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To mar our skill, fam'd Linois, thou hast found A certain way, by fighting ships on ground; Fix deep in sand thy centre, van, and rear, Nor e'er St. Vincent, Duncan, Nelson, fear. While, o'er the main, Britannia's thunder rolls, She leaves to thee the trident of the shoals!
"The dust of Gordon is not laid in English earth, nor does even the ocean, which has been named Britannia's realm, hold in 'its vast and wandering grave' the bones of her latest hero.
There is no need to continue the story, for I have nothing to add to the facts set forth in the pamphlet and the play. If Britannia's Pastorals had been written a few years later, we may be sure that William Browne would have paid a fitting compliment to his fellow-townsman's bravery.
But Veneering makes two remarkably good points; so good, that they are supposed to have been suggested to him by the legal gentleman in Britannia's confidence, while briefly conferring on the stairs. Point the first is this. Veneering institutes an original comparison between the country, and a ship; pointedly calling the ship, the Vessel of the State, and the Minister the Man at the Helm.
Hirschberg reproduces in facsimile a large number of the recruiting placards which have decorated the British Isles since the outbreak of war. "England wages war on business lines. It is not the sons of the land who bleed for Britannia's honour; mercenaries from the four corners of the world including blacks carry on the war as a trade for England's business world and nobility.
But let Britannia's son not flatter himself that so he shall escape contamination. His precautions are entirely fruitless. Suppose he does see the whole beast before him, and the very bean-vines, proof positive of first-fruits; cannot the economical landlord gather up heave-shoulder and wave-breast and serve them out to him in next day's mince-pie? Matter revolves, but is never annihilated.
Apparently its poetical quality was satisfactory to those who appoint Laureates. Jubilee-Song, for music, 1897 Hark! the world is full of thy praise, England's Queen of many days; Who, knowing how to rule the free, Hast given a crown to monarchy. Honour, Truth, and growing Peace Follow Britannia's wide increase, And Nature yield her strength unknown To the wisdom born beneath thy throne!
What though, when thou wert lowly laid, Instead of all the pomp of woe, The volley o'er thy bloody bed Was thunder'd by an envious foe: Inspired by it in after time, A race of heroes will appear, The glory of Britannia's clime, To emulate thy bright career.
The association of this ideal world with the simplicity of pastoral life was effected by Vergil, and in this form it was treated with loving minuteness by Tasso in his Aminta and by Browne in his Britannia's Pastorals . The fiction no doubt answered to some need in human nature, but in literature it soon came to be no more than a polite convention.
In style and poetic merit Browne's work is most astonishingly unequal, though the general level of Britannia's Pastorals is distinctly higher than that of the Shepherd's Pipe. The author passes at times abruptly from careful and loving realism to the most stilted conventionality, and from passages of impassioned eloquence to others grotesquely banal.
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