiar to latter-day readers, are the identical sonnets passed from one to the other. During this same month of July we know that, paying a call in his “London, plaguey London,” and finding his friend abroad,[4] Dr. Donne consoled himself by leaving a courtliest message: “Your memory is a state-cloth and presence which I reverence, though you be away;” and went back after to his “sallads and onions” at Mitcham, or to his solitary lodgings near Whitehall.