“Goodyere, I’m glad, and grateful to report,
Myself a witness of thy few days sport;
Where I both learn’d, why wise men hawking follow,
And why that bird was sacred to Apollo:
She doth instruct men by her gallant flight,
That they to knowledge so should tower upright,
And never stoop, but to strike ignorance;
Which if they miss, yet they should re-advance
To former height, and there in circle tarry,
Till they be sure to make the fool their quarry.
Now, in whose pleasures I have this discerned,
What would his serious actions me have learned?”
And in the verses enclosed in his letter (XXX) to Goodyer, Donne writes:
“Our soule, whose country is heaven, & God her father,
Into this world, corruptions sinke, is sent,
Yet, so much in her travaile she doth gather,
That she returnes home, wiser than she went;
It pays you well, if it teach you to spare
And make you asham’d, to make your hawks praise, yours,
Which when herselfe she lessens in the aire,
You then first say, that high enough she toures.”
LXX
To Sir Thomas Roe. Until 1752, when by Act of Parliament the first day of January became the first day of the year, the year began on March 25th and ended on the following March 24th. What to Donne was “the last (day) of 1607” would be to us March 24th, 1608. Since 1752 therefore it has been a common practice in referring to dates falling between January 1st and March 24th inclusive of all years previous to the year 1752 to give both years. So we would give the date of the execution of Charles I as January 30th, 1648/49.
“The Mask” is possibly Ben Jonson’s The Hue and Cry after Cupid, “celebrating the happy marriage of John Lord Ramsey, Viscount Hadington, with the Lady Elizabeth Ratcliffe,” of which Rowland White wrote to the Earl of Shrewsbury, “The great Maske intended for my L. Haddington’s marriage is now the only thing thought upon at Court.”
LXXI
I have not succeeded in finding a clue to the “accident” of which Donne writes. It would seem that some friend or relation of Sir Henry Goodyer’s had met with sudden, and perhaps violent, death.
LXXII
In point of date of composition, this is probably the earliest of the published letters of Donne, who in December, 1600, had been for more than three years chief secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, the Lord Keeper, from whose friendly custody the Earl of Essex was set free in July, 1600.