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:
(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.)
Donne's friend, Sir Henry Goodyere, seems to have had relations with her either directly or through her first cousin, the Countess of Bedford, for Donne writes to him from Mitcham, 'I remember that about this time you purpose a journey to fetch, or meet the Lady Huntington.' This fact lends support to the view of Mr. Chambers and Mr. Gosse that she is 'the Countesse' referred to in the following extract from a letter to Goodyere, which has an important bearing on the poem under consideration. Very unfortunately it is not dated, and Mr. Chambers and Mr. Gosse differ widely as to the year in which it may have been written. The latter places it in April, 1615, when Donne was on the eve of taking Orders, and was approaching his noble patronesses for help in clearing himself of debt. But Mr. Chambers points to the closing reference to 'a Christning at Peckam', and dates the letter 1605-6, when Donne was at Peckham after leaving Pyrford and before settling at Mitcham. I am not sure that this is conclusive, for in Donne's unsettled life before 1615 Mrs. Donne might at any time have gone for her lying-in or for a christening festival to the house of her sister Jane, Lady Grimes, at Peckham. But the tone of the letter, melancholy and reflective, is that of the letters to Goodyere written at Mitcham, and the general theme of the letter, a comparison of the different Churches, is that of other letters of the same period. The one in question (Letters 1651, p. 100; Gosse, Life, ii. 77) seems to be almost a continuation of another (Letters, 1651, p. 26; Gosse, Life, i. 225). Whatever be its date, this is what Donne says: 'For the other part of your Letter, spent in the praise of the Countesse, I am always very apt to beleeve it of her, and can never beleeve it so well, and so reasonably, as now, when it is averred by you; but for the expressing it to her, in that sort as you seeme to counsaile, I have these two reasons to decline it. That that knowledge which she hath of me, was in the beginning of a graver course then of a Poet, into which (that I may also keep my dignity) I would not seeme to relapse. The Spanish proverb informes me, that he is a fool which cannot make one Sonnet, and he is mad which makes two. The other strong reason is my integrity to the other Countesse' (i.e. probably the Countess of Bedford. The words which follow seem to imply a more recent acquaintance than is compatible with so late a date as 1615), 'of whose worthinesse though I swallowed your words, yet I have had since an explicit faith, and now a knowledge: and for her delight (since she descends to them) I had reserved not only all the verses which I should make, but all the thoughts of womens worthinesse. But because I hope she will not disdain, that I should write well of her Picture, I have obeyed you thus far as to write; but intreat you by your friendship, that by this occasion of versifying, I be not traduced, nor esteemed light in that Tribe, and that house where I have lived. If those reasons which moved you to bid me write be not constant in you still, or if you meant not that I should write verses; or if these verses be too bad, or too good, over or under her understanding, and not fit; I pray receive them as a companion and supplement of this Letter to you,' &c. If this was written in 1615 it is incompatible with the fact (supposing the poem under consideration to be by Donne) that he had already written to the Countess of Huntingdon a letter in a very thinly disguised tone of amatory compliment. If, however, it was written, as is probable, earlier, the reference may be to this very poem. Perhaps Goodyere thought it 'over or under' the Countess's understanding and did not present it.
(3) Certainly, looking at the poem itself, one has difficulty in declaring it to be, or not to be, Donne's work. Its metaphysical wit and strain of high-flown, rarefied compliment suggest that only he could have written it; in parts, on the other hand, the tone does not seem to me to be his. It is certainly very different from that of the other letters to noble ladies. It carries one back to the date of the Elegies. If Donne's, it is a further striking proof how much of the tone of a lover even a married poet could assume in addressing a noble patroness. Would Donne at any time of his life write to the Countess of Huntingdon in the vein of p. [418], ll. 21-36, or the next paragraph, ll. 37-76? One could imagine the Earl of Pembroke, or some one on a level of equality socially with the Countess, writing so; not a dependent addressing a patroness. The only points of style and verse which might serve as clues are (1) the peculiar use of 'young', e.g. l. 84 'youngest flatteries', l. 13 'younger formes'. With which compare in the Letter to Wotton, here added, at p. [188]:
Ere sicknesses attack, yong death is best.