Little is known of his life save that he studied at Oriel College, Oxford; and almost less of his forty-two pastorals, satires, &c., in verse and prose, which were edited by Dr. Grosart in 1877 and 1893.

	Thou, that wouldst find the habit of true passion,
	And see a mind attir’d in perfect strains;
	*        *        *        *        *
	Look here on Breton’s work, the master print:
	Where such perfections to the life do rise.

  Nicholas Breton, a writer of pastoral, sonnets, canzons and madrigals, in which kind of writing he keeps company with several other contemporary æmulators of Spencer and Sir Philip Sidny, in a publist collection of selected odes of the chief pastoral sonnetteers, &c. of that age.

  The ballad of “Phillida and Corydon,” reprinted by Percy, is a delicious little poem; and if we are to judge from this specimen, his poetical powers, for surely he must have had the powers of a poet, were distinguished by a simplicity, at once easy and elegant.

  His happiest vein is in little pastoral pieces. In addition to the long roll of his indifferent works which are enumerated in the “Biographia Poetica,” the “Censura Literaria” imputes to him a novel of singular absurdity, in which the miseries of the heroine of the story are consummated by having her nose bit off by an aged and angry rival of her husband.

  A man of no ordinary genius, writing in his more inspired moments with tenderness and delicacy.

  As a literary man Breton impresses us most by his versatility and his habitual refinement. He is a satirical, religious, romance, and pastoral writer in both prose and verse. But he wrote with exceptional facility, and as a consequence he wrote too much. His fertile fancy often led him into fantastic puerilities. It is in his pastoral lyrics that he is seen at his best. The pathos here is always sincere; the gaiety never falls into grossness, the melody is fresh and the style clear.

  If we could take as his the charming lullaby of “The Arbour of Amorous Devices” he would stand (if only as a kind of “single-speech”) high as a poet. But I fear that Dr. Grosart’s attribution of it to him is based on little external and refuted by all internal evidence. His best certain thing is the pretty “Phillida and Corydon” idyll, which may be found in “England’s Helicon” or in Mr. Ward’s “Poets.” But I own that I can never read this latter without thinking of two lines of Fulke Greville’s in the same metre and on no very different theme—

	“O’er enamelled meads they went,
	Quiet she, he passion-rent,”

which are simply worth all the works of Breton’s prose and verse, unless we count the “Lullaby,” put together. In the mots rayonnants, the mots de lumière, he is sadly deficient. But his work (which is nearly as plentiful in verse as in prose) is, as has been said, very interesting to the literary student, because it shows better perhaps than anything else the style of literature which a man, disdaining to condescend to burlesque or bawdry, not gifted with any extraordinary talent, either at prose or verse, but possessed of a certain literary faculty, could then produce with a fair chance of being published and bought. It cannot be said that the result shows great daintiness in Breton’s public. The verse, with an improvement in sweetness and fluency, is very much of the doggerel style which was prevalent before Spenser; and the prose, though showing considerable faculty, if not of invention, yet of adroit imitation of previously invented styles, is devoid of distinction and point…. The pervading characteristics are Breton’s invariable modesty, his pious, and, if I may be permitted to use the word, gentlemanly spirit, and a fashion of writing which, if not very pointed, picturesque, or epigrammatic, is clear, easy, and on the whole rather superior in observance of the laws of grammar and arrangement to the work of men of much greater note in his day.

  Nicholas Breton was an Elizabethan primitive, who went on publishing fresh volumes until after the death of James I., but without having modified the sixteenth-century character of his style…. Of these short productions “The Passionate Shepherd” is by far the best, and ranks very high among Breton’s contributions to poetry. It is a collection of pastoral lyrics, in a variety of measures, very lightly, liquidly, and innocently thrown off, with no sense of intellectual effort and no great attention to style. Breton has a very pleasant acquaintance with nature…. Breton had the root of poetry in him, but he was no scholar, inartistic, and absolutely devoid of the gift of self-criticism. A small posy has been selected by Mr. Bullen from the wilderness of his overgrown garden.

  There is a naturalness, an easy flow, and gaiety, a tenderness and purity about Breton that ought to restore him to fame.

  As fresh as Nash, as copious as Lodge, but endowed with a finer artistic feeling, and altogether captivating in his ready grace and buoyancy.