I'm none of those that have the means or place
With shows of cost to do your nuptials grace;
But only master of mine own desire,
Am hither come with others to admire.
I am not of those Heliconian wits,
Whose pleasing strains the court's known humour fits,
But a poor rural shepherd, that for need
Can make sheep music on an oaten reed.
This "faithful though an humble swain" was of distinctive repute among Beaumont's associates by 1615: no less for the lyric ease of his Shepherd's Hunting, or of his
Shall I wasting in despair
Die because a woman's fair?—
than for the "plain, moral speaking" of the Abuses Stript and Whipt that in 1613-14 had brought him a year's imprisonment in the Marshalsea. Jonson later "personates" him as Chronomastix, or whipper of the times, in a masque at Court; and Beaumont's, and Fletcher's friend, Massinger, introduces him by allusion, in his Duke of Milan, about 1620, "I have had a fellow," says the Officer in Act III, ii, of that play—
That could endite forsooth and make fine metres
To tinkle in the ears of ignorant madams,
That for defaming of great men, was sent me
Threadbare and lousy.
Still another member of this circle of poets associated with the Inns of Court is the Cuddy of the pastoral poems, the intimate friend of Wither and Browne,—Christopher Brooke, who, though he does not cut much of a figure in his Elegies, or in his Ghost of Richard III, was a lovable and hearty friend, and a distinguished Bencher of Lincoln's Inn. That Brooke was intimate with Shakespeare's company of the King's Servants, at just the period that Beaumont and Fletcher were most closely associated with that company, we have already noticed. As one of the barristers who, in 1612, defended Burbadge and Heming against the bill of complaint brought by Kirkham for recovery of profits in the Blackfriars theatre, he had much to do with having the "plaintiff's bill cleerly and absolutely dismissed out of this courte."[87]
This community of friendship with Browne and Browne's circle gives us, by inference, a clue to an extended list of the gentlemen of London with whom Beaumont cannot have altogether failed to be acquainted. Browne succeeded Beaumont as poet of the Inner Temple, and the friends of the former in that Society would be known to the latter.
Among those who wrote verses laudatory of Browne's Pastorals between 1613 and 1616, was his "learned friend," John Selden, the jurist and antiquary, whose "chamber was in the paper buildings which looke towards the garden." He kept, says Aubrey, "a plentifull table, and was never without learned company": frequently that of Jonson, Drayton, and Camden; and, we may be certain, of John Fletcher, too; for on his mother's side, Selden as his coat of arms and epitaph prove, and as Hasted tells us in his History of Kent, was of the "equestrian" family of Bakers to which Fletcher's stepsisters belonged. Selden was of Beaumont's age to a year, and had been of the Society since 1604. For Browne's book Edward Heyward, also, wrote verses,—Selden's most "devoted friend and chamber-fellow,"—to whom (Aubrey again) "he dedicated his Titles of Honour," 1614. Heyward came from Norfolk and was admitted to the Inner Temple in 1604. And with Selden must be also bracketed, Thomas Wenman, of Oxfordshire; for so Suckling brackets him in the Session of the Poets:
The poets met the other day,
And Apollo was at the meeting, they say....
'Twas strange to see how they flocked together:
There was Selden, and he stood next to the chaire,
And Wenman not far off, which was very faire.
Wenman came to the Inner Temple in 1613; he expresses in his complimentary verses to Browne his wonder that the pastoralist can frame such worthy poetry while as yet "scarce a hair grows up thy chin to grace." Wenman was the son of that Sir Richard whose wife was implicated in the Gunpowder Plot by Mrs. [Elizabeth] Vaux. He succeeded to an Irish peerage in 1640. There was, also, Thomas Gardiner, the son of a rector in Essex. He came to the Inner Temple in 1609, and in 1641 was knighted for his loyalty to King Charles. There was, though not of the Inner Temple, Browne's favourite companion, William Ferrar, the Alexis of the pastoral circle. Ferrar was admitted to the Middle Temple in 1610, and died young. He must have been a graceful and lovable youth, if we may judge from Wither's and Browne's tributes to him. Through his father, "an eminent London merchant, who was interested in the adventures of Hawkins, Drake, and Raleigh," Browne and Beaumont might, if in no other way, have met with Sir Richard and Sir Walter. There were, also, writing praises to Browne, the brothers Croke, sons of Sir John Croke of the King's Bench. They were both of Christ's Church, Oxford, Charles and Unton; and they became students of the Inner Temple in 1609. Charles was something of a poet. In 1613 he was Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College; he took orders, and became a Fellow of Eton College; and during the Civil War fled to Ireland. Unton rose at the Bar, became a member of Parliament, "aided the Parliamentarians during the Civil War and enjoyed the favour of Cromwell." And there was Browne's dear friend, Thomas Manwood, who had entered the Inner Temple in 1611, and whose early death by drowning Browne bewails in the fourth eclogue of the Shepherd's Pipe,—an elegy somewhat fantastic but beautifully sincere, and, in one or two of its fundamental concepts, decidedly reminiscent of Beaumont's elegy written the year before on the death of the Countess of Rutland.