manners is most excellent may be difficult to say; the former seems most striking, the latter more pleasing, the former shews vice and folly in the most ridiculous lights, the latter more fully shews each man himself, and unlocks the inmost recesses of the heart. Great are the names of the various masters who followed the one and the other manner. Jonson, Beaumont, and Moliere list on one side; Terence, Shakspeare, and Fletcher on the other. But to return to our duumvirate, between whom two other small differences are observable. Beaumont, as appears by various testimonies, and chiefly by his own letter prefixed to the old folio edition of Chaucer, was a hard student; and, for one whom the world lost before he was thirty, had a surprising compass of literature: Fletcher was a polite rather than a deep scholar, and conversed with men at least as much as with books. Hence the gay sprightliness and natural ease of his young gentlemen are allowed to be inimitable; in these he has been preferred by judges of candour even to Shakspeare himself. If Beaumont does not equal him in this, yet, being by his fortune conversant also in high life (the son of a judge, as the other of a bishop) he is in this too alter ab illo, a good second, and almost a second self, as Philaster, Amintor, Bacurius in the three first plays, Count Valore, Oriana, Cleremont, Valentine, and others evidently shew. This small difference observed, another appears by no means similar to it: Beaumont, we said, chiefly studied books and Jonson; Fletcher, nature and Shakspeare, yet so far was the first from following 7 The letter referred to was not written by our author. See the Introduction, p. viii. his friend and master in his frequent close and almost servile imitations of the ancient classics, that he seems to have had a much greater confidence in the fertility and richness of his own imagination than even Fletcher himself: The latter, in his masterpiece, The Faithful Shepherdess, frequently imitates Theocritus and Virgil; in Rollo has taken whole scenes from Seneca, and almost whole acts from Lucan in the False One. I do not blame him for this; his imitations have not the stiffness, which sometimes appears (though not often) in Jonson, but breathe the free and full air of originals; and accordingly Rollo and The False One are two of Fletcher's first-rate plays. But Beaumont, I believe, never condescended to translate and rarely to imitate; however largely he was supplied with classic streams, from his own urn all flows pure and untinctured. Here the two friends change places: Beaumont rises in merit towards Shakspeare, and Fletcher descends towards Jonson. 8 Having thus seen the features of these twins of poetry greatly resembling yet still distinct from each other, let us conclude that all reports which separate and lessen the fame of either of them are ill-grounded and false, that they were, as Sir John Berkenhead calls them, two full congenial souls, or, as either Fletcher himself, or his still greater col Rollo is in the first edition in quarto ascribed to Fletcher alone; The False One is one of those plays that is more dubious as to its authors. The prologue speaks of them in the plural number, and it is probable that Beaumont assisted in the latter part of it, but I believe not much in the two first acts, as these are so very much taken from Lucan, and the observation of Beaumont's not indulging himself in such liberties holds good in all the plays in which he is known to have had the largest share.-Seward. See vols. V. and VII. league, Shakspeare, expresses it in their Two Noble Kinsmen, vol. X. p. 32: They were an endless mine to one another; They were both extremely remarkable for their ready flow of wit in conversation as well as composition, and gentlemen that remembered them, says Shirley, declare, that on every occasion they talked a comedy. As, therefore, they were so twinned in genius, worth, and wit, so lovely and pleasant in their lives, after death, let not their fame be ever again divided. And now, reader, when thou art fired into rage or melted into pity by their tragic scenes, charmed with the genteel elegance, or bursting into laugh ter at their comic humour, canst thou not drop the intervening ages, steal into Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher's club-room at the Mermaid, on a night when Shakspeare, Donne, and others visited them, and there join in society with as great wits as ever this nation, or perhaps ever Greece or Rome, could at one time boast ? where, animated each by the other's presence, they even excelled themselves; "For wit is like a rest, Held up at tennis, which men do the best With the best gamesters. What things have we seen 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; then when there hath been thrown For three days past; wit that might warrant be Till that were cancell'd; and when that was gone Was able to make the two next companies Right witty; though but downright fools, mere wise." Hitherto the reader has received only the portraits of our authors without any proof of the similitude and justice of the draught; nor can we hope that it will appear just from a mere cursory view of the originals. Many people read plays chiefly for the sake of the plot, hurrying still on for that discovery, The happy contrivance of surprising but natural incidents is certainly a very great beauty in the drama, and little writers have often made their advantages of it; they could contrive incidents to embarrass and perplex the plot, and by that alone have succeeded and pleased, without perhaps a single line of nervous poetry, a single sentiment worthy of memory, without a passion worked up with natural vigour, or a character of any distinguished marks. The best poets have rarely made this dramatic mechanism their point. Neither Sophocles, Euripides, Terence, Shakspeare, Beaumont, Fletcher, or Jonson, are at all remarkable for forming a labyrinth of incidents, and entangling their readers in a pleasing perplexity: Our late dramatic poets learnt this from the French, and they from romance-writers and novelists. We could almost wish the readers of Beaumont and Fletcher to drop the expectation of the event of each story, to attend with more care to the beauty and energy of the sentiments, diction, passions, and characters. Every good author pleases more, the more he is examined; (hence perhaps that partiality of editors ⚫to their own authors; by a more intimate acquaintance, they discover more of their beauties than they do of others) especially when the style and manner are quite old-fashioned, and the beauties hid under the uncouthness of the dress. The taste and fashion of poetry varies in every age, and though our old dramatic writers are as preferable to the modern as Vandyke and Rubens to our modern painters, yet most eyes must be accustomed to their manner before they can discern their excellencies. Thus the very best plays of Shakspeare were forced to be dressed fashionably by the poetic tailors of the late ages before they could be admitted upon the stage, and a very few years since his comedies in general were under the highest contempt. Few, very few durst speak of them with any sort of regard, till the many excellent criticisms upon that author made people study him, and some excellent actors revived these comedies, which completely opened men's eyes; and it is now become as fashionable to admire as it had been to decry them. Shakspeare therefore, even in his second-best manner, being now generally admired, we shall endeavour to prove that his second-rate and our authors' first-rate beauties are so near upon a par that they are scarce distinguishable. A preface allows not room for sufficient proofs of this, but we will produce at least some parallels of poetic diction and sentiments, and refer to some of the characters and passions. The instances shall be divided into three classes The first of passages where our authors fall short in comparison of Shakspeare; the second of such as are not easily discerned from him; the third of those where Beaumont and Fletcher have the advantage. In the Maid's Tragedy there is a similar passage to one of Shakspeare, the comparison of which alone will be no bad scale to judge of their different ex |