Beaumont, his great associate, addressed a copy of verses to him, which are strongly characteristic of his powers of severe reproof, and, at the same time, of his ardent affection for the poet. He exposes the chicanery which influenced the judges of the pit; the insolent arrogance and pedantic usurpation of some individuals who pronounced the decision, and the contemptible and abject submission of the rest, who looked up to those pedants as infallible oracles: In short, the lively picture which he exhibits of the rules and manner of damning an excellent production, which happened to be unsavoury to the vulgar palate, is, it is to be feared, not only a true por trait of the audiences of those times, but may be applied to those of our own day, making allowance, not only for the change of manners, but for the still more general corruption of taste for the drama, which is an indelible stigma on our contemporaries. Beaumont was ably supported in his defence of this beautiful poem by his friend Ben Jonson, who had himself sufficient reasons to complain of the injustice of popular ignorance, and who, in the following words, ironically characterises these theatrical judges:

The wise and many-headed bench, that sits
Upon the life and death of plays and wits,

(Composed of gamester, captain, knight, knight's man, Lady or pucelle, that wears mask or fan,

Velvet, or taffata cap, ranked in the dark

With the shop's foreman, or some such brave spark,
That may judge for his sixpence,) had, before
They saw it half, damned thy whole play.—

To the testimonies of Beaumont and Jonson, those of Chapman, the translator of Homer, and a dramatic iter of great celebrity at the time, and of Field, both a player and a poet, were added; and Fletcher subjoined three copies of verses to Sir Walter Aston, Sir William Skipwith, and Sir Robert Townshend, and an address to the reader, in which he modestly, (but, at the same time, casting bitter reflections on the ignorance of the auditors, who, he says, expected a comedy of clowns, with their curtaildogs, and the usual amusement of Whitsun-ales, cream, wassel, and morris dances,) informs the lower rank of the public of what description a pastoral comedy is or should be. Eight years after his death, and more than twenty after its original representation, The Faithful Shepherdess was acted before the court with applause, which was followed by a revival at Blackfriars, where the audience had an opportunity of retracting their former unjustifiable censure.

The public were not satisfied with exposing their want of taste, by condemning this pastoral, but, as if determined not to countenance any performance which did not follow the usual beaten path of dramatic composition, they passed the same sentence soon after on The Knight of the Burning Pestle. The severe treatment of this burlesque comedy, the first of the kind which had appeared on the English stage, and of equal, if not superior, excellence to any similar productions which have appeared since, was, no doubt, occasioned by the London citizens being liberally ridiculed in the course of the composition, though the principal aim of the satire was levelled at the absurd romances and ranting plays of the time. From the dedication, which the bookseller, Walter Burre, prefixed to the quarto edition, which he published in 1613, it is evident that the play was first re. presented in the year 1611. The publisher asserts, that the appearance of Don Quixote was a full year later than that of the play; but there is little doubt that he alludes to the publication of the English translation in 1612. The origi nal work of Cervantes, which met with such extraordinary success in Spain, was, no doubt, soon imported into England; the connection

between the courts of St James's and Valladolid at the time led to a considerable intercourse between the two countries, and the study of the Spanish language had become very fashionable in England. Fletcher was well read in Spanish authors, from whom he borrowed several of his plots; and the author of The Knight of the Burning Pestle had certainly read Don Quixote in the original language. Whether this drama was composed by our poets conjointly, or by one of them, unassisted by the other, is a question which cannot at present be satisfactorily answered, the authorities being contradictory.*

In the same year, our poets, in conjunction, brought out the tragi-comedy, entitled, A King and No King, at the Globe; and, from the number of editions which it underwent beforc and after the Restoration, it appears to have met with a most favourable reception, and to have maintained a regular and steady popularity. It was, according to the usual practice of the dramatic proprietors of the time, withheld from the press till 1619, and then published, probably from a copy fraudulently obtained, by Thomas Walkley, who exhibits such ignorance in his de.

* See the introduction to The Knight of the Burning Pestle in this volume.

dication to Sir Henry Nevill, as to speak of the authors' further labours, though Beaumont had been dead for four years at that time. If we can give credit to the assertions of commendatory writers, we may conclude, on the evidence of Robert Herrick, an elegant poet of the period, that the plot of this tragi-comedy was furnished by Fletcher; and, from the versification, which exhibits the strongly marked characteristics of that poet in very few scenes only, it appears. that the execution was principally Beaumont's. Bishop Earle asserts the claims of the latter to the character of Bessus in very strong terms.

It was probably in this, or one of the years immediately preceding, that our united poets produced the collection of short dramas, entitled, Four Plays, or Moral Representations, in One. In offering this variegated entertainment. to their audiences, they followed the example of some of their predecessors, but it does not appear that their work met with any great degree of approbation. From internal evidence, Beaumont appears to have furnished the two first Triumphs, and his associate the two others. It is not unlikely that the three Triumphs of Honour, Love, and Death, were originally out. lines for regular plays; and that the poets, per