LIFE OF WILLIAM BROWNE. BORN 1590.-DIED 1645. WILLIAM BROWNE was the son of a gentleman of Tavistock, in Devonshire. He was educated at Oxford, and went from thence to the Inner Temple, but devoted himself chiefly to poetry. In his twenty-third year he published the first part of his Britannia's Pastorals, prefaced by poetical eulogies, which evince his having been, at that early period of life, the friend and favourite of Selden and Drayton. To these testimonies he afterwards added that of Ben Jonson. In the following year he published the Shepherd's Pipe, of which the fourth eclogue is often said to have been the precursor of Milton's Lycidas. A single simile about a rose constitutes all the resemblance. In 1616, he published the second part of his Britannia's Pastorals. His Masque of the Inner Temple was never printed till Dr. Farmer transcribed it from a MS. of the Bodleian library, for Thomas Davis's edition of Browne's works, more than 120 years after the author's death. He seems to have taken his leave of the Muses about the prime of his life, and returned to Ox ford, in the capacity of tutor to Robert Dormer, Earl of Caernarvon, who fell in the battle of Newbury, 1643. After leaving the university with that nobleman, he found a liberal patron in William, Earl of Pembroke, whose character, like that of Caernarvon, still lives among the warmly coloured and minutely touched portraits of Lord Clarendon. The poet lived in Lord Pembroke's family; and, according to Wood, grew rich in his employment. But the particulars of his history are very imperfectly known, and his verses deal too little with the business of life to throw much light.upon his circumstances. His works exhibit abundant specimens of true inspiration, and had his judgment been equal to his powers of invention, or had he yielded less to the bad taste of his age, or occasionally met with a critic instead of a flatterer, he would have been entitled to a much higher rank in the class of genuine poets. His Pastorals form a vast storehouse of rural imagery and description, and in personifying the passions and affections, he exhibits pictures that are not only faithful but striking, just to nature and to feeling, and frequently heightened by original touches of the pathetic and sublime, and by many of those wild graces which true genius only can exhibit. WILLIAM BROWNE. BRITANNIA'S PASTORALS. BOOK I. THE FIRST SONG. THE ARGUMENT. Marina's freedome now I sing, Of Famine's cave, and then th' abuse As when a mariner (accounted lost) |