I have told her birth, her marriage, and the number of her children, and have given some short account of them.  I shall next tell the Reader, that her husband died when our George was about the age of four years:  I am next to tell, that she continued twelve years a widow; that she then married happily to a noble gentleman, the brother and heir of the Lord Danvers,[6] Earl of Danby, who did highly value both her person and the most excellent endowments of her mind.

[Sidenote:  Her character]

[Sidenote:  Dr. Donne]

In this time of her widowhood, she being desirous to give Edward, her eldest son, such advantages of learning, and other education, as might suit his birth and fortune, and thereby make him the more fit for the service of his country, did, at his being of a fit age, remove from Montgomery Castle with him, and some of her younger sons, to Oxford; and having entered Edward into Queen’s College, and provided him a fit tutor, she commended him to his care, yet she continued there with him, and still kept him in a moderate awe of herself, and so much under her own eye, as to see and converse with him daily:  but she managed this power over him without any such rigid sourness as might make her company a torment to her child; but with such a sweetness and compliance with the recreations and pleasures of youth, as did incline him willingly to spend much of his time in the company of his dear and careful mother; which was to her great content:  for she would often say, “That as our bodies take a nourishment suitable to the meat on which we feed; so our souls do as insensibly take in vice by the example or conversation with wicked company:”  and would therefore as often say, “That ignorance of vice was the best preservation of virtue; and that the very knowledge of wickedness was as tinder to inflame and kindle sin and keep it burning.”  For these reasons she endeared him to her own company, and continued with him in Oxford four years; in which time her great and harmless wit, her cheerful gravity, and her obliging behaviour, gained her an acquaintance and friendship with most of any eminent worth or learning, that were at that time in or near that University; and particularly with Mr. John Donne, who then came accidentally to that place, in this time of her being there.  It was that John Donne who was after Dr. Donne, and Dean of St. Paul’s, London:  and he, at his leaving Oxford, writ and left there, in verse, a character of the beauties of her body and mind:  of the first he says,

  No Spring nor Summer-beauty hath such grace
  As I have seen in an Autumnal face.

Of the latter he says,

  In all her words to every hearer fit,
  You may at revels, or at council sit.

The rest of her character may be read in his printed poems, in that Elegy which bears the name of “The Autumnal Beauty.”  For both he and she were then past the meridian of man’s life.