From a grateful King and Country, Lord Mounteagle received, as we have already learned, a payment of £700 a year, equal to nearly £7,000 a year in our money.[A] [Footnote A: Lord Mounteagle’s reward was £300 per annum for life, and £200 per annum to him and his heirs for ever in fee farm rents. Salisbury declared that Mounteagle’s Letter was “the first and only means” the Government had to discover that “most wicked and barbarous Plot.” Personally, I am bound to say I believe him. The title Lord Morley and Mounteagle is now in abeyance (see Burke’s “_Extinct Peerages_”); but let us hope that we may see it revived. An heir must be in existence, one would imagine; for the peerages Morley and Mounteagle would be granted by the Crown for ever, I presume. There is at the present date a Lord Monteagle, whose title is of a more recent creation.] But Ben Jonson, the rare Ben Jonson, the friend of Shakespeare, of Donne,[B] and other wits of the once far-famed Mermaid Tavern, Bread Street, London, deemed the temporal saviour of his Country to be still insufficiently requited. So the Poet, invoking his Muse, penned, in the young peer’s honour, the following stately epigram:—— [Footnote B: John Donne the celebrated metaphysical poet, afterwards Dean of St. Paul’s, and author of the once well-known “_Pseudo-Martyr_,” which Donne wrote at the request of King James himself. For one of Donne’s ancestors _and descendants_, see _ante_ p. 160. Henry Donne (or Dunne), a barrister, was brother to John Donne. He was, I believe, implicated in the Babington conspiracy along with Edward Abington, brother to Thomas Abington, and about ten other young papist gentlemen, some of very high birth, great wealth, and brilliant prospects. At the chambers of Henry Donne, in Thavies Inn, Holborn, London, “the Venerable” William Harrington, of Mount St. John, near Thirsk, was captured. Harrington fled to the College at Rheims to study for the priesthood, in consequence of the impression made upon him by Campion, who was harboured, in the spring of 1581, for ten days at Mount St. John; Campion there wrote his famous “_Decem Rationes_.” Harrington was executed at the London Tyburn, for his priesthood, in 1594. He is said to have struggled with the hangman when the latter began to quarter him alive. Harrington is mentioned in Archbishop Harsnett’s “_Popish Impostures_,” a book known to Shakespeare. Harrington was a second cousin to Guy Fawkes, through Guy’s paternal grandmother, Ellen Harrington, of York.] “TO WILLIAM LORD MOUNTEAGLE.