and while gathering flowers to weave a garland for him was surprised by a satyr, who pursued her into a wood.  She sought refuge in a cave, where, being overtaken by her pursuer, she prayed to Diana, and in the last resort to Ina, by whom she was transformed into a spring, which, after drowning the venturesome satyr, ran on to join its waters with those of her beloved Tavy.  Thus Browne wove the common names of his familiar home into a romance of pastoral invention.  The metamorphosis of Arethusa pursued by Alpheus, of Ambra by Ombrone, of the nymphs by the satyrs of the Salices, or as frescoed on the temple of Pales in the Arcadia, the loves of Mulla and Mollana in Spenser, and the mythological impersonations of the Polyolbion, find, as it were, a meeting-place in Browne’s lay of Walla.

The three parts of Britannia’s Pastorals did not appear together.  Book I was published during the winter of 1613-14, Book II in 1616, each containing five songs; while the fragment of Book III, containing two songs only, remained in manuscript till 1853, when it was discovered in the Cathedral Library at Salisbury, and printed for the Percy Society[136].

The narrative, as may have been inferred from what has already been said, is sufficiently fantastic.  In the introduction of allegorical characters Browne was probably influenced by Spenser, and in a lesser degree by the masque literature of his day and by the study of Langland.  Since the work is unfinished, we may in charity suppose that had Browne completed his design the whole would have presented a somewhat less incongruous appearance; there is, however, a marked tendency towards the accumulation of unexplained incidents, which may most plausibly be referred to the influence of the Spanish romances, especially of the Diana, which was already accessible in Yong’s translation, and one incident of which Browne did undoubtedly borrow.

In style and poetic merit Browne’s work is most astonishingly unequal, though the general level of Britannia’s Pastorals is distinctly higher than that of the Shepherd’s Pipe.  The author passes at times abruptly from careful and loving realism to the most stilted conventionality, and from passages of impassioned eloquence to others grotesquely banal.  In some of his peculiarities, as in the perpetuai use of elaborate similes and in the indulgence in inflated paraphrases, he anticipates some of the worst faults of style cultivated by writers of the next century.  There are portions of the poem where the narrative is literally carried on through a succession of highly wrought comparisons, each paragraph beginning with an ‘As’ followed by a correlative ‘So’ half a page further on.  No such series of pictures, however fairly wrought—­and Browne’s too often end in bathos—­can possibly convey the impression of continuons action.  It is the same with periphrasis.  Used with discretion it may be one of the subtlest ornaments of style, and even when fulfilling no particular purpose is capable of imparting a luxuriant and somewhat rococo richness to the verse.  The effect, however, is frequently one of unrelieved frigidity, as in the lines: