BROWNE, WILLIAM (1591-1643), English pastoral poet, was born at Tavistock, Devonshire. He is said to have proceeded to Oxford c. 1603. He entered the Inner Temple in 1611. His elegy on the death of Henry, prince of Wales, and the first book of Britannia's Pastorals appeared in 1613 ; the Shepherd's Pipe, which contained some eclogues by other poets, in 1614; and the second book of the pastorals in 1616. The times were unfavour able to his tranquil talent, and he retired to private life.
Browne's Arcadia is localized in his native Devonshire. He was untiring in his praises of "Tavy's voiceful stream (to whom I owe more strains than from my pipe can ever flow)." He knew local history and traditions, and he celebrates the gallant sailors who "by their power made the Devonian shore Mock the proud Tagus" (Brit. Past. bk. ii., song 3). It is for his truthful, affec tionate pictures of his country life and its surroundings that the stories of Marina and Celandine, Doridon and the rest are still read. A copy of Browne's pastorals with annotations in Milton's handwriting is preserved in the Huth library, and there are many points of likeness between Lycidas and the elegy on Philarete (Thomas Manwood) in the fourth eclogue of the Shepherd's Pipe. Keats also was a student of Browne.
The first two books of Britannia's Pastorals were re-issued in 1625. The third, though it had no doubt circulated in the author's lifetime, was edited from a ms. for the Percy Society by T. C. Croker in 1852. A collected edition of Browne's works was pub lished in 1772 by John Davies. Some sonnets to Caelia, epistles, elegies and epitaphs, with miscellaneous poems, were printed for the first time by Sir S. E. Brydges in 1815; excellent modern com plete editions of Browne include W. C. Hazlitt's (1868-60 for the Roxburghe library, and a more compact one (1894) by Mr. Gordon Goodwin, with an introduction by Mr. A. H. Bullen, for the "Muses' Library." For an elaborate analysis of Browne's obligations to earlier pastoral writers see F. W. Moorman, "William Browne," Quellen and Forschungen zur Sprach- and Kulturgeschichte der Germanischen Volker (Strassburg, 1897).