of Fuller, seem as strange to us as ruffs and farthingales; but it is only one form of that "full and heightened style" which Webster praised in Chapman's tragedies; and we may fairly ask with the poet, "If I fail in something, let my full performance in other some restore me; . and if I be something paraphrastical and faulty, is it justice in that poor fault (if they will needs have it so) to drown all the rest of my labour?" The passion and energy of Chapman give such an individuality to what is, in one sense, an original poem, that Charles Lamb could declare that the poet "makes his readers glow, weep, tremble, and take any affection he pleases ;" and Dryden, in the very days when poets were congratulating themselves on becoming free from the faults of their Elizabethan predecessors, could assure his readers that the Earl of Mulgrave and Edmund Waller, "two of the best judges of our age," could not "read over the translation of Chapman without incredible transport."

This most "eminent and reverend poet" died in 1634, a year after Laud had entered upon his duties as Archbishop of Canterbury and Wentworth had begun the reign of "Thorough;" and thus the aged poet of seventy-five, of whom Ben Jonson had said that next to himself he alone and Fletcher could make a mask, might in the very year of his death have beheld the dining-hall of Ludlow Castle brightened by the words of Milton's "Comus" and the music of Harry Lawes. Eighteen years had then elapsed since Chapman had been saluted as the "learned shepherd of fair Hitchin hill" by a poet who was thirty-one years his junior.

William
Browne.

William Browne was from Devonshire, and retained all a west-countryman's pride in his lovely native county. He sang its praises in his "Britannia's Pastorals" (Bk. II. Song iii. 6or, etc.), declaring it to be a "blessed spot whose equal all the world *E. W." x. 464.

affordeth not," and felt certain that, even if its natural charms could be matched, yet

"Time never can produce men to o'ertake

The famous Grenville, Davies, Gilbert, Drake,
Or worthy Hawkins, or of thousands more."

Among these last, the minor poet who found favour with Milton, Keats, and Mrs. Browning may claim to take a place. The last three years of Shakespeare's life cover the brief period of Browne's poetical publication; he ceased to produce verse after 1616, at the age of twenty-five. His first poem had been an elegy on the death of Prince Henry, which was issued in 1613 in a volume with another by Christopher Brooke. This same year doubtless saw the publication of the undated first Book of his "Britannia's Pastorals," which was divided into five "Songs," and contained nearly 4,000 lines written in the heroic couplet. Next year seven eclogues, entitled "The Shepheards Pipe," were printed in a volume to which Christopher Brooke, Geo. Wither, and John Davies of Hereford each contributed an additional eclogue in praise of their friend. The second Book of the Pastorals--also in five "Songs" containing 5,000 linesappeared in 1616. Browne lived nearly thirty years longer, dying, probably, about 1645, but he published no more. poetry. In 1852 a fragment of a third Book of the Pastorals was printed from a neatly written MS. which had been discovered at Salisbury by Beriah Botfield while searching the Cathedral Libraries. This was found bound up at the end of a folio edition of Books I. and II., and contained but two "Songs," one of 1,000 and the other of 300 lines, together with a few short poems, the manuscript of which had been much corrected. Browne's "Masque of the Inner Temple," acted at Whitehall Jan. 13th, 1614-15, also lay unpublished for a century and a half, until Thomas Davies printed it in the second edition of the two

Books of the Pastorals in 1772. Other poems were first printed in 1815 from a MS. in the British Museum bearing the date 1650.

Born at Tavistock, probably in 1591, William Browne was first educated at the grammar school of his native town, and passed at the beginning of James I.'s reign to Exeter College, Oxford. He left without a degree, came to London, and entered at Clifford's Inn, which he quitted for the Inner Temple in November, 1612. At the age of thirty-three he returned to Oxford as tutor to Robert Dormer, afterwards Earl of Carnarvon, and was then admitted M.A. His closing years were passed at Dorking, in Surrey, where, at the now ruined castle of Betchworth, there then lived a family of his own name, to whom he was doubtless related. His first wife had died in 1614, and after thirteen years of courtship he wedded in second marriage the daughter of Sir Thomas Eversfield of Horsham, that quiet country town to which in more recent days the name of Shelley has added a further literary association. A portion of Browne's life after leaving College had been passed at Wilton, where we have seen Sir Philip Sidney writing his "Arcadia" for the pleasure of his sister the Countess of Pembroke, and it was probably in memory of this lady that Browne wrote the well-known lines, which have often been attributed to Ben Jonson.*

