Life and Works of Henry King. 239 



is to be found in the fine, sane lines of his own poem, "The Legacy," 

 apparently addressed to Anne Berkeley during their married life. 

 The only positive bit of evidence (if it can be deemed such) to support 

 this theory of King's second marriage is a passage in a hitherto 

 unprinted poem which can only doubtfully be assigned to King 

 (viz. lines 40 and 41, page 286) ; note the wording here: she is never 

 called "thy mother," but only "thy Sires wife" ; and note the tone 

 of lines 40—46 : there is no love mentioned, but merely the idea of 

 helpmate and safeguard, an idea perfectly in accord with the sober 

 common-sense of "St. Valentines day"; and finally, note the date, 

 1630.^ The total absence of any other mention of the event is not 

 especially significant, for evidence as to the details of the first mar- 

 riage and of all the private life of Henry King is exceedingly scanty. 

 A further objection, in the fact that the printer-editors of the editio 

 princeps did not place "St. Valentines day" with the obviously 

 autobiographical poems is also lacking in weight ; for the arrangement 

 of the volume is far from thoroughly systematic, evidently, and then 

 too the poem was placed with a considerable group of quasi-auto- 

 biographical pieces immediately after an indubitably personal poem, 

 and finally the piratical printers ^ may well have been ignorant of 

 an episode twenty-five years old ^ in their author's private life. As for 

 the clause in his Will (Hannah cxii), "to her who was soe nearly 

 related to my most deare and never to bee forgotten Wife," the ab- 

 sence of any surviving relatives of this other wife would make such lang- 

 uage perfectly natural and proper. On the whole, then, it seems quite 

 as likely that Henry King did marry again as that he did not do so.^ 



1 It is, of course, impossible that Anne Berkeley could have been alive in 

 1630, or much if any later than 1624, in fact; for Henry King says of her, 

 in "The Exequy," that she was "scarce" 24 when she died, and so even if 

 she died in 1624 she would have been only 17 or 18 when she married. 

 Furthermore, the 1630 here presumably stands for 1631. 



2 Their own preface confesses the unauthorized character of the venture. 

 ^ This would give 1632 as the approximate date of the second Mistress 



Henry King's demise ; if she existed at all, she probably did not have many 

 years of married life, or some mention of her would have come down to us. 

 At least, the shorter her life, the easier it is to understand the absence of 

 such mention. 



^ It is to be remembered that even in the case of a far better known seven- 

 teenth century writer, no less famous and famihar a figure than Izaak Walton, 

 in fact, doubt on the question of his second marriage was no-*- dispelled until 

 very recently; cf. Keble's ed. of "Hooker's Complete Works," 1851, I, foot- 

 note 2, page 61 ; Nicholas' Walton, 2d ed., i860, page v, etc. 



