We do not know when or where our poet ended his days, but if, oppressed with sorrow or sickness, he turned with longing to the native scenes which in early youth he had loved so well, it is likely enough that he is referred to in the simple entry of the Tavistock register:—“27th March, 1643, William Browne was buried.” As poets will, Browne went on writing all through life, but he published nothing new after 1616. He left in MS. a third book of the Pastorals, which was first printed in 1852, and a number of smaller poems, sonnets, epistles, visions, allegories, epigrams, epitaphs, and some jocular pieces. Amongst the last were the Lydford stanzas, which contained the first notice of the wild Gubbingses, and the sharp satire on Lydford Law; about 1630 they were “commonly sung by many a fiddler” as a Devonshire ballad. Why did Browne print nothing new after 1616? He had not lost the poetic gift, for much that he left in MS. is as good as anything he ever wrote. We have examples in the first and second songs of the third book of the Pastorals, and nothing that he published is brighter than the song in the Lansdowne MS. with the pleasant refrain: Welcome! Welcome! do I sing! Far more welcome than the Spring! He that parteth from you never, Shall enjoy a Spring for ever!” In truth, William Browne was, as his friend Drayton styled him, “a rightly-born Poet.” If, like the “Faërie Queene,” his Pastorals are vague and diffuse in narrative, and deficient in human interest, yet, like the “Faërie Queene,” they abound in happy visions, and fine descriptions, and wholesome thoughts, expressed in easy, flowing melody. Browne was akin to Keats and Tennyson in his love of well-sounding words and sonorous lines. It gave him keen pleasure— To linger on each line’s enticing graces. And his enjoyment of the simple beauties of nature was as true and heartfelt as Cowper’s. Vivid pictures of country scenes, and homely sketches of country life, are presented to us again and again in verse that is always clear and lucid, though soft and sweet, or rough and rugged, according to the subject. His carefully-constructed verses, in their clearness and in their varying tone, would really seem to have been attuned to the “voiceful Tavy” which he loved so dearly and celebrated so gladly, and by whose side many of them were written. Why, then, with such a gift, so obviously unexhausted, did he decline to publish anything after the appearance of the second book of _Britannia’s Pastorals_, in 1616? Probably he felt, as S. Daniel had felt before him, that a people entirely devoted to action and incident could have little taste for pure poetry. Even as early as 1613 he had described a poor poet, sitting up late, wasting ink and paper, and wearing out “many a gray goose quill,” in the vain hope of immortal renown:—