[84] Mrs Katherine Philips, whom the affectation of her age called Orinda, was the daughter of Mr Fowler, a citizen of London. Aubrey, the most credulous of mankind, tells us, in MS. Memoirs of her life, that she read through the Bible before she was four years old, and would take sermons verbatim by the time she was ten. She married a decent respectable country gentleman, called Wogan; a name which, when it occurred in her extensive literary correspondence, she exchanged for the fantastic appellation of Antenor. She maintained a literary intercourse for many years with bishops, earls, and wits, the main object of which was the management and extrication of her husband's affairs. But whether because the correspondents of Orinda were slack in attending to her requests in her husband's favour, or whether because a learned lady is a bad manager of sublunary concerns, Antenor's circumstances became embarrassed, notwithstanding all Orinda's exertions, and the fair solicitor was obliged to retreat with him into Cardiganshire. Returning from this seclusion to London, in 1664, she was seized with the small-pox, which carried her off in the 33d year of her age.
Her poems and translations were collected into a folio after her death, which bears the title of "Poems by the most deservedly admired Mrs Katherine Philips, the matchless Orinda. London, 1667."—See Ballard's Memoirs of Learned Ladies, p. 287.
This lady is here mentioned with the more propriety, as Mrs Anne Killigrew dedicated the following lines to her memory:
Orinda (Albion's and our sexes grace)
Owed not her glory to a beauteous face,—
It was her radiant soul that shone within,
Which struck a lustre through her outward skin,
That did her lips and cheeks with roses dye,
Advanced her height, and sparkled in her eye:
Nor did her sex at all obstruct her fame,
But higher 'mong the stars it fixed her name;
What she did write not only all allowed,
But every laurel to her laurel bowed.
[85] James Bertie, Lord Norris of Rycote, was created Earl of Abingdon in 1682. There is in the Luttrell Collection an Elegy on his death.
[86] The gout.
[87] Donne's character as a love-poet is elsewhere very well given by Dryden. "He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with the speculations of philosophy, where he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softness of love." Elizabeth Drury was the daughter of Sir Robert Drury, with whom Donne went to Paris. Donne celebrated her merit, and lamented her death in elegies, entitled, "The Anatomy of the World, wherein, by occasion of the untimely Death of Mrs Elizabeth Drury, the frailty and the decay of this whole World is represented." These elegiac verses are divided into two anniversaries, through which the editor attempted in vain to struggle in search of the acknowledgment quoted by Dryden.
[88] In allusion to the provision made in Egypt, during the seven years of plenty, for the succeeding seven years of famine.
[89] Lady Abingdon had six sons and three daughters.
[90] Æneas descending to the shades, finds his father Anchises engaged in the review of his posterity.—See Æneid, lib. vi.