they employed the surer and more biting weapons of irony and ridicule." po In considering the general merit and the etical character of the works of Beaumont and Fletcher, the state of dramatic composition at the time must always be kept in view. Regularity and unity of design were not considered of equal importance among the writers and critics of London in those days as they were at Athens or Rome. The question of the value of these rules, and of the expediency of the poets of all countries subscribing to their authority, may be fairly set aside; and, indeed, the numerous and able defenders of Shakspeare may be referred Sometimes the puritans seem to have made successful applications to the master of the revels for the removal of such passages, which, in spite of their pretended indifference of worldly abuse, and readiness to undergo persecution and martyrdom for the cause, touched them too nearly.-See the introduction to The Woman's Prize, vol. V. p. 254. The avowed hostility of the fanatics to the stage did not cease with the Restoration; and the persecution which the author of Douglas underwent in the middle of the enlightened eighteenth century, will for ever stamp disgrace on his persecutors. There is nothing more disgusting in the tirades of Prynne, Gosson, Stubbs, and Hall, than in the pamphlets published against the tragedy of Douglas. Fortunately, the stage has nothing to fear from the attacks of the fanatics of our own days. They are not less violent and abusive, but they are harmless and ineffective. to as a defence of all his contemporaries. The powerful scenes of that poet, supported by some which are little inferior in the compositions of Jonson, Massinger, and our poets, are sufficient authority for the establishment of a new dramatic school less perfect than that of the ancients, which is still followed by the poets of France and Italy, but founded more immediately on nature, better calculated for the display of striking events, and indulging to the imagination more extended limits." If these premises are granted, (and, without granting them, their plays, together with those of almost all their illustrious contemporaries, must be condemned,) we may assert, that the general conception of our poets' plots is most happily imagined, though too 7 Butler, in his verses" Upon Critics who judge of Modern Plays precisely by the rules of the Ancients," which were occasioned by Rymer's attacking three of our authors' plays, after having traced the genealogy of these critics from Speroni, and pointed out the thefts they committed among the works of their predecessors, says that they there found matter— "Enough to furnish all the lewd impeachers Of witty Beaumont's poetry and Fletcher's; Are charged by these who`tentimes worse commit; And for misjudging some unhappy scenes, Are censured for't with more unlucky sense; And please more than the best that pedants write." 8 frequently, particularly when Fletcher had no longer the advantage of subjecting his plays to the judicious Beaumont, betraying haste and carelessness in the progress towards the catastrophe. Fletcher may be, in some degree, exculpated for this by the multitude of his dramatic composi tions, with which it seems he could not furnish his friends the players fast enough to satisfy the eager demand of the public. A proof of this occurs in the preface to a book of the seventeenth century, sufficiently near the period in which he flourished, to deserve credit for the information it contains: "It is reported of Mr Fletcher, that, though he writ with such a free and sparkling genius, that future ages shall scarcely ever parallel, yet his importunate comedians would not only crowd upon him such impertinencies, which to him seemed needless and lame excuses, his works being so good, his indignation rendered them as the only bad lines his modest Thalia was ever humbled with." From this, the importunate haste of the performers at once appears; and we also learn that many of the spots which disfigure the most beautiful of his dramas are to be attributed to The Mysteries of Love and Eloquence, 1685; quoted in the British Bibliographer, vol. I. p. 523. his good-natured but ill-timed complaisance to the actors.9 It must be acknowledged, as a great failing • The defects of Fletcher's plots, and the injudicious multiplicity of incidents in many of his plays, are summed up with great candour and judgment in some Remarks on English Comedy, lately published:-"Fletcher, with the extremity of negligence, run his actors into a chaos of incident and bustle, without much attention to propriety, probability, or, indeed, any thing more than throwing a comic light upon each isolated scene. The whole was winded up with some extraordinary accident, some unexpected discovery, some sudden change of mind and temper in a leading personage, or such other similar inartificial expedient, as no audience could admit to be fitting and natural, though they might be, perhaps, too much amused with the events preceding the catastrophe, to be critically scrupulous about the mode in which it was accomplished."—The British Drama, Lond. 1811. 8vo. vol. III. p. ii. There is a curious resemblance between the bustle and stir of Fletcher's comedies, and that of the plays of his dramatic contemporaries in Spain. The comedies of Calderon, Lope de Vega, Moreto, and other poets of the peninsula, particularly those which delineate the manners of the higher ranks at the time, and which the Spaniards call comedias de capa y espada, because they are performed in the well-known Spanish dress of the mantle and the sword, contain a similar profusion of incident, and betray a degree of haste and inattention in the composition, far beyond that of which Fletcher has been accused. With the general character of Lope de Vega's comedies, the English public has been made acquainted by Lord Holland in a most satisfactory manner; and it is to be lamented that his lordship's researches respecting the comedies of Calderon and Guillen de Castro, in most respects the superiors of Lope, particularly in richness of fancy, brilliancy of colouring, and pathos, have not as yet been communicated to the public. in both our poets, that they were not always content with the ordinary course of nature, but were too fond of introducing incidents strained to the highest pitch of probability, and sometimes surpassing the bounds of nature. In the gene. ral mechanism of their plots also, they were certainly surpassed by Massinger; the events are often too much crowded together, and not always connected with sufficient art. But, after allowing these failings to their full extent, our poets will not be denied the praise of generally supporting the interest throughout, of fixing our attention in a lively manner upon the fortunes of those characters for whom they intend to engage our interest in a peculiar degree, and of the proper adaptation of the sentiments to the character by whom they are uttered. Like the rest of the dramatists of the time, with the exception of Ben Jonson, Cartwright, and Randolph, our poets, and Fletcher in particular, seldom thought it necessary to invent a tale for the plot of their dramas, but generally had recourse to the prolific stores of the Italian and Spanish novelists, where they found an exhaustless mine of subject for the exercise of their dramatic talents, in the same manner as the dramatists of Greece had recourse to the |