All these, however, are local celebrities; and our one poet of public fame is William Browne, the reverent disciple of Sidney and Spenser; the personal friend of Wither and Drayton, Selden and Ben Jonson; the poet’s poet, who suggested more than one idea to Milton, was admired by Keats, and highly commended by Mrs. Browning. He was a bright little man, beloved by his brother-poets for his simple manners and gentle character; such another as Hartley Coleridge, without his weakness of will; so that he was known amongst them as “Bonny Browne” and “Sweet Willy of the Western Main.” William Browne probably came of a knightly family near Great Torrington; but he was born here in Tavistock in 1591—just the most stirring time for minds and morals that England has ever known. The Reformation had stimulated the conscience, as the New Learning had liberated the mind; and then our wonderful deliverance from the mighty power of Spain had produced an extraordinary national exultation. What wonder that this newly-awakened energy should find expression in Spenser and Shakspere, in Hooker and Bacon, and their innumerable, not unworthy satellites? But apart from the general excitement, Tavistock had its own special atmosphere of stirring influences, both from the past and in the present. The inscribed stones in the vicarage garden show that the country was occupied by a Gaelic tribe of Celts early in the Roman times. But the town owed its fame, and probably its very existence, to the great Benedictine monastery, founded by Earl Ordulf, and sanctified by the relics of St. Rumon in the days of Edgar the Peaceable. For almost six centuries it had reflected, and even, for a short while, directly influenced, through its abbots, the changeful course of England’s progress. Two of its earlier abbots were leading statesmen, as well as active prelates. Lyfing, afterwards Bishop of Worcester, was Canute’s fellow-traveller to Rome in 1026, and the staunch friend of the patriotic Earl Godwin. Aldred, also Bishop of Worcester, and then Archbishop of York, was the wise counsellor of Edward the Confessor and of Harold, and the brave rebuker of William I.; he was the great church-builder and church-reformer of his time, and he was the first English Bishop to visit Jerusalem.