and justness of the sentiments inculcated in the serious part of. their productions, is generally unimpeachable. The impulses and effects of each several passion, they have, in most instances, exhibited with great truth and consistency, though Fletcher was too frequently betrayed, by the hasty and importunate demands of the players upon his muse, into a defalcation in his latter acts; and hence theconversion of many of his depraved characters is effected in too sudden and inartificial a manner. As Beaumont and Fletcher had received a good education, and as they were at least men of polite learning, we may suppose that they were not guilty of those gross deficiencies and mistakes which we meet with in the writings of some of their less-favoured contemporaries. Accordingly, they in general succeed well in pourtraying the character of the ancient Roman; but when engaged on a French, Italian, or Spanish story, they could not divest themselves of their nationality; and hence their foreigners, particularly those of the lower rank, like those. of all the dramatic poets of the time, Jonson not excepted, are perfect Englishmen. The anachronisms with which they may be charged occur very sparingly, consist chiefly in single passages and allusions from low life, and are by no means so gross as those of their great fellowpoet, Shakspeare. The excellence of their style has been in general allowed to be transcendent; and Dryden considered their works as a proper standard for the language. They are generally free from constrained phraseology and involved construction; they are not guilty of the artificial and intentional harshness of Jonson's language, and seldom of those unnatural clenches which Shakspeare too frequently may be accused of.Massinger's style, as his last editor observes, approaches that of Fletcher in a considerable degree; but when he charges the poetry of the latter with a degree of morbid softness, he certainly forgot the animated and nervous style of many of his serious plays; for instance, Bonduca, The Loyal Subject, Valentinian, and The Double Marriage. The songs which occur in these plays possess, in general, a singular degree of sweetness and natural elegance; in which requisites they are only inferior to some of Shakspeare's, while they infinitely excel those which are interspersed in the plays of Jonson, Massinger, and other dramatists of the time. Notwithstanding the close connection which subsisted between Beaumont and Fletcher, and the congeniality of their genius in many points of view, there is a striking and evident difference in their versification, which, it is singular, has never been noticed. As an apt and obvious instance, their joint production, entitled Four Plays in One, may be selected. The dissimilarity of the metre in the two first of the Triumphs, or short plays, from that of the two last, cannot fail to strike every attentive reader. In the former, the general cast of the versification has some degree of affinity to that of Shakspeare. The sense of one line is continually run into that of the next, the breaks in the middle are very frequent, and the recurrence of female, or double terminations of the lines, is even less frequent than in Shakspeare, though more so than in Ben Jonson. The versification in the two latter Triumphs is of a very different nature. The greater number of the verses end with some division of a sentence, the breaks in the middle occur more sparingly and are less striking, and the number of double and treble terminations considerably exceeds that of the single or male. This last 9 To ascertain the comparative proportion of male and female terminations, the editor has taken an equal number of lines from The Triumph of Honour, written by Beaumont, and peculiarity is the most striking, and runs through all the plays which Fletcher produced without assistance, except where he assumes the mockheroic style, as in The Woman-Hater and The from the Triumph of Death, by Fletcher. Amongst one hundred verses from the second scene of the former, there are only fourteen which have double terminations; whereas, in an equal number from the fourth scene of the latter, there are no less than seventy-six double and six triple terminations. (See also the Observations on The Two Noble Kinsmen, vol. XIII. p. 166.) Fletcher has even lines with quadruple and quintuple terminations: e. g. "Have ye to swear that you will see it executed". Another peculiarity of Fletcher's metre, which also prevails more or less in all the dramatic verse of the time, and which must of course be attended to by the reader, is the introduction of dactyls, principally at the pause in the middle of a verse. From inattention to this particular, or rather from wilful oversight, Steevens was frequently induced to tamper with Shakspeare's text in the most unwarrantable manner. For instance, in the line "Your old kind father, whose frank heart gave you all,” he omits the monosyllable, you. Mr Malone properly restored it in his edition; but his observation, that the words father, brother, and rather, were pronounced like monosyllables, is not correct. They were pronounced in the same manner as at present, and the last syllable, with the next one, were uttered like the short syllables of the ancient dactyl; and this irregularity in the old dramatic metre is rather a beauty than a defect, as it varies the modulation of blank verse, which in more modern poets is too often tiresome by its uniformity. Knight of the Burning Pestle, and likewise in The Faithful Shepherdess, in which, being rather a pastoral poem than a play, he, no doubt, restrained himself purposely, and assumed greater regularity. On the contrary, in most of the plays which he produced in conjunction with Beaumont, we either find their different styles of versification alternating, or that of Beaumont predominating. In the latter case, as in Philaster, The Maid's Tragedy, King and no King, and The Honest Man's Fortune, we may fairly suppose that Fletcher's associate produced the greater part; or that, in revising the lines of his friend, he gave them the cast of metre peculiar to himself. It was the generally received opinion, in the seventeenth century, that, during the lifetime of Beaumont, that poet's principal business consisted in correcting the exuberance of Fletcher's wit. John Earle, Bishop of Salisbury, who knew them both, and who wrote an elegant copy of verses on the death of the former, informed that respectable antiquary, Aubrey, of this particular, who has reported it in his Natural History and Antiquities of Surrey. The same tradition is ' And yet Seward grounds his refutation of this tradition principally on the testimony of Bishop Earle. |