That women can no parts of friendship bee.

Montaigne refers to the same heresy in speaking of 'Marie de Gournay le Jars, ma fille d'alliance, et certes aymée de moy beaucoup plus que paternellement, et enveloppée en ma retraitte et solitude comme l'une des meilleures parties de mon propre estre. Je ne regarde plus qu'elle au monde. Si l'adolescence peut donner presage, cette ame sera quelque jour capable des plus belles choses et entre autres de la perfection de cette tressaincte amitié ou nous ne lisons point que son sexe ait pu monter encores: la sincerité et la solidité de ses moeurs y sont desja bastantes.' Essais (1590), ii. 17.

Page 282. Elegie on Mris Boulstred.

Cecilia Boulstred, or Bulstrode, was the daughter of Hedgerley Bulstrode, of Bucks. She was baptized at Beaconsfield, February 12, 158¾, and died at the house of her kinswoman, Lady Bedford, at Twickenham, on August 4, 1609. So Mr. Chambers, from Sir James Whitelocke's Liber Famelicus (Camden Society). He quotes also from the Twickenham Registers: 'Mris Boulstred out of the parke, was buried ye 6th of August, 1609.' In a letter to Goodyere Donne speaks of her illness: 'but (by my troth) I fear earnestly that Mistresse Bolstrod will not escape that sicknesse in which she labours at this time. I sent this morning to aske of her passage this night, and the return is, that she is as I left her yesternight, and then by the strength of her understanding, and voyce, (proportionally to her fashion, which was ever remisse) by the eavenesse and life of her pulse, and by her temper, I could allow her long life, and impute all her sicknesse to her minde. But the History of her sicknesse makes me justly fear, that she will scarce last so long, as that you, when you receive this letter, may do her any good office in praying for her.' Poor Miss Bulstrode, whose

voice was

Gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman,

has not lived to fame in an altogether happy fashion, as the subject of some tortured and tasteless Epicedes, a coarse and brutal Epigram by Jonson (An Epigram on the Court Pucell in Underwoods,—Jonson told Drummond that the person intended was Mris Boulstred), a complimentary, not to say adulatory, Epitaph from the same pen, and a dubious Elegy by Sir John Roe ('Shall I goe force an Elegie,' p. [410]). It was an ugly place, the Court of James I, as full of cruel libels as of gross flattery, a fit subject for Milton's scorn. The epitaph which Jonson wrote is found in more than one MS., and in some where Donne's poems are in the majority. Chambers very tentatively suggested that it might be by Donne himself, and I was inclined for a time to accept this conjecture, finding it in other MSS. besides those he mentioned, and because the sentiment of the closing lines is quite Donnean. But in the Farmer-Chetham MS. (ed. Grosart) it is signed B. J., and Mr. Percy Simpson tells me that a letter is extant from Jonson to George Gerrard which indicates that the epitaph was written by Jonson while Gerrard's man waited at the door. I quote it from B:

On the death of Mrs Boulstred.

Stay, view this Stone, and if thou beest not such

Reade here a little, that thou mayest know much.