Note 57 — Chapter VIII

Something of the same love, but unluckily much less of the same gift, occurs in the poems of a friend of Browne's once hardly known except by some fair verses on Shakespere ("Renowned Spenser," etc.), but made fully accessible by Mr. R. Warwick Bond in 1893. This was William Basse, a retainer of the Wenman family near Thame, the author, probably or certainly, of a quaint defence of retainership, Sword and Buckler (1602), and of other poems—Pastoral Elegies, Urania, Polyhymnia, etc.—together with an exceedingly odd piece, The Metamorphosis of the Walnut-Tree of Boarstall, which is not quite like anything else of the time. Basse, who seems also to have spelt his name "Bas," and perhaps lived and wrote through the first forty or fifty years of the seventeenth century, is but a moderate poet. Still he is not contemptible, and deserves to rank as a member of the Spenserian family on the pastoral side; while the Walnut-Tree, though it may owe something to The Oak and the Brere, has a quaintness which is not in Spenser, and not perhaps exactly anywhere else.