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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.

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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. 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 :

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"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

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