POEM BY NICHOLAS BRETON.

I have recently purchased a small manuscript in quarto, containing fifteen leaves, written about the year 1590, which consists of a poem in six cantos, without title or name of the author, but which, I feel convinced, from the style, is one of the numerous works of Nicholas Breton. In the hope that some of your correspondents may be able to identify the poem, which may possibly be printed in some of Breton's very rare works, I subjoin the commencing stanzas:

"Where should I finde that melancholy muse,

That never hard of any thinge but mone,

And reade the passiones that her pen doth use,

When she and sorrow sadlye sitt alone

To tell the world more then the world can tell

What fits indeed most fitlye figure hell.

"Lett me not thinke once of the smalest thought

May speake of less then of the greatest gref,

Wher every sence with sorrowes overwrought

Lives but in death, dispayring of relef,

While thus the harte with torments torne asunder

Maye of the worlde be cal'd the wofull wonder."

These two stanzas are by no means favourable specimens of the entire poem, but I prefer to give them, because the work itself may be printed. If it appears, on inquiry, to be still inedited, I may venture to submit a few other extracts from it of a more illustrative character. Our bibliographers would be more useful guides, were they always to give the first lines of old poems. I have a tolerably good library, but can find no work sufficiently descriptive of Breton's works to enable me to trace the above.