come up from Pilford, where Mistress Anne was expecting to lie in with her annual babe; Master Chapman, whose Monsieur d'Olive was soon to be played at the Blackfriars; and, richly apparelled, as became their young manhood and rising fortunes, the inseparable friends, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. What Beaumont thought of these nights at the Mermaid he communicated to Jonson in a rhyming epistle from the country, whither he and Fletcher had retired in order to put the finishing touches to a couple of comedies.

"What things have we seen

Done at the Mermaid! heard words that have been
So nimble, and so full of subtle flame,

As if that every one from whence they came

Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,

And had resolved to live a fool the rest
Of his dull life."

Of the English dramatic poets who lived about the time of Shakespeare, all but Chapman, were born in his boyhood or young manhood, and the plays of all but Ford and Shirley were in possession of the stage before his death. His contemporaries could compare him with his rivals in tragedy and comedy, with Jonson, Dekker, Heywood, Middleton, Marston, Webster, Beaumont and Fletcher, Rowley, and Massinger, and with such lesser luminaries as Munday, Chettle, Wilkins, Tourneur, and Field. They did so, no doubt, and they did not reach the critical conclusion of the nineteenth century that he was superior to all. They were great writers with all their faults, greater than any that have since illustrated the Poetic Drama of

England. Popular during their lives, three or four of them even as late as the close of the seventeenth century, and forgotten or neglected in the eighteenth century, they are now estimated at their true value, and have the place which belongs to them among the English poets. This restoration to their poetic rights was largely due to a clerk in the India House,-a lover of antiquity, for which he jestingly said he wrote, the author of John Woodvil, a Tragedy, who seventy-five years ago (1808) published a volume of Specimens from their works. He read them more understandingly than any man of his time, and when he ventured to criticise them, which was seldom, his criticisms were weighty indeed. Of Shirley, for example, he says that he was the last of a great race, all of whom spoke nearly the same language, and had a set of moral feelings and emotions in common. Of Massinger he says that he had not the higher requisites of his art in anything like the degree in which they were possessed by Ford, Webster, Tourneur, Heywood, and others. "He never shakes or disturbs the mind with grief. He is read with composure and placid delight. He wrote with that equability of all the passions which made his English style the purest and most free from violent metaphors and harsh constructions of any of the dramatists who were his contemporaries." Of The Poetaster, a satirical comedy directed against Dekker and others, he says: "This Roman Play seems written to confute those enemies of Ben Jonson, in his own day and ours, who have said that he made a pedantical use of his learning. He has here revived the whole court of Augustus by a learned spell. We are admitted to the

society of the illustrious dead. Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Tibullus, converse in our own tongue more finely and poetically than they expressed themselves in their native Latin. Nothing can be imagined more elegant, refined, and court-like, than the scenes between this Lewis the Fourteenth of Antiquity and his Literati. The whole essence of that kind of intercourse is contained therein." Of Ford he says: "Ford was of the first order of Poets. He sought for sublimity not by parcels in metaphors or visible images, but directly where she has her full residence-in the heart of man; in the acts and sufferings of the greatest minds." Of Webster he says: "To move a horror skilfully, to touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon fear as much as it can bear, to wean and weary a life until it is ready to drop, and then step in with mortal instruments to take its last forfeit this only a Webster can do." And of Webster's famous Dirge in The White Devil (" Call for the Robin red-breast and the Wren "), he says rapturously: "I never saw anything like this Dirge, except the Ditty which reminds Ferdinand of his drowned Father in the Tempest. As that is of the water, watery, so this is of the earth, earthy. Both have that intenseness of feeling which seems to resolve itself into the elements which it contemplates." He quotes largely from Beaumont and Fletcher, and in commenting upon the poetic qualities of the latter, as contrasted with those of Shakespeare, in their joint production The Two Noble Kinsmen, he says: "His ideas moved slow; his versification, though sweet, is tedious, it stops every moment; he lays line upon line, making up one after the other, adding image to image so deliberately that we see where they

join. Shakespeare mingles everything, he runs line into line, embarrasses sentences and metaphors; before one idea has burst its shell, another is hatched and clamorous for disclosure." And a friend of this friend of ours, this clerk in the India House, a dramatist, and a dramatic critic, a journalist, and a poet, has something to say about Fletcher and Beaumont, in a volume of specimens from both which is worth quoting. Here it is: "Beaumont and Fletcher were two born poets, possessed of a noble and tender imagination, of great fancy and wit, and of an excess of companionability and animal spirits, which, by taking them off from study, was their ruin. They had not patience to construct a play like Ben Jonson, yet their sensibility and their purer vein of poetry have set them above him, even as dramatists. By the side of merely conventional or artificial poets they are demigods; by the side of Shakespeare they were striplings, who never arrived at years of discretion. Yet even as such, they show themselves of ethereal race; and as lyrical poets they surpassed even Shakespeare. There was nothing to compare with their songs, for tenderness and sweetness, till the appearance of Percy's Reliques-and some of the best touches even of those were found to be from their hands." After Leigh Hunt and Charles Lamb who can hope to say anything worth listening to concerning the English Dramatic Poets who lived about the time of Shakespeare?

THE CENTURY,

NEW YORK, October 13, 1883.

R. H. STODDARD.