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POETRY," says Shirley in his introduction to the folio edition of Beaumont and Fletcher, printed in 1647, "poetry is the child of nature, which, regulated and made beautiful by art, presenteth the most harmonious of all compositions; among which (if we rightly consider) the dramatical is the most absolute, in regard of those transcendent abilities which should wait upon the composer; who must have more than the instruction of libraries, (which of itself is but a cold contemplative knowledge,) there being required in him a soul miraculously knowing and conversing with all mankind, enabling him to express not only the phlegm and folly of thick-skinned men, but the strength and maturity of the wise, the air and insinuations of the court, the discipline and resolution of the soldier, the virtues and passions of every noble condition-nay, the counsels and characters of the greatest princes." All these he then insists are "demonstrative and met" in his beloved authors," whom but to mention is to throw a cloud upon all former names, and benight posterity." The vast admiration thus expressed by a brother dramatist of these celebrated intellectual kinsmen, has been repeatedly echoed. In their own age they enjoyed a wide reputation, and during the reign of Charles II. were twice as popular as Shakspeare himself. Time, however, has been slowly and silently dimming their fame. As their dramas gradually dropped from the list of acting plays, they did not readily pass from the stage into the library, though they have ever occupied a prominent place among the elder dramatists, and are part and parcel of English literature. The highest praise of the dramatic poet, that of being endowed with souls"miraculously knowing and conversing with all mankind," of this they were deservedly shorn; it is, indeed, relatively true only of Shak speare; but to the great body of English readers, especially in this country, their merits as poets of fancy and sentiment are but imperfectly known. In the present article we propose attempting an analysis of their powers, to set forth their characteristic faults and excellences, and

to feed the fancies of our readers with some delicious quotations from their works.

Beaumont and Fletcher belong to that band of the elder English dramatists who received their inspiration from Shakspeare, the true creator of the English drama. Their plays were produced wholly in the reign of James I., from 1607 to 1625. Their first drama was written about four years before Shakspeare's last. Bat little of their private history is known, except that they were both gentlemen by birth and education, belonged to families unusually prolific in poets, were highly esteemed by their contemporaries, and through life were remarkably constant friends. Beaumont was born in 1586, entered college at the age of ten, and, like a large number of English poets and dramatists, went through the form of studying law. His powers of composition were early developed. When only sixteen he published a translation in rhyme of Ovid's fable of Salmacis and Hermaproditus. At the age of nineteen he had acquired among sach men as Jonson, the reputation of sound judgment and poetic power, and was an esteemed member of the club of wits and poets who met at the Mermaid. In 1606 or 1607 his literary confederacy with Fletcher appears to have commenced. He died in 1615, at the age of twenty-nine. Fletcher was born in the year 1576, the son of one of Queen Eliza beth's bishops. There is no positive evidence of his appearance as an author before he had arrived at the age of thirty. It is probable that up to that period his private fortune supplied his wants. At this time his intimacy with Beaumont commenced. It is singular that to this co-partnership Fletcher, the elder of the two by ten years, brought the mercurial spirit and creative fancy, Beaumont the regulating judgment and solid understanding. Their friendship was unbroken. Before Reaumont's marriage, "they lived together," says Aubrey, "on the Bankside, not far from the playhouse, both lachelors; had one in their house, which they did so admire, the same clothes, cloak, &c., between them."

er not only wrote the remaining thirtyfive, but that he had altogether the largest share in the joint plays. Beaumont us spoken of by a contemporary, as "the sober spunge" of the firm, retrenching and rubbing out the exuberances of Fletcher's volatile fancy. The three most celebrated, if not the three best, dramas in the whole collection, "The Maid's Tragedy," Philaster," and King and No King," are, to be sure, among the plays in which Beaumont is known to have been concerned, and doubtless his cooperation was of importance; but still Fletcher's own dramas, allowing for their greater rapidity and carelessness of execution, have essentially the same characteristics of mind and manner. Fletcher undoubtedly supplied the capital of the firm, and Beaumont probably the directing judgment. Their portraits bear out the common tradition respecting their characters. The countenance of Fletcher is that of some "hot amorist," eager, sanguine, fanciful and sensual, but in the faded splendor of the eyes, giving evidence of energies overwrought and passions unchecked. That of Beaumont, though intelligent, is somewhat heavy and prim, sure signs, we suppose, of his judgment. We have no means of judging of his powers singly, except from a few miscellaneous poems. These indicate no marked poetic capacity. The celebrated address to Melancholy, which usually passes under his name, is sung by the passionate lord in one of Fletcher's worst plays, "The Nice Valor "produced, it is supposed, at least three years after Beaumont's death. Even if we take the conjecture of Seward that this play was Beaumont's, though for this there is no evidence, its immense inferiority to the joint plays, and to almost all of those written by Fletcher alone, would only make the superior geRius of the latter more apparent. In

our remarks, therefore, though we may use their names together, our readers will please to consider that " Beaumont and Fletcher" means little more than Fletcher. Most critics now drop Beaumont-considering the plays, to use a line of poor Sir Aston Cockayne's doggerel, to be, in the main,

"Sweet issues of sweet Fletcher's brain!"

