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 received at Wilton, the home of the Herberts.  After his second marriage he moved to Dorking and there settled.  He died in or before the year 1645.  In the letters of administration granted to his widow (November, 1645) he is described as “late of Dorking, in the county of Surrey, Esquire.”  But there is no entry of his death in the registers at Dorking or Horsham:  so perhaps he went back to lay his bones in his beloved Devon.  A William Browne was buried at Tavistock on March 27th, 1643.  This may or may not have been our author.  “Tavistock,—­Wilton,—­Dorking,” says Mr. Bullen,—­“Surely few poets have had a more tranquil journey to the Elysian Fields.”

An amiable poet.

As with his life, so with his poetry—­he went about it quietly, contentedly.  He learned his art, as he confesses, from Spenser and Sidney; and he took it over ready-made, with all the conventions and pastoral stock-in-trade—­swains languishing for hard-hearted nymphs, nymphs languishing for hard-hearted swains; sheep-cotes, rustic dances, junketings, anadems, and true-love knots; monsters invented for the perpetual menace of chastity; chastity undergoing the most surprising perils, but always saved in the nick of time, if not by an opportune shepherd, then by an equally opportune river-god or earthquake; episodes innumerable, branching off from the main stem of the narrative at the most