Of Middleton, who wrote from twenty to thirty plays, in some of which, according to a very prevalent fashion of that age, he called in the aid of Rowley, Dekker, Fletcher, and Massinger; of Dekker, who wrote the whole or part of about thirty plays; of John Marston, who wrote eight plays; of Taylor, Tourneur, Heywood, and Ford, we can only say that their dramas abound with fine things, and would well repay a perusal. John Fletcher (_born_, 1576; _died_, 1625) and Francis Beaumont (_born_, 1586; _died_, 1616) require a more specific notice. They worked together on the same plays to the number of upwards of thirty, whilst John Fletcher wrote fourteen or fifteen himself. In fact, Fletcher, so far as can be known, was the more voluminous writer of the two, Beaumont having written little in his own name, except a masque, a few farces, dramatic pieces, and translations. The style of the two, however, was so much alike, that there is little to distinguish their productions from those of an individual mind. Beaumont and Fletcher were, as stated by Dryden, far more popular in their time than Shakespeare himself. The truth is, that they had less originality and were more compliant with the spirit of their age. They sought their characters more in the range of ordinary life, and therefore hit the tastes of a large and commoner class. They were extremely lively and forcible in dialogue, and had a flowery and dignified style which oftener approached the poetical than became it. We are everywhere met by admirable writing, and a finely-sustained tone, but we travel on without encountering those original characters that can never again be forgotten, and become a part of our world, or those exquisite gushes of poetry and poetic scenery which, like the music of Ariel, ring in the memory long afterwards. At the same time we are continually offended by extreme grossness and jarred by slovenliness and incongruity. They are of the class of great and able playwrights who command the popularity of their age, but whom future ages praise and neglect; and who are only read by the curious for the fragments of good things that they contain.