‘Tell him if he i’ th’ blood-siz’d field lay swoln, Shewing the sun his teeth, grinning at the moon, What you would do’— I think we perceive the extravagance of Beaumont and Fletcher, not contented with truth or strength of description, but hurried away by the love of violent excitement into an image of disgust and horror, not called for, and not at all proper in the mouth into which it is put. There is a studied exaggeration of the sentiment, and an evident imitation of the parenthetical interruptions and breaks in the line, corresponding to what we sometimes meet in Shakespear, as in the speeches of Leontes in the Winter’s Tale; but the sentiment is overdone, and the style merely mechanical. Thus Hippolita declares, on her lord’s going to the wars, ‘We have been soldiers, and we cannot weep, When our friends don their helms, or put to sea, Or tell of babes broach’d on the lance, or women That have seethed their infants in (and after eat them) The brine they wept at killing ’em; then if You stay to see of us such spinsters, we Should hold you here forever.’ One might apply to this sort of poetry what Marvel says of some sort of passions, that it is ‘Tearing our pleasures with rough strife Thorough the iron gates of life.’ It is not in the true spirit of Shakespear, who was ‘born only heir to all humanity,’ whose horrors were not gratuitous, and who did not harrow up the feelings for the sake of making mere _bravura_ speeches. There are also in this first act, several repetitions of Shakespear’s phraseology: a thing that seldom or never occurs in his own works. For instance, ——‘Past slightly _His careless execution_’— ‘_The very lees_ of such, millions of rates Exceed _the wine_ of others’— ——‘Let _the event_, That _never-erring arbitrator_, tell us’— ‘Like _old importment’s bastard_’— There are also words that are never used by Shakespear in a similar sense: ——‘All our surgeons _Convent_ in their behoof’— ‘We _convent_ nought else but woes’—