Mr. Darley, however, whose introduction to Moxon's edition is of much merit, lays considerable stress on Beaumont's aid to Fletcher, and gives him credit for a deeper and graver enthusiasm than his lively and prolific partner possessed; and intimates his opinion that three of the plays known to be by the firm, are worth all the rest in the collection put together.

The faults and impurities of Beaumont and Fletcher are the first qualities which strike the reader of their works. Many of these are doubtless to be attributed to the circumstances under which they wrote. Their dramatic career was_commensurate with the reign of James I., the meanest, weakest, most effeminate, most ridiculous, the most despised and the most despicable of English sovereigns. Their object was to become the fashionable dramatists of the day; and this object they pursued at any sacrifice of morals, dignity and decorum. They are the most indecent in expression, and the most licentious in principle, of all the elder dramatists; and seem to stand half way between the age of Elizabeth and that of Charles II. In their comedies they already indicate the approach of the school of Wycherly and Congreve. They have, however, much of the raciness and sweetness of the old dramatic spirit, and were essentially poets as well as wits. The prominent defect of their genius and personal character was levity. As their aim was popularity, their plays were constructed more with regard to theatrical effectiveness than dramatic propriety; and they consulted their audiences rather than their consciences, in the contrivance of incident and delineation of character. They were careless of moral principle, indifferent to the natural relations of things, and threw off their dramas with a singular absence of seriousness and depth of purpose. They wrote with the stage, the actors and the audiences constantly in their view, and if they fulfilled the external conditions of their art, they seemed reckless of its higher laws and more worthy ambitions. They, of course, drank in the inspiring air of their time

the time of Shakspeare, Jonson, Massinger, Decker, Webster and Ford-and their writings are not without sentiments and characters of an ideal and heroic cast, but they more resolutely pandered than the others to the depravity of the age. There was a marked degeneracy of manners, especially among the higher classes, in the reign of James I., as compared with the reign of Elizabeth. The impurities of our authors' muse are a good index of the extent of this corruption. "It is quite a mistake," says Mr. Darley, "to imagine Sybaritism did not commence in England till the reign of Charles the Second, when it was rather at its climax: he simply rebuilt its temple, on a basis indeed almost as broad as the whole land, brought together again the scattered flock of Thammuz, and with them for ministers, himself well-suited for High Priest, made proselytes of almost the whole people, prone enough to conversion. But even under James the First and his pious son, it was more than a poetical fiction that Comus kept an itinerant court in this isle, had full as many secret partisans of his principles as John Calvin, and found but few Lady Alices and Lord Bracklys among the May-bushes and myrtlegroves to discountenance him either by their precepts or examples.

Nothing but wandering frailties, Wild as the wind, and blind as death and ignorance,

Inhabit there.""

Indeed the peculiar sauciness with which Beaumont and Fletcher invade sanctuaries, sacred to silence, and the marvelous nonchalance with which they pour out the language of libertinism and vulgarity, indicate a most remarkable absence of decency in their auditors. No one should condemn the Puritans for their pious hatred of stage plays until he reads the dramas of Beaumont and Fletcher, and conceives of them as being performed before a miscellaneous audience in London. That they were not considered especially indecent in their own day is evidenced by the lines in which Lovelace commends their example to other playwrights, even less observant of the proprieties of language:

"View here a loose thought said with such

In fact, it was not their object to outrage the delicacy of their age, but simply to be on a line with its corruption. Shakspeare and Jonson, who commenced their career in Elizabeth's severer time, are comparatively pure in expression as well as principle. Though they represented libertinism, they did not delineate it with the evident glee with which our authors went to the task. They possessed moral sense, the sense by which the poet accommodates the creations of his imagination to the natural relations of things, and of this sense Beaumont and Fletcher knew but little, and that little they did not hesitate to disregard when it stood in the way of a bright jest or a diverting incident.

The romantic or Shakspearean drama, as an artistical representation of human life, reached relative perfection only in Shakspeare. Its success depends on the skill with which its seemingly discordant materials are harmonized, and it required the consummate judgment and plastic imagination of its great master to fulfill its conditions. Beaumont and Fletcher, who followed in Shakspeare's luminous track, who repeatedly imitated, and often copied, his style, characters and sentiments, had not sufficient depth, solidity and strength of mind, or force and refinement of imagination, to succeed in the same difficult path. It is evident that it demands a rare combination of the greatest and most various powers to be completely successful in the romantic drama. Its form, while it seems to afford opportunities for boundless license, in admitting at once the highest and meanest sentiments and characters, in reality requires in the dramatist the utmost tolerance and harmony of nature, and the nicest balance of faculties. It especially requires Imagination, in the highest sense of the word-an imagination which both shapes and fuses, which not only can create the individual parts of a drama, both serious and comic, but so interfuse them, and produce such a harmony in the general effect, that the parts shall constitute in their combination a perfect whole, or rather seem to be natural growths from one central principle of vitality. Now Beaumont and Fletcher by no means fulfill these conditions. They often create admirable parts, but they fail in exhibiting them in their relation to each other. Their plays teem with the most flagitious excesses against nature and decorum, and are all characterized by incompleteness