WILLIAM BROWNE, OF TAVISTOCK.
THE author of Britannia's Pastorals is a Devonshire worthy. He was the contemporary of Herrick, and as the one lived at Tavistock and the other held the living of Dean Prior, it is probable that the poets were acquainted. The contrast between the two men is sufficiently striking. Browne published all his poems before he was eight-and-twenty, and these poems, rich in fancy, luxuriant in style, and written in a coarse age, are remarkable for moral purity. Herrick, on the other hand, although a clergyman by profession, was the most amatory of poets, and published, after middle-life, poems as remarkable for lyrical sweetness as for voluptuousness of expression. He sings the charms of many mistresses in no mea- sured language, and all his life long the bachelor priest seems to have been making love or writing love verses ; Browne had apparently an early disappointment; yet, if so, it did but serve to make him chivalrous to women, and he gained his reward in a happy but brief period of married life. Both poets abound in rural descriptions, but Browne found his delight in the country, while Herrick hated the solitariness of the life which he was forced to lead in " dull Devonshire." As literary artists, the palm beyond all doubt must be awarded to Herrick, some of whose lyrics have a consummate beauty which it is more easy to enjoy than to de- scribe ; in Browne we find little that is not marred by defect of taste and crudeness of form, but much also that is suggestive, and of poetical beauty.
In his own day Browne was a distinguished man, for he won the friendship and the praise of Ben Jonson, Drayton, Chapman, Selden, and Wither, but it would seem that he was unacquainted with the Fletchers—Phineas and Giles, which is the more strange as those poets belonged to the same school as Browne, and followed in the track of his master and theirs—Edmund Spenser.
The biography of Browne, notwithstanding his friends and his fame is meagre in the extreme, for what Lord Macaulay calls the lees Boswelliana, so prevalent iu our time, was unknown in those early days. We neither learn how be lived nor where he died, and so few facts are recorded concerning him, that Mr. Hazlitt (like Mr. Hales in his recent memoir of Spenser) is forced to search the works in order to read, as far as may be, the poet's biography from the poems. From other sources he has added one or two new facts and several conjectures, and has probably done as much for Browne's fame as it is now possible to do. This noble edition of the works is the finest tribute that could be rendered to a poet's memory. For the first time they are edited with competent knowledge and skill, and there are few lovers of this old writer who will not rejoice to see him thus appreciated and • The Whole Works of William Browne, of Tavistock and of the Inner Temple; now first collected and edited, with a Memoir of the Pod and Notes. By W. Carew Hazlitt, of the Inner Temple. 2 vols. Printed for the Boxburghe Library. honoured. Mr. Hazlitt has spared no labour in the work. The text of the first and second books of the " Pastorals " is republished from the second edition which appeared in Browne's life-time. To the third book, printed for the first time in 1851 from the original MS. in the Cathedral Library at Salisbury, Mr. Hazlitt has devoted a careful examination, and feels convinced that there was never any real ground for questioning its authenticity. In the " Shepheards Pipe" the "old text is represented with scrupulous fidelity," and in all other of the poems Mr. Hazlitt has either himself collated the text with the original, or has received. the assistance of competent friends.
For more reasons than one, Browne is worthy of the conscien- tious labour thus bestowed upon him. His poems are injured by the conceits of the age, and by the passion for pastoral poetry and for allegory which infected so many of Spenser's immediate successors. The Faerie Queene is the most beautiful allegorical poem in the language, but it is the beauty of the poetry and not of the allegory which makes it so dear to us. Spenser's in- comparable genius enabled him to overcome difficulties with which smaller men could not cope. His imitators, weak where he was strong, caught at. his defects eagerly, and in the process of transmission multiplied them tenfold. Yet among Spenser's followers there were true poets, and not one has a better claim to the title than the author of Britannia's Pastorals. No mere versifier can stimulate the genius of greater men, but this has been notably done by Browne, whose works afforded sugges- tions to Milton and to Keats. Mr. Hazlitt gives us an interesting account of the sale some years ago of a folio copy of Britannia's Pastorals containing Milton's MSS. notes, some of which he transcribes. They are comparatively unimportant, and contain no judgment on the poem, but they show with what extreme care it must have been read. Mr. Hazlitt observes that Browne was one of Milton's favourite authors, which is perhaps too strong an assertion, but it is certain that Milton is indebted to him for sug- gestions iu Lycidas, Comus, and Paradise Regained.
In a letter now first published from one of the .Ashmolean MSS., Mr. Hazlitt shows that " in 1640 Browne was resident, either permanently or temporarily, at Dorking, in Surrey, in what he terms ' his poore cell and sequestration from all businesse.' " This is an interesting fact, not only because an ancestor of Browne had resided at Betchwortb. Castle, afterwards the residence of Abraham Tucker, but because Browne's name may now be added to the long list of illustrious men who have lived or sojourned in that charming neighbourhood. He, too, in common with Spenser, Drayton, Milton, Pope, and Thomson, has sung of the Mole, a comparatively insignificant stream, except for the peculiarity of its swallows, but a stream upon which has been conferred poetical immortality.
Spenser enjoys the just and enviable title of " the poet's poet," but the term might, with some truth, perhaps, be also applied to Browne. He will never again be popular, as he unquestionably was in his life-time ; but he will, we think, be always read by poets and students of poetry. The task of perusing his works is not wholly pleasurable. if he charms us on one page he wearies us on another ; if he delights us one moment with a genuine bit of nature, at the next he is involved in the subtleties of allegory, and becomes unreadable, if not unintelligible. When at his best, his poetry is like a breath of sweet country air, or like the scent of newly-mown grass. His similes, drawn from what we are wont to call common objects, are often singularly happy ; he gives us fresh draughts from nature, and his verse is frequently marked by an Arcadian simplicity contrasting pleasantly with the classical conceits and the forced allusions over which in other portions the reader is doomed to groan. On the whole, we may still agree with Ben Jonson in his judgment of his " truly-belov'd friend," that what he has written is " most worthy to be read," and that his worth is " good upon the Exchange of Letters."
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