We may be sure that the poet received his meed of praise from King, Princess, and Elector, and from officials of the Court—the Earl of Nottingham, Lord Privy Seal, and Bacon, "the chief contriver"; and that he sat high at the "solemn supper in the new Marriage-room" which the King made them on the Sunday,—maybe "at the same board" with the King who doubtless jested much at the expense of Prince Charles and his followers. For they had to pay for the feast, "having laid a wager for the charges, and lost it in running at the ring."[83]
If it had not been customary for members of the Inns of Court to retain connection with the Society to which they belonged, even after they had ceased to be in residence, especially if still living in the City, we might infer from his authorship of this masque that Beaumont had kept in touch with the Inner Temple. Though he had not professed the law, the quiddities of its parlance enliven various passages of his Woman-Hater and of the plays which he later wrote with Fletcher. Whether he kept his name on the books or not, the Inner Temple was in a social sense his club for life; and it was to "those Gentlemen that were his acquaintance there" that the publisher Mosely turned for help when searching for his portrait in 1647. The students of his generation were by 1612, many of them, utter barristers, ancients, and benchers: he would affiliate with them; and that he should be acquainted with the "Gentlemen who were actors" in his masque goes without saying. This was an occasion of tremendous moment to the members of the allied Houses. They were conferring the highest honour upon their poet, and every man on the books of each Inn knew him by name and face. One of the Fellows, John, afterwards Sir John, Fenner provides a messenger "to fetch Mr Beaumont," and advances 10li. "toward the mask business." Another, Lewis Hele is twice paid 70li. toward the same business. From Chamberlain's letter, we learn that the passage by water to Whitehall "cost them better than three hundred pound,"—from two thousand to twenty-four hundred pounds, in the money of to-day. From the records of the Societies for "the 10th of King James," we find that "the charge in apparell of the Actors in that great Mask at White-hall was supported" by each Society; "the Readers at Gray's Inn being each man assessed at 4l., the Ancients, and such as at that time were to be called Ancients, at 2l. 10s. apiece, the Barristers at 2l. a man, and the Students at 20s."; and that on May 4, 1613, the Inner Temple is still indebted over and besides the contribution of the House "for the late show and sports ... not so little as 1200li.,"—that is to say, from seven to nine thousand pounds according our present valuation.[84] Beaumont in his Dedication of the quarto (published soon afterwards) to the worthy Sir Francis Bacon and the grave and learned Bench of the anciently-allied Houses of Gray's Inn and the Inner Temple, is addressing friends when he says "Yee that spared no time nor travell in the setting forth, ordering, and furnishing of this Masque ... will not thinke much now to looke backe upon the effects of your owne care and worke: for that whereof the successe was then doubtfull, is now happily performed and gratiously accepted. And that which you were then to thinke of in straites of time, you may now peruse at leysure."
Of the gentlemen-masquers, and "the towardly yoong, active, gallant Gentlemen of the same houses," who, as their convoy "set forth from Winchester-House which was the Rende vous towards the Court, about seven of the clock at night," on that occasion, the most directly interested in the event would be a group of literary friends of which the central figure was William Browne of Tavistock. He had been at Clifford's Inn, one of the preparatory schools for the Inner Temple, on the other side of Fleet Street, since about 1608, had migrated to the Inner Temple in November 1611, and had been admitted a member in March 1612. He was some five years younger than Beaumont, and, like Beaumont, was at just that time on intimate terms of friendship with the last of the Elizabethan pastoralists, Michael Drayton,—on terms of reciprocal admiration and friendship also with Beaumont's dramatic associates, Jonson and Chapman; and he had himself, in 1613, been engaged for three years upon the composition of the charming First Book of his Britannia's Pastorals. In a letter written some years later to a lover of the Pastoral,—the translator of Tasso's Aminta, Henery Reynolds, Esq.,—Of Poets and Poesy, and published in 1627, Drayton couples William Browne so closely with Sir John and Francis Beaumont that even if the trio were not, in various ways, affiliated with the same legal Society we could not escape the conclusion that the brothers were near and dear to Browne. "Then," writes Drayton, after mentioning other literary acquaintances,—
Then the two Beaumonts and my Browne arose,
My deare companions whom I freely chose
My bosome friends; and in their severall wayes,
Rightly borne Poets, and in these last dayes,
Men of much note, and no lesse nobler parts,—
Such as have freely tould to me their hearts,
As I have mine to them.
