Another of this little group of late Spenserian pastoralists was, as we shall later see, an admirer of Beaumont. This is William Basse, probably the composer of the lines _In Laudem Authoris_, signed W. B., and prefixed to the 1602 edition of _Salmacis and Hermaphroditus_. With the commendatory verses of Davies, George Wither, Thomas Wenman, and others in Browne's _Second Book_ of the _Pastorals_, appear some again signed W. B. "It is just possible," according to the most recent editor of Browne's poems,[86] "that Basse and Browne were kinsmen." It is certain that Basse was a retainer in the family of the poetic Thomas Wenman who was Browne's contemporary at the Inner Temple. Basse, himself, had published three pastoral elegies in 1602, and he was still writing pastorals half a century later. Another of this group, George Wither, had since 1606 been of one of the adjoining Inns of Chancery. He is the Roget, Thyrsis, Philarete of this pastoral field. In 1614, he wrote the third eclogue supplementary to Browne's _Shepherd's Pipe_; and in 1615 he was a neighbor of the Inner Temple poets, at Lincoln's Inn. In that eclogue he speaks of a Valentine on "the Wedding of fair Thame and Rhine" which he had composed on the occasion of the royal marriage; and in the first _Epithalamium_ of the Valentine, he refers explicitly to the masques of Chapman and Beaumont. He must have known both those "Heliconian wits." "I'm none," he says with self-depreciation,-- I'm none of those that have the means or place With shows of cost to do your nuptials grace; But only master of mine own desire, Am hither come with others to admire. I am not of those Heliconian wits, Whose pleasing strains the court's known humour fits, But a poor rural shepherd, that for need Can make sheep music on an oaten reed. This "faithful though an humble swain" was of distinctive repute among Beaumont's associates by 1615: no less for the lyric ease of his _Shepherd's Hunting_, or of his Shall I wasting in despair Die because a woman's fair?-- than for the "plain, moral speaking" of the _Abuses Stript and Whipt_ that in 1613-14 had brought him a year's imprisonment in the Marshalsea. Jonson later "personates" him as Chronomastix, or whipper of the times, in a masque at Court; and Beaumont's, and Fletcher's friend, Massinger, introduces him by allusion, in his _Duke of Milan_, about 1620, "I have had a fellow," says the Officer in Act III, ii, of that play-- That could endite forsooth and make fine metres To tinkle in the ears of ignorant madams, That for defaming of great men, was sent me Threadbare and lousy.