Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/164

144 guides were Spenser and Sidney, and more immediately Michael Drayton. Not only is some of the best of Drayton's seventeenth-century work pastoral, but his Polyolbion (begun in 1598, and probably well known to his friends before its publication in 1612 and 1622) had excited enthusiasm for English scenery and rivers. If Jacobean pastoral poetry is often tedious and long-winded, if its cultivators produced no such delicate, courtly exotic as the Aminta—to which, after all, the later Comus is a very satisfactory counter-weight,—yet under Drayton's influence it became more truly natural in sentiment, a more faithful mirror of English scenery, and some of the sweetest versification of this period, when Donne's and Jonson's bold experiments were unsettling English prosody, is to be found in pastorals written north and south of the Tweed.

All these features are discoverable in the poems of William Browne (1590-1645?) of Tavistock in Devonshire—

"Blessed spot,                Whose equal all the world affordeth not."

Educated at Oxford, he became a member of the Inner Temple, where he was the friend of Drayton, Chapman, Jonson, Selden, Wither, and Brooke. The first part of Britannia's Pastorals appeared in 1613. In the following year he published some more regular eclogues, The Shepherd's Pipe, to which Wither and others contributed. The second part of the longer poem appeared in