We may proceed upon the assumption that it would have been impossible for these bosom friends of Drayton, members of the same club, not to have known each other. Especially, if we recall that Browne was a literary disciple of Fletcher in pastoral poetry, between 1610 and 1616, and that he had Beaumont's masque and poetic fame in mind when, in the Dedication of his own Masque of Ulysses and Circe, presented by the same Society of the Inner Temple not quite two years later, January 13, 1615, he said, "If it degenerate in kind from those other our Society hath produced, blame yourselves for not seeking to a happier Muse."
I am at pains thus to emphasize the acquaintance of Browne and Beaumont, because our acquaintance with the latter is enriched if we may regard him as familiarly associated with the literary coterie of the Inns of Court. Browne and Beaumont had friends in common beside Drayton, Chapman, and Jonson. To, and of, Elizabeth, the daughter of Sir Philip Sidney, Beaumont writes, as we shall presently notice, in terms of admiration and intimacy. And it is for Mary, the sister of Sir Philip, that William Browne composes, in or after 1621, the immemorial epitaph,
Underneath this sable hearse
Lies the subject of all verse:
Sydney's sister, Pembroke's mother;
Death, ere thou hast slain another,
Fair, and learn'd, and good as shee
Time shall throw his dart at thee.
To this Pembroke, William Herbert, third Earl, Browne dedicates the Second Book of the Pastorals, 1616, which contains the beautiful tribute to Sidney and his Arcadia; and Pembroke shows his regard for the young poet by appointing him tutor to a wealthy ward, and later taking him into the service of his own family at Wilton. In 1614 John Davies of Hereford wrote the third eclogue appended to Browne's Shepherd's Pipe, in which he figures as old Wernock, and Browne as Willy; and, in 1616, commendatory verses to the Second Book of Browne's Pastorals,—beginning "Pipe on, sweet swaine." He had already in 1610, addressed "the most ingenious Mr. Francis Beaumont" in an epigram of like familiarity and devotion:
Some that thy name abbreviate, call thee Franck:
So may they well, if they respect thy witt;
For like rich corne (that some fools call too ranck)
All cleane Wit-reapers still are griping it;
And could I sow for thee to reape and use,
I should esteeme it manna for the Muse.[85]
Another of this little group of late Spenserian pastoralists was, as we shall later see, an admirer of Beaumont. This is William Basse, probably the composer of the lines In Laudem Authoris, signed W. B., and prefixed to the 1602 edition of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus. With the commendatory verses of Davies, George Wither, Thomas Wenman, and others in Browne's Second Book of the Pastorals, appear some again signed W. B. "It is just possible," according to the most recent editor of Browne's poems,[86] "that Basse and Browne were kinsmen." It is certain that Basse was a retainer in the family of the poetic Thomas Wenman who was Browne's contemporary at the Inner Temple. Basse, himself, had published three pastoral elegies in 1602, and he was still writing pastorals half a century later. Another of this group, George Wither, had since 1606 been of one of the adjoining Inns of Chancery. He is the Roget, Thyrsis, Philarete of this pastoral field. In 1614, he wrote the third eclogue supplementary to Browne's Shepherd's Pipe; and in 1615 he was a neighbor of the Inner Temple poets, at Lincoln's Inn. In that eclogue he speaks of a Valentine on "the Wedding of fair Thame and Rhine" which he had composed on the occasion of the royal marriage; and in the first Epithalamium of the Valentine, he refers explicitly to the masques of Chapman and Beaumont. He must have known both those "Heliconian wits." "I'm none," he says with self-depreciation,—