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.

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 neg. ligence, 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 ac◄ cident, 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 In the general 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

traditional tales of their gods and ancient heroes. To this source must be ascribed the mul titude of incidents, the bustle and stir, and duplication of plots, which have been so often censured in the plays of the seventeenth century by the advocates for the three unities. In some instances, the different plots in one drama are not sufficiently connected, and run parallel to each other from the first act to the last, without being sufficiently made to bear upon each other; but our poets are never guilty of this defect in an equal degree with Dryden in The Spanish Fryar, and Southerne in his Oroonoko. In many cases, the multiplicity of novels judiciously combined into the plot of one play affords a strong specimen of the poet's art. The comedy of Women Pleased, for instance, is founded on at least four different stories, but they are connected with so much skill that no unnatural result is produced.

The general character of the dramatic works of our authors is summed up with great judgment by Dryden, in the following passage of his Essay on Dramatic Poesy, printed in 1666:

"Beaumont and Fletcher had, with the advantages of Shakspeare's wit, which was their precedent, great and natural gifts, improved by

study; Beaumont especially being so accurate a judge of plays, that Ben Jonson, while he lived, submitted all his writings to his censure, and it is thought used his judgment in correcting, if not contriving, all his plots. What value he had for him appears by the verses he wrote to him, and therefore I need speak no farther of it. The first play that brought Fletcher and him in esteem was Philaster; for before that they had written two or three very unsuccessfully; as the like is reported of Ben Jonson, before he writ Every Man in his Humour: Their plots were generally more regular than Shakspeare's, especially those that were made before Beaumont's death: And they understood and imitated the conversation of gentlemen much better; whose wild debaucheries, and quickness of wit in repartees, no poet can ever paint as they have done. Humour, which Ben Jonson derived from particular persons, they made it not their business to describe; they represented all the passions very lively, but above all, love. I am apt to believe the English language in them arrived to its highest perfection; what words. have since been taken in are rather superfluous than necessary. Their plays are now the most pleasant and frequent entertainments of the stage,