Plays like this, or even like "The Spanish Comedy," which opens pleasantly and humorously, and in the cure and his sexton suggests the influence of Cervantes, but closes in a mist of evil passions, give some show of reason to the opinion of our French critic. "A friendly hand selecting with care" might give all of Beaumont and Fletcher's that can please readers not specially devoted to the study of the Drama. Even in the beautiful scenes of "The Faithful Shepherdess," in poetry worthy of Spenser's pastoral vein, the author, quite needlessly, introduces a shepherdess who resembles the Brunhault of "Thierry and Theodoret" as Brunhault may have been in girlhood. "The Knight of the Burning Pestle," on the other hand, with the grocer-critic who insists on a play in which a grocer shall "do admirable things"; with the humours of the grocer's wife, and the Quixotic adventures of Ralph, the apprentice, is lively, and, says the Prologue, "has endeavoured, to be far from unseemly words to make your ears glow". Yet, in the jail delivery of the Barber, the authors go out of their way to find ugly ribaldries. Famous among the comedies are "The Scornful Lady," "The Humorous Lieutenant," "The Wild-goose Chase," and "The Little French Doctor". The lyrics and songs are especially beautiful, even in the Elizabethan wealth of song. A peculiarity of Fletcher's blank verse is his fondness for redundant syllables at the close, and indeed anywhere in the line. This manner was gaining on Shakespeare in his latest plays, and, in authors after Fletcher, led to the decay, almost to the death, of blank verse. Yet Fletcher's lines, as before Marlowe and Shakespeare, were often "end-stopped": the sense closed with the close of each line; this is not the manner of Shakespeare, or of Beaumont. In his later days Fletcher went for his plots to Spanish tales and romances. Chapman. The date of the birth (near Hitchin) of George Chapman, conjecturally placed in 1559, is unknown. He was at Oxford in 1574. The exactness of his scholarship must not be estimated by his translation of Homer; translations, whether in prose or verse, did not then aim at precision. In 1594 he published "The Shadow of Night," containing verses which have been used to support the theory that he was the poet concerning whose favour Shakespeare expresses uneasiness in his Sonnets. He wrote a conclusion to Marlowe's "Hero and Leander"; attempted the luscious (which did not suit his genius), in Ovid's "Banquet of Sense"; celebrated Henry, Prince of Wales, in "The Tears of Peace," is mentioned as a dramatist by Meres in 1598, and in that year published his version of "Seven Books of the 'Iliad'" (not the first seven), while he finished his "Iliad" in 1611, his "Odyssey," some years later.