For the present it is sufficient to say that Basse was himself issuing a pastoral romance in the year of _Salmacis_, 1602; and that he was by way of subscribing himself simply W. B. The external evidence for Beaumont's authorship of this metrical tale is, at the best, but slight. As regards the internal, however, I cannot agree with Fleay and the author of the article entitled _Salmacis and Hermaphroditus not by Beaumont_.[23] Both diction and verse display characteristics not foreign to Beaumont's heroic couplets in epistle and elegy, nor to the blank verse of his dramas,--though they do not markedly distinguish them. The romantic-classical and idyllic grace may be the germ of that which flowers in the tragicomedies; and the joyous irony is not unlike that of _The Woman-Hater_ and _The Knight of the Burning Pestle_. The poem is a voluptuous and rambling expansion of the classical theme "which sweet-lipt Ovid long agoe did tell." The writer, like many a lad of 1602, has steeped himself in the amatory fable and fancy of Marlowe, Chapman, and Shakespeare; and the passionate imaginings are such as characterize poetic lads of seventeen in any period. It is not impossible that here we have Francis Beaumont's earliest attempt at a poem of some proportions, and that he was stirred to it by exercises like _The Endimion and Phoebe_ of Drayton, probably by that time the friend of the Grace-Dieu family. Francis, indeed, need not have been ashamed of such a performance, for in spite of the erotic fervour and the occasional far-fetched conceits, the poet has visualized clearly the scenes of his mythological idyl, and enlivened the narrative with ingenuous humour; he has caught the figured style and something of the winged movement of his masters; and every here and there he has produced lines of more than imitative beauty: Looke how, when Autumne comes, a little space Paleth the red blush of the Summer's face, Searing the leaves, the Summer's covering, Three months in weaving by the curious Spring,-- Making the grasse, his greene locks, go to wracke, Tearing each ornament from off his backe; So did she spoyle the garments she did weare, Tearing whole ounces of her golden hayre.