The last of these references is too indefinite to be of use. I mean that it covers too wide a period. Nor, indeed, do the others bring us very far. The first indicates the period from the alliance between the League and the King of Spain, 1585, when Philip promised a monthly subsidy of 50,000 crowns, to the conversion and victory of Henry IV in 1593; the second, the short time during which Spanish influence gained the upper hand in Scotland, between 1582 and 1586. After 1593 is the only determinable date. In _Loves Warre_ we are brought nearer to a definite date. France in her lunatique giddiness did hate Ever our men, yea and our God of late; Yet shee relies upon our Angels well Which nere retorne points to the period between Henry's conversion ('yea and our God of late') and the conclusion of peace between France and Spain in 1598. The line, And Midas joyes our Spanish journeyes give (taken with a similar allusion in one of his letters: Guyanaes harvest is nip'd in the spring I feare, &c., p. 210), refers most probably to Raleigh's expedition in 1595 to discover the fabulous wealth of Manoa. Had the Elegy been written after the Cadiz expedition there would certainly have been a more definite reference to that war. The poem was probably written in the earlier part of 1596, when the expedition was in preparation and Donne contemplated joining it. To date one of the poems is not of course to date them all, but their paradoxical, witty, daring tone is so uniform that one may fairly conjecture that these thirteen Elegies were written between 1593 and Donne's first entry upon responsible office as secretary to Egerton in 1598. The twelfth (_His parting from her_) and fifteenth (_The Expostulation_) Elegies it is impossible to date, but it is not _likely_ that they were written after his marriage. _Julia_ is quite undatable, a witty sally Donne might have written any time before 1615. But the fourteenth (_A Tale of a Citizen and his Wife_) was certainly written after 1609, probably in 1610.