Chapter Waterland to Webbe of W by Biographical Dictionary of English Literature

best work was, perhaps, his dialect songs, College as Poems and Songs (1859), which brought him great local fame. He was possessed of considerable literary gift, and has been called “the Lancashire Burns.”

Webbe, William (born 1550).—Critic and translator. Almost nothing is known of him except that he was at Cambridge and acted as tutor in certain distinguished families, and was a friend of Spenser. He wrote a Discourse of English Poetrie (1586), in which he discusses metre, rhyme (the use of which he reprehends), and reviews English poetry up to his own day. He also translated the first two of the Eclogues of Virgil in singularly unmelodious hexameters.