This letter, written less than two weeks before his death, is addressed to
one of the most intimate of the friends of Donne's later life. Mrs. Thomas
Cokain, or Cokayne, had been abandoned by her husband, who left her with a
houseful of children, at Ashbourne, the Derbyshire estate of the Cokaynes,
and went to London where the rest of his life was spent in the compilation
of an English-Greek lexicon, which was finally published in 1658, twenty
years after his death.
Donne lived long enough to perform the Lenten service of which he writes.
On February 12th, 1631, he preached at Court the last and most famous of
his sermons, _Deaths Duell, or, A Consolation to the Soule, against the
Dying Life, and living Death of the Body, Delivered in a Sermon at
White-Hall, before the KINGS MAIESTIE, in the beginning of Lent, 1630[1],
By that late Learned and Reverend Divine,_ JOHN DONNE, _Dr. in Divinity,
and Deane of S. Pauls, London_.
Transcriber's Notes:
Passages in italics are indicated by _italics_.
Superscripted characters are indicated by {superscript}.
The original text includes Greek characters. For this text version these
letters have been replaced with transliterations.