(1) The poem was not included in the 1633 edition, nor is it found in either of the groups _D_, _H49_, _Lec_ and _A18_, _N_, _TCC_, _TCD_. It was added in _1635_ with four other spurious poems, the dialogue ascribed to Donne and Wotton but assigned by the great majority of manuscripts to the Earl of Pembroke and Sir Benjamin Rudyard, the two epistles to Ben Jonson, and the Elegy addressed to Sir Thomas Roe, which we have assigned, for reasons given above, to Sir John Roe. The poem is found in only two manuscript collections, viz. _P_ and the second, miscellaneous collection of seventeenth-century poems in _TCD_. In both of these it is headed _Sr Walter Ashton_ (or _Aston_) _to the Countesse of Huntingtone_, and no reference whatsoever is made to Donne. I do not attach much importance to this title. Imaginary headings were quite common in the case of poems circulating in manuscript. Poems are inscribed as having been written by the Earl of Essex or Sir Walter Raleigh the night before he died, or as found in the pocket of Chidiock Tichbourne. Editors have occasionally taken these too seriously. Drayton's _Heroicall Epistles_ made it a fashion to write such letters in the case of any notorious love affair or intrigue. The manuscript _P_ contains a long imaginary letter from Sir Philip Sidney to Lady Mary Rich and a fragment of her reply. In the same manuscript the poem, probably by the Earl of Pembroke, 'Victorious beauty though your eyes,' is headed _The Mar: B to the Lady Fe: Her._, i.e. the Marquis of Buckingham to--I am not sure what lady is intended. The only thing which the title given to the letter in question suggests is that it was not an actual letter to the Countess but an imaginary one. (2) Of Donne's relations with Elizabeth Stanley, who in 1603 became the Countess of Huntingdon, his biographers have not been able to tell us very much. He must have met her at the house of Sir Thomas Egerton when her mother, the dowager Countess of Derby, married that statesman in 1600. Donne says: I was your Prophet in your yonger dayes, And now your Chaplaine, God in you to praise. (p. 203, ll. 69-70.)