Chapter XXVI

The marriage of the Princess Elizabeth and the Count Palatine took place in February, 1613. This letter with its anticipations of the great event may safely be assigned to the journey on which Donne accompanied Sir Robert Drury in 1611-12. "My book of M{ris} Drury" is Donne's strange poem in commemoration of the first anniversary of the death in 1610 of Sir Robert Drury's little daughter Elizabeth. _An Anatomie of the World, wherein by occasion of the untimely death of Mistress Elizabeth Drury, the frailty and decay of this whole world is represented_, was published in 1611. The extravagance of the homage here paid to a child whom Donne had never seen, and on whose father's bounty he and his family were living, was regarded by some of his friends as savoring rather too patently of insincerity.

In commemoration of the second anniversary of Elizabeth Drury's death, Donne published in 1612 a poem _Of the Progresse of the Soule_. _Wherein, by occasion of the religious death of Mistress Elizabeth Drury, the incommodities of the soule in this life, and her exaltation in the next, are contemplated._

In 1618 Ben Jonson told Drummond "that Done's Anniversarie was profane and full of blasphemies: that he told Mr. Done, if it had been written of the Virgin Marie, it had been something; to which he answered that he described the Idea of a Woman, and not as she was." (_Conversations with Drummond, III._)