Others cannot pretend to assign to each author, or to their various allies, their own contributions to each of the fifty-two dramas, which Mr. Swinburne suspected Coleridge of "never having really read". Whether Coleridge did or did not carefully peruse the fourteen stout volumes of Weber's edition, it is certain that very few people are more industrious. A French critic, M. Jusserand, affirms that a friendly hand could make a pleasing selection of scenes, displaying tragical vigour, eloquence, poetry, wit, and that the selection would give "the falsest idea of their work," for "the lugubrious and the ribald were their chief domain". At all events other qualities than ribaldry will win their readers at present, and it is unnecessary to direct readers to a play in which a woman "makes the very satyrs blush at her sight." Coleridge thought it would be interesting to settle a question of statistics, "how many of these plays are founded on rapes, how many on incestuous passions, and how many on mere lunacies". Mr. Swinburne provided the statistics, _Plays_ 52, _Rapes_ 2, _Incestuous Passions_ 0, _Lunacies_ 2. In the throng of plays by Beaumont and Fletcher (of which a folio edition was published in 1647; an uncertain amount of the writing was ascribed to Massinger), it must suffice to speak of but a few. The bald analysis of any of these Jacobean dramas cannot do justice to its merits. The plots of the greatest dramas, those of the Athenian stage and of Shakespeare, rest, now on history, now on inventions of prehistoric antiquity, myths and legends. The story of Lear has elements as impossible, and as primitive, as the stories of Œdipus or of Thyestes. The events are monstrous--"people don't do these things,"--but they afford to the dramatist great situations, and they were already familiar in tradition. The events in "The Maid's Tragedy," on the other hand, could not have occurred, and have no traditional source. There have been callous and profligate kings, but Charles II, who declared that "in my reign all tragedies must end happily," and for whom Waller later made "The Maid's Tragedy" end happily, did not seduce innocent girls, hand them over as brides to courtiers who were already betrothed to other ladies, and retain his victims as his mistresses. The king in "The Maid's Tragedy" does these things, and is a moral monster. Amintor being in love with Aspatia, and she with him, the king forces him--for loyalty and passive obedience are his guiding stars--to reject Aspatia, and wed Evadne, whom nobody suspects of being the royal mistress. At Courts, however, these graces are not hid. The bridal eve is not much enlivened by a masque of Neptune and Æolus, and is saddened by the wails and prophecies of the forlorn Aspatia. Other bridesmaids talk ribaldry enough, but the bridegroom, whose heart is with Aspatia, feels A grief shoot suddenly through all my veins; Mine eyes rain: this is strange at such a time.