It was about the year 1606 that William Browne left the Grammar School for Exeter College, Oxford. He did not then matriculate or take his degree, but he made friends with his colleagues, several of whom showed their poetical taste in commendatory verses to his _Pastorals_ in 1613. Meanwhile, in November, 1611, Browne had passed on to the Inner Temple, where he largely increased his poetical acquaintance. He was on good terms with Ben Jonson, Chapman, and Massinger amongst our dramatists, and was therefore probably known to Shakspere; but his most intimate friends were John Davies, the able author of _Nosce Teipsum_; Christopher Brooke, the close ally of the famous poet and preacher, John Donne; George Wither, and Michael Drayton. He and Brooke, in 1613, published in one volume their elegies on the death of Prince Henry. He had much in common with the early poems of Wither: their _Pastorals_ exhibit the same charming simplicity, the same full content in verse-making, the same indifference to irresponsive maidens. These lines of Browne:— And gentle Swaine, some counsel take of me; Love not where still thou maist; love who loves thee; strike the same note as that of Wither’s spirited song:— Shall I wasting in despair, Die because a woman’s fair? . . . . . . If she be not so to me, What care I how fair she be? To Drayton, as his “Honor’d Friend,” Browne addressed some verses introductory to the second part of the _Polyolbion_. Regretting the loss to letters when great Eliza died, with Chapman’s _Homer_ in mind, he boasts that we can still render the classics into English without loss:— Whilst our full language, musical and high, Speaks, as themselves, their best of Poesy. Browne’s regret at the general falling-off since the death of Elizabeth suggests that the verses in her honour, which were removed with the plastering from Tavistock Parish Church in 1845, may have been amongst his earliest efforts. They ended with these flattering words:— This! This was she, that in despite of Death, Lives still ador’d, admir’d Elizabeth. Spain’s rod, Rome’s ruin, Netherland’s relief; Heaven’s gem, Earth’s joy, World’s wonder, Nature’s chief. Browne’s elegy on Prince Henry was reprinted as one of the songs in the first book of his _Britannia’s Pastorals_, which was also published in 1613, with commendatory verses from Drayton and Brooke and the learned Selden, besides those from his college friends. In doing the same kindly office for the second book, in 1616, Ben Jonson spoke thus highly of the care and finish of Browne’s work:— which is so good Upon th’ Exchange of Letters, that I wou’d More of our Writers would, like thee, not swell With the _how much_ they set forth, but th’ _how well_.