Few readers are below the level of the poem, which Ben calls
The bound and frontier of our poesy.
"Bosworth Field" is written in rhyming decasyllabic couplets, which come near to the measure as later used for heroic and satiric poetry, though the lines sometimes carry on the sense in the style disused by Pope. The story of the death of Richard III, disdaining to fly, is spirited, though it cannot rival the old ballad on the same subject. In translations from the "Satires of Horace," Beaumont comes nearer to the model of Dryden and Pope. "An Ode of the Blessed Trinity" is perhaps the most pleasing of the sacred poems. Beaumont could have taught much to the Royal Prentice in verse, James I, whom he salutes as his master,
Your judicious rules have been my guide.
He translated the "Tenth Satire of Juvenal," and wrote many verses to friends, and elegies.
William Browne, born about 1590-91, of a Devonshire family, went to Exeter College, Oxford, and to the Inns of Court. In 1613 he published the first part of his "Britannia's Pastorals," with commendatory verses, including some, more cautious than usual, by Ben Jonson. The pastorals have the usual defects of the obsolete kind of composition and of Browne's own age of conceits. They are extremely prolix, very artificial, rich in classical allusions, and occasionally in puns. The rhymed decasyllabic couplets carry on the sense, as was usual before Waller and Pope.
"The Shepherd's Pipe" is a collection of eclogues and dialogues between long-winded shepherds, in a variety of metres. The popular tale of the father's bequests, the ring, cloth, and brooch of magical qualities, is told in stanzas of seven lines. The swains occasionally conduct themselves very like "our liberal shepherds"; at other times their songs of nature and the birds are pretty and pleasing. A pastoral elegy for Mr. Thomas Elwood is an elegy and pastoral, in these respects alone it resembles "Lycidas". In "The Inner Temple Masque," taken from the Odyssey about Ulysses and Circe, the Sirens' song and Circe's charm are pretty, but not on the highest level of the contemporary lyrics.
About 1624 Browne is said to have been the tutor at Oxford of the Hon. Robert Dormer, afterwards Earl of Caernarvon, who fell, on the Royalist side, at Newbury in 1643: the date of Browne's own death is unknown.
His poems seem never to have been popular. In the vast realm of Spenser can be found all the merits of Browne on a far higher level; and Browne's defects, for he even drops into the allegoric style which dominated the latter Middle Ages and seemed immortal, are exceedingly abundant in all the pastoral verse between Spenser and Milton.