——‘’Tis not a life; ’Tis but a piece of childhood thrown away.’ But here was youth, genius, aspiring hope, growing reputation, cut off like a flower in its summer-pride, or like ‘the lily on its stalk green,’ which makes us repine at fortune and almost at nature, that seem to set so little store by their greatest favourites. The life of poets is or ought to be (judging of it from the light it lends to ours) a golden dream, full of brightness and sweetness, ‘lapt in Elysium;’ and it gives one a reluctant pang to see the splendid vision, by which they are attended in their path of glory, fade like a vapour, and their sacred heads laid low in ashes, before the sand of common mortals has run out. Fletcher too was prematurely cut off by the plague. Raphael died at four and thirty, and Correggio at forty. Who can help wishing that they had lived to the age of Michael Angelo and Titian? Shakespear might have lived another half-century, enjoying fame and repose, ‘now that his task was smoothly done,’ listening to the music of his name, and better still, of his own thoughts, without minding Rymer’s abuse of ‘the tragedies of the last age.’ His native stream of Avon would then have flowed with softer murmurs to the ear, and his pleasant birthplace, Stratford, would in that case have worn even a more gladsome smile than it does, to the eye of fancy!—Poets however have a sort of privileged after-life, which does not fall to the common lot: the rich and mighty are nothing but while they are living: their power ceases with them; but ‘the sons of memory, the great heirs of fame’ leave the best part of what was theirs, their thoughts, their verse, what they most delighted and prided themselves in, behind them—imperishable, incorruptible, immortal!—Sir John Beaumont (the brother of our dramatist) whose loyal and religious effusions are not worth much, very feelingly laments his brother’s untimely death in an epitaph upon him. ‘Thou should’st have followed me, but death to blame Miscounted years, and measured age by fame: So dearly hast thou bought thy precious lines, Their praise grew swiftly; so thy life declines. Thy Muse, the hearer’s Queen, the reader’s Love, All ears, all hearts (but Death’s) could please and move.’ Beaumont’s verses addressed to Ben Jonson at the Mermaid, are a pleasing record of their friendship, and of the way in which they ‘fleeted the time carelessly’ as well as studiously ‘in the golden age’ of our poetry. [_Lines sent from the Country with two unfinished Comedies, which deferred their merry meetings at the Mermaid._]