QUERIES.

NICHOLAS BRETON'S "CROSSING OF PROVERBS."

Although my query respecting William Basse and his poem, "Great
Britain's Sun's Set," (No. 13. p. 200), produced no positive
information touching that production, it gave an opportunity to some
of your correspondents to communicate valuable intelligence relating
to the author and to other works by him, for which I, for one, was
very much obliged. If I did not obtain exactly what I wanted, I
obtained something that hereafter may be extremely useful; and that
I could not, perhaps, have obtained in any other way than through the
medium of your pleasant and welcome periodical.

I am now, therefore, about to put a question regarding another writer
of more celebrity and ability. Among our early pamphleteers, there was
certainly none more voluminous than Nicholas Breton, who began writing
in 1575, and did not lay down his pen until late in the reign of
James I. A list of his pieces (by no means complete, but the fullest
that has been compiled) may be seen in Lowndes's _Bibl. Manual_;
it includes several not by Breton, among them Sir Philip Sidney's
_Ourania_, 1606, which in fact is by a person of the name Backster;
and it omits the one to which my present communication refers, and
regarding which I am at some loss.

In the late Mr. Heber's _Catalogue_, part iv. p. 10., I read as
follows, under the name of Nicholas Breton:--