from the title-page of the 1615 volume, while the author was in prison in the Marshalsea for hunting vice with a pack of satires in full cry, that is, the Abuses Stript and Whipt of 1611.  The verse seldom rises above an amiable mediocrity, the best that can be said for it being that it carries on, in a not wholly unworthy manner, the dainty tradition of the octosyllabic couplet between the Faithful Shepherdess and Milton’s early poems.  Browne’s eclogues are chiefly remarkable for the introduction into the first of a long and rather tedious tale derived from a manuscript of Thomas Occleve’s.  The last of the series, an elegy on the death of Thomas, son of Sir Peter Manwood, has been quoted as the model of Lycidas, but the resemblance begins and ends with the fact that in either case the subject of the poem met his death by drowning—­a resemblance which will scarcely support a charge of plagiarism[121].

In 1621 appeared six eclogues under the title of The Shepherd’s Tales by the prolific miscellaneous writer Richard Brathwaite.  Each in its turn recounts the amorous misfortunes of some swain, which usually arise out of the inconstancy of his sweetheart, and the prize of infelicity having been adjudged, the author, not perhaps without a touch of malice, sends the whole company off to a wedding.  The Tales are noteworthy for the very pronounced dramatic gift they reveal, being in this respect quite unique in their kind.  The same year saw the publication of the not very successful expansion of one of these eclogues into the pastoral narrative in verse, entitled ‘Omphale or the Inconstant Shepherdesse.’  Brathwaite had already in 1614 published the Poet’s Willow, containing a ‘Pastorall’ which recounts the unsuccessful love of Berillus, an Arcadian shepherd, for the nymph Eliza[122].

Pursuing the chronological order we come next to Phineas Fletcher’s ‘Piscatorie Eclogs’ appended to his Purple Island in 1633.  Except that the scene is laid on the banks of a river instead of in the pastures, and that the characters spend their time looking after boats and nets instead of tending flocks, they differ in nought from the strictly pastoral compositions.  They are seven in number, and deal either with personal subjects or with conventional themes.  As an imitation of the Shepherd’s Calender, without its uncouthness whether of subject or language, and equally without its originality or higher poetic value, the work is not wanting in merit, but it is most decidedly wanting in all power to arrest the reader’s attention.