the
footsteps of that river's special poet, William Browne. His poems are
not so well known as they might be, and his most celebrated lines are
nearly always attributed to Ben Jonson--I mean the fine epitaph on
'Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother'--though any doubt as to the author
of the lines is cleared up by a manuscript in the library of Trinity
College, Dublin. Not very many details of his life are known, but he had
the happiness of being better appreciated by his contemporaries than by
posterity, and Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton wrote complimentary
verses, as a sort of introduction to volumes of his poems when they were
published. Browne's work is very uneven, many of his poems are charming,
some diffuse and rather poor; but he had a sincere feeling for Nature,
and his nymphs and swains revelled in posies and garlands in the shade
of groves full of singing birds.

In the third book of his long poem, 'Britannia's Pastorals,' there is a
quaint and pretty song, of which one verse runs:

'So shuts the marigold her leaves
At the departure of the sun;
So from the honeysuckle sheaves
The bee goes when the day is done;
So sits the turtle when she is but one,
And so all woe, as I, since she is gone.'

A deliciously whimsical touch marks his description of a feast of
Oberon:

'The glasses, pure and thinner than we can
See from the sea-betroth'd Venetian,
Were all of ice, not made to overlast
One supper, and betwixt two cowslips cast.
A prettier hath not yet been told,
So neat the glass was, and so feat the mould.
A little spruce elf then (just of the set
Of the French dancer or such marionette),
Clad in a suit of rush, woven like a mat,
A monkshood flow'r then serving for a hat;
Under a cloak made of the Spider's loom:
This fairy (with them, held a lusty groom)
Brought in his bottles; neater were there none;
And every bottle was a cherry-stone,
To each a seed pearl served for a screw,
And most of them were fill'd with early dew.'

Now and again in his verses there peeps out a joyful pride in his
county, and his love of the Tavy is deep to his heart's core.

Some way below Tavistock is Buckland Abbey, founded by Amicia, Countess
of Devon, in 1278, and for long years the home of Cistercians. At the
Dissolution the Abbey was granted for a small sum to Sir Richard
Grenville (grandfather of the hero of the _Revenge_), who alt