A less fortunate one made the Lady Davies mad, or rather fixed the character of her madness. She was the widow of Sir John Davies, the statesman and poet, and having anagrammatized Eleanor Davies into Reveal O Daniel, she was crazy enough to fancy that the spirit of the Prophet Daniel was incorporated in her. The Doctor mentioned the case with tenderness and a kind of sympathy. “Though the anagram says Dr. Heylyn, had too much by an L and too little by an S, yet she found Daniel and Reveal in it, and that served her turn.” Setting up for a Prophetess upon this conceit, and venturing upon political predictions in sore times, she was brought before the Court of High Commission, where serious pains were preposterously bestowed in endeavouring to reason her out of an opinion founded on insanity. All, as might have been expected, and ought to have been foreseen, would not do, “till Lamb, then Dean of the Arches, shot her through and through with an arrow borrowed from her own quiver.” For while the Divines were reasoning the point with her out of scripture, he took a pen into his hand, and presently finding that the letters of her name might be assorted to her purpose, said to her, Madam, I see that you build much on anagrams, and I have found out one which I hope will fit you: Dame Eleanor Davies,—_Never so mad a Ladie!_ He then put it into her hands in writing, “which happy fancy brought that grave Court into such a laughter, and the poor woman thereupon into such a confusion, that afterwards she either grew wiser, or was less regarded.”—This is a case in which it may be admitted that ridicule was a fair test of truth. When Henri IV. sent for Marshal Biron to court, with an assurance of full pardon if he would reveal without reserve the whole of his negociations and practices, that rash and guilty man resolved to go and brave all dangers, because certain Astrologers had assured him that his ascendant commanded that of the King, and in confirmation of this some flattering friend discovered in his name _Henri de Bourbon_ this anagram _De Biron Bonheur_. _Comme ainsi fust_, says one of his contemporaries, _qu'il en fist gloire, quelque Gentilhomme bien advisé là present—dit tout bas à l'oreille d'un sien amy, s'il le pense ainsi il n'est pas sage, et trouvera qu'il y a du_ Robin _dedans_ Biron. _Robin_ was a name used at that time by the French as synonymous with simpleton. But of unfitting anagrams none were ever more curiously unfit than those which were discovered in Marguerite de Valois, the profligate Queen of Navarre; _Salve, Virgo Mater Dei; ou, de vertu royal image!_ The Doctor derived his taste for anagrams from the poet with whose rhymes and fancies he had been so well embued in his boyhood, old Joshua Sylvester, who as the translator of Du Bartas, signed himself to the King in anagrammatical French _Voy Sire Saluste_, and was himself addressed in anagrammatical Latin as _Vere Os Salustii_.