Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/165

Rh 1616, the whole in 1625. Browne was also the author of a masque, and of sonnets, jocular verses, epigrams, and epitaphs, the last of which include the beautiful

"Underneath this sable hearse,"

which, however, was till recently attributed to Jonson.

Britannia's Pastorals blends all the diverse strains of Elizabethan pastoralism. Descriptions inspired by Sidney's Arcadia, Spenser's Faerie Queene, and Drayton's Polyolbion are combined with moral allegory and satire, in which the influence of Langland as well as contemporaries is traceable, and all these with Ovidian metamorphoses. A story of wooing and adventure, and the changing of nymphs into streams and flowers, runs through the poem; but there are endless digressions to satirise James's neglect of the fleet, to bewail the death of Prince Henry, or to sing the praise of virtue and of poets dead and living. The whole is borne along on a stream of flowing decasyllabics which suggest the music of the pipe, and whose echo is audible in the varied cadences of Keats's Endymion, which irritated the ear of Quarterly reviewers.

The same high enthusiasm for moral goodness, for nature, and for song, with a more ardent love-strain, uttered in a sweet but shriller music, are the characteristics of all that is best in the poetry of the much too voluble George Wither (1588-1667). A native of Bentworth in Hampshire, for a short