Of the other two elegies, _Julia_, which is found in only two manuscripts, _B_ and _O'F_, is quite the kind of thing Donne might have amused himself by writing in the scurrilous style of Horace's invectives against Canidia, frequently imitated by Mantuan and other Humanists. The chief difficulty with regard to the second, _A Tale of a Citizen and his Wife_, is to find Donne writing in this vein at so late a period as 1609 or 1610, the date implied in several of the allusions. He was already the author of religious poems, including probably _La Corona_. In 1610 he wrote his _Litanie_, and, as Professor Norton points out, in the same letter in which he tells of the writing of the latter he refers to some poem of a lighter nature, the name of which is lost through a mutilation of the letter, and says, 'Even at this time when (I humbly thank God) I ask and have his comfort of sadder meditations I do not condemn in myself that I have given my wit such evaporations as those, if they be free from profaneness, or obscene provocations.' Whether this would cover the elegy in question is a point on which perhaps our age and Donne's would not decide alike. Donne's nature was a complex one. Jack Donne and the grave and reverend divine existed side by side for not a little time, and even in the sermons Donne's wit is once or twice rather coarser than our generation would relish in the pulpit. But once more we must add that it is possible Donne has in this case been made responsible for what is another's. Every one wrote this occasional poetry, and sometimes wrote it well. There is no more difficult poem to understand or to assign to or from Donne than the long letter headed _To the Countesse of Huntington_, 13 on the list, which, for the time being, I have placed in the Appendix B. On internal grounds there is more to be said for ascribing it to Donne than any other single poem in this collection. Nevertheless I have resolved to let it stand, that it may challenge the attention it deserves.[16] The reasons which led me to doubt Donne's authorship are these: