is an observation, that desire and doubt have no rest, for he immediately sent a servant to Drury-House, with a charge to hasten back and bring him word “whether Mrs. Donne was dead or alive, and if alive in what condition she was as to her health.”  The twelfth day the messenger returned with this account; “that he found and left Mrs. Donne very sad and sick in her bed; and that after a long and dangerous labour she had been delivered of a dead child, and upon examination the birth proved, to be on the same day, and about the very hour Mr. Donne affirmed he saw her pass by him in his chamber.”——­After Donne’s return from France, many of the nobility pressed the King to confer some secular employment upon him; but his Majesty, who considered him as better qualified for the service of the church than the state, rejected their requests, tho’ the Earl of Somerset, then the great favourite, joined in petitioning for his preferment.  About this time the disputes concerning the oaths of allegiance and supremacy being agitated, Mr. Donne by his Majesty’s special command, wrote a treatise on that subject, entitled, Pseudo Martyr, printed in 4to, 1610, with which his Majesty was highly pleased, and being firmly resolved to promote him in the church, he pressed him to enter into holy orders, but he being resolved to qualify himself the better for the sacred office by studying divinity, and the learned languages deferred his entering upon it three years longer, during which time he made a vigorous application to these branches of knowledge, and was then ordained both deacon and priest, by Dr. John King, then bishop of London.  Presently after he was appointed one of the chaplains in ordinary to his Majesty, and about the same time attending the King in a progress, he was created Dr. in divinity, by the university of Cambridge, by the particular recommendation of that Prince[5] His abilities and industry in his profession were so eminent, and himself so well beloved, that within the first year of his entering into holy orders, he had the offer of fourteen benefices from persons of quality, but as they lay in the country, his inclination of living in London, made him refuse them all.  Upon his return from Cambridge his wife died, and his grief for her loss was so great, that for some time he betook himself to a retired and solitary life:  Mrs. Donne died in the year 1617, on the seventh day after the birth of her twelfth child.  She left our author in a narrow unsettled state with seven children then living, to her he gave a voluntary assurance, that he would never bring them under the subjection of a step-mother, and this promise he faithfully kept.  Soon after the death of his wife, he was chosen preacher of Lincoln’s-Inn, and in the year 1619 appointed by King James to attend the earl of Doncaster, in his embassy to the Princes of Germany, and about 14 months after his return to England, he was advanced to the deanery of St. Paul’s.  Upon the vacancy of the deanery, the King sent an order