His buskins (edg'd with silver) were of silke ...
Those buskins he had got and brought away
For dancing best upon the revell day.
Browne, by the way, wrote the Prefatory Address to this Book of Britannia's Pastorals, June 18, 1613, only three months after Beaumont's Masque upon the "revel day" was acted; and the book was licensed for printing, the same year, November 15.
Returning to our young lion, he will, I fear me, exult (with lust of chase or laughter?) when in the third song of this book, he notes that Doridon, overhearing the love-colloquy of Remond and Fida, can find no other trope to describe their felicity than one drawn from Ovid, and from the so-called Beaumont poem of 1602, Salmacis and Hermaphroditus,—
Sweet death they needs must have, who so unite
That two distinct make one Hermaphrodite.[91]
Lured by such scents as these, our beast of prey may pounce—upon a shadow, or not?—when, having tracked the meandering Browne to the second song of the Second Book, he there hears him rehearse the names of
What shepheards on the sea were seene
To entertaine the Ocean's queene,—
the poets of England: Astrophel (Sidney), "the learned Shepheard of faire Hitching hill" (Chapman), all loved Draiton, Jonson, well-languag'd Daniel, Christopher Brooke, Davies of Hereford, and Wither,
Many a skilfull swaine
Whose equals Earth cannot produce againe,
But leave the times and men that shall succeed them
Enough to praise that age which so did breed them,—
and then, without interim, proceed:
Two of the quaintest swains that yet have beene
Failed their attendance on the Ocean's queene,
Remond and Doridon, whose haplesse fates
Late sever'd them from their more happy mates.[92]