said, favors his mother; there is very little Greek in him; and yet a trick of the gait now and then, and certain tones of voice, recall the father. If not so tall as he, and without his dignity, he is a fine stalwart fellow, and looks quite able to make his own way in the world. Yes, in Chapman's poem there is life, there is energy, and the consciousness of them. Did not Dryden say admirably well that it was such a poem as we might fancy Homer to have written before he arrived at years of discretion? Its defect is, I should say, that in it Homer is translated into Chapman rather than into English.

Chapman is a poet for intermittent rather than for consecutive reading. He talks too loud and is too emphatic for continuous society. But when you leave him, you feel that you have been in the company of an original, and hardly know why you should not say a great man. From his works, one may infer an individuality of character in him such as we can attribute to scarce any other of his contemporaries, though originality was far cheaper then than now. A lofty, impetuous man, ready to go off without warning into what he called a "holy fury," but capable of inspiring an almost passionate liking. Had only the best parts of what he wrote come down to us, we should have reckoned him a far greater poet than we can fairly call him. His fragments are truly Cyclopean.

V

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER

THE names of Beaumont and Fletcher are as inseparably linked together as those of Castor and Pollux. They are the double stars of our poetical firmament, and their beams are so indissolubly mingled that it is in vain to attempt any division of them that shall assign to each his rightful share. So long as they worked in partnership, Jasper Mayne says truly that they are

"both so knit

That no man knows where to divide their wit,
Much less their praise."

William Cartwright says of Fletcher :

"That 't was his happy fault to do too much;
Who therefore wisely did submit each birth
To knowing Beaumont, ere it did come forth,
And made him the sobriety of his wit."

And Richard Brome also alludes to the copious ease of Fletcher, whom he had known:

"Of Fletcher and his works I speak.

His works! says Momus, nay, his plays you'd say!
Thou hast said right, for that to him was play
Which was to others' brains a toil."

The general tradition seems to have been that
Beaumont contributed the artistic judgment, and
Fletcher the fine frenzy. There is commonly a
grain of truth in traditions of this kind. In the

plays written by the two poets conjointly, we may find an intellectual entertainment in assigning this passage to one and that to the other, but we can seldom say decisively "This is Beaumont's," or "That is Fletcher's," though we may find tolerably convincing arguments for it.

We have, it is true, some grounds on which we may safely form a conclusion as to the individual characteristics of Fletcher, because a majority of the plays which go under their joint names were written by him alone after Beaumont's death. In these I find a higher and graver poetical quality, and I think a riper grain of sentiment, than in any of the others. In running my eye along the margin, I observe that by far the greater number of the isolated phrases I have marked, whether for poetical force or felicity, but especially for picturesqueness, and for weight of thought, belong to Fletcher. I should never suspect Beaumont's hand in such verses as these from "Bonduca" (a play wholly Fletcher's):

"Ten years of bitter nights and heavy marches,

When many a frozen storm sung through my cuirass,
And made it doubtful whether that or I

Were the more stubborn metal."

Where I come upon a picturesque passage in the joint plays, I am apt to think it Fletcher's: so too where there is a certain exhilaration and largeness of manner, and an ardor that charges its words with imagination as they go, or with an enthusiasm that comes very near it in its effect. Take this from the same play:

"The gods of Rome fight for ye; loud fame calls ye,
Pitched on the topless Apennine, and blows
To all the underworld, all nations, seas,

And unfrequented deserts where the snow dwells,
Wakens the ruined monuments, and there,
Where nothing but eternal death and sleep is,
Informs again the dead bones with your virtues."

In short, I am inclined to think Fletcher the more poet of the two. Where there is pathos or humor, I am in doubt whether it belongs to him or his partner, for I find these qualities both in the plays they wrote together and in those which are wholly his. In the expression of sentiment going far enough to excite a painless æsthetic sympathy, but stopping short of tragic passion, Beaumont is quite the equal of his friend. In the art of heightening and enriching such a sentiment by poetical associations and pictorial accessories, Fletcher seems to me the superior. Both, as I have said, have the art of being pathetic, and of conceiving pathetic situations; but neither of them had depth enough of character for that tragic pathos which is too terrible for tears; for those passionate convulsions when our human nature, like the sea in earthquake, is sucked away deep down from its habitual shores, leaving bare for a moment slimy beds stirring with loathsome life, and weedy tangles before undreamed of, and instantly hidden again under the rush of its reaction. Theirs are no sudden revelations, flashes out of the very tempest itself, and born of its own collisions; but much rather a melancholy Ovidian grace like that of the Heroic Epistles, conscious of itself, yet

not so conscious as to beget distrust and make us feel as if we had been cheated of our tenderness. If they ope the sacred source of sympathetic tears, it is not without due warning and ceremonious preparation. I do not mean to say that their sentiment is not real, because it is pensive and not passionate. It is real, but it is never heartrending. I say it all in saying that their region is that of fancy. Fancy and imagination may be of one substance, as the northern lights and lightning are supposed to be; but the one plays and flickers in harmless flashes and streamers over the vault of the brain, the other condenses all its thought-executing fires into a single stab of flame. And so of their humor. It is playful, intellectual, elaborate, like that of Charles Lamb when he trifles with it, pleasing itself with artificial dislocations of thought, and never glancing at those essential incongruities in the nature of things at sight of which humor shakes its bells, and mocks that it may not shudder.

Their comedies are amusing, and one of them, "Wit without Money," is excellent, with some scenes of joyous fun in it that are very cheering. The fourth scene of the third act is a masterpiece of fanciful extravagance. This is probably Fletcher's. The Rev. W. Cartwright preferred Fletcher's wit to Shakespeare's:

"Shakespeare to thee was dull: whose best jest lies
I' th' ladies' questions and the fools' replies.
Nature was all his art; thy vein was free
As his, but without his scurrility."