See "E. W." ix. 123, where the lines are quoted. They were never ascribed to Jonson till 1756, when Peter Whalley printed them in his edition of that poet's works. They were first printed anonymously in 1658; and again in 1660, in the "Poems of Wm. E. of Pembroke and Sir Benj. Rudyerd" (p. 66), a volume known to contain verse by neither of these writers (see Bibliography, under Dyer, No. 9). Aubrey, in quoting them, said that they were written by "Mr. Browne who wrote the Pastorals;" and the mid-seventeenth century MS. copies at Trinity College, Dublin, and among the Lansdowne MSS., are both signed "W. Browne." In these MSS. the six lines given in "E. W." ix. p. 123 are followed by six other weaker lines. Hazlitt suggested that these were by Pembroke, the son of the countess, and

The story of Celand and Marina, contained in the ten thousand lines of the "Pastorals," is a labyrinth without a clue; we never seek to trace it. But though there are portions of the poem which are tame, homely, and almost puerile, yet other portions with attractive sweetness disclose patches of real poetry in their pictures of quiet country life -the angler, the hunter, nut-picking, the May games, the bridals and feastings; while the song of the birds and the ripple of the stream are heard among the trees and flowers. Its charm is felt in detachable portions, and one such is that in Bk. II. (Song II. 281-342), in which Browne passes in review his poetic friends-Chapman, all-loved Drayton, well-knowing Jonson, well-languaged Daniel, and all-worthy Broke, John Davies, and George Wither with their learned lays.

Giles

Fletcher.

Giles Fletcher, "equally beloved of the Muses and of the Graces," born, it is said, in 1588, came of a poetic family. His father was the author of "Licia ;"* his elder brother Phineas wrote "The Purple Island ;" and his cousin was the dramatic associate of Beaumont. Browne did not include him in his list; for although, according to Fuller, Fletcher was born in London and educated at Westminster School, yet his brief literary life had nothing in common with that of the poets of the metropolis. Its centre and circumference was at Cambridge. Not even Thomas Gray himself can claim an association more intimate than that of the Stuart poet with the University town. As undergraduate, scholar, minor Fellow, reader in Greek grammar and language, Fletcher passed fifteen years nearly half of his short life-among the colleges of the place of which he lovingly said it was "after heaven

that this had led to the insertion of all twelve among the earl's poems. (See Mr. Goodwin's edition of Browne's poems, 1894, Vol. II. p. 350, being a note on p. 294.)

* "E. W." x. 213-14.

principally to be desired." There, in 1603,* as an undergraduate he had signed "G. Fletcher Trinit." to his first published verse, a "Canto" on Elizabeth, which formed part of an academic volume printed after the queen's death. There, in 1610, his most notable poem was published, and dedicated to the Master of his own College, Dr. Nevile. There each of the two subsequent editions appeared in 1632 and 1640. There he had already developed that vein of fancy, seen also in his brother, which marks his verse; for even when preaching at the University church of St. Mary, "his prayer before the sermon usually consisted of one entire allegory, but led on most proper in all particulars." He only quitted Cambridge to hold a living in the gift of his College, and when he found his final sphere of labour it was most probably from the hand of a former Cambridge and Trinity student that he received it. He calls the author of the "Advancement of Learning" his "honourable benefactor," and it is known that the living of Alderton was formerly in possession of the Bacon family. Here, on the flat Suffolk coast, in the lonely village cure, the scholarly poet drooped and died; "his clownish and low parted Parishioners (having nothing but their shoes high about them) valued not their Pastor according to his worth, which disposed him to melancholy and hastened his dissolution." Thus wrote quaint Thomas Fuller, deriving his information from the Rev. John Ramsay, who had married the poet's widow after his death in 1623.

"Christs Victorie, and Triumph in Heauen, and Earth, over, and after death," is practically a brief epic of 2,100 lines, in four Books, replete with allegory and dealing

* If Fletcher was born in 1588, he was only fifteen when this poem appeared. This seems unlikely. His brother Phineas entered college at eighteen; why should it not be supposed that Giles also did? He would then be born about 1585, and three years, instead of six, would separate the brothers.