Little is known of Browne’s life.  He was a native of Tavistock, Devonshire; born, it is thought, in 1591, the son of Thomas Browne, who is supposed by Prince in his ‘Worthies of Devon’ to have belonged to a knightly family.  According to Wood, who says “he had a great mind in a little body,” he was sent to Exeter College, Oxford, “about the beginning of the reign of James I.”  Leaving Oxford without a degree, he was admitted in 1612 to the Inner Temple, London, and a little later he is discovered at Oxford, engaged as private tutor to Robert Dormer, afterward Earl of Carnarvon.  In 1624 he received his degree of Master of Arts from Oxford.  He appears to have settled in Dorking, and after 1640 nothing more is heard of him.  Wood thinks he died in 1645, but there is an entry in the Tavistock register, dated March 27th, 1643, and reading “William Browne was buried” on that day.  That he was devoted to the streams, dales, and downs of his native Devonshire is shown in the Pastorals, where he sings:—­

     “Hail, thou my native soil! thou blessed plot
     Whose equal all the world affordeth not! 
     Show me who can, so many crystal rills,
     Such sweet-cloth’d valleys or aspiring hills;
     Such wood-ground, pastures, quarries, wealthy mines;
     Such rocks in whom the diamond fairly shines.”

And in another place he says:—­

     “And Tavy in my rhymes
     Challenge a due; let it thy glory be
     That famous Drake and I were born by thee.”

The First Book of ‘Britannia’s Pastorals’ was written before its author was twenty, and was published in 1631.  The Second Book appeared in 1616, and both were reprinted in 1625.  The Third Book was not published during Browne’s life.  The ‘Shepherd’s Pipe’ was published in 1614, and ’The Inner Temple Masque,’ written on the story of Ulysses and Circe, for representation in 1614, was first published in Thomas Davies’s edition of Browne’s works (3 vols., 1772).  Two critical editions of value have been brought out in recent years:  one by W. Carew Hazlitt (London, 1868-69); and the other by Gordon Goodwin and A.H.  Bullen (1894).

“In the third song of the Second Book,” says Mr. Bullen in his preface,—­

“There is a description of a delightful grove, perfumed with ‘odoriferous buds and herbs of price,’ where fruits hang in gallant clusters from the trees, and birds tune their notes to the music of running water; so fair a pleasaunce

          ’that you are fain
          Where you last walked to turn and walk again.’

A generous reader might apply that description to Browne’s poetry; he might urge that the breezes which blew down these leafy alleys and over those trim parterres were not more grateful than the fragrance exhaled from the ‘Pastorals’; that the brooks and birds babble and twitter in the printed page not less blithely than in that western Paradise.  What so pleasant as to