April 21, 1894. William Browne of Tavistock.

It has been objected to the author of _Britannia's Pastorals_ that
their perusal sends you to sleep. It had been subtler criticism, as
well as more amiable, to observe that you can wake up again and,
starting anew at the precise point where you dropped off, continue the
perusal with as much pleasure as ever, neither ashamed of your
somnolence nor imputing it as a fault to the poet. For William Browne
is perhaps the easiest figure in our literature. He lived easily, he
wrote easily, and no doubt he died easily. He no more expected to be
read through at a sitting than he tried to write all the story of
Marina at a sitting. He took up his pen and composed: when he felt
tired he went off to bed, like a sensible man: and when you are tired
of reading he expects you to be sensible and do the same.

A placid life.

He was born at Tavistock, in Devon, about the year 1590; and after the
manner of mild and sensible men cherished a particular love for his
birth-place to the end of his days. From Tavistock Grammar School he
passed to Exeter College, Oxford--the old west-country college--and
thence to Clifford's Inn and the Inner Temple. His first wife died
when he was twenty-three or twenty-four. He took his second courtship
quietly and leisurely, marrying the lady at length in 1628, after a
wooing of thirteen years. "He seems," says Mr. A.H. Bullen, his latest
biographer, "to have acquired in some way a modest competence, which
secured him immunity from the troubles that weighed so heavily on men
of letters." His second wife also brought him a portion. More than
four years before this marriage he had returned to Exeter College, as
tutor to the young Robert Dormer, who in due time became Earl of
Carnarvon and was killed in Newbury fight. By his fellow-collegians--as
by everybody with whom he came into contact--he was highly beloved and
esteemed, and in the public Register of the University is styled, "vir
omni humana literarum et bonarum artium cognitione instructus." He
gained the especial favor of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, whom
Aubrey calls "the greatest Maecenas to learned men of any peer of his
time or since," and of whom Clarendon says, "He was a great lover of
his country, and of the religion and justice, which he believed could
only support it; and his friendships were only with men of those
principles,"--another tribute to the poet's character. He was familiarly
re