Whether we are to regard this consistent “study in little” as a deliberate piece of work on the part of the authors, must remain a matter of opinion. There is no similar figure elsewhere in the dramatic output of Massinger, nor any quite so minutely conceived within the same number of speech-lines in that of Field, and one could scarce be blamed for believing that a number of hap-hazard, sketchy strokes with which the collaborators dashed off a character whom they deemed of no great importance, all so fell upon the canvas that, by a miracle of chance, they went to form the lineaments of a real woman. The discussion of the probability or possibility of such a hypothesis would carry us very far afield, and would involve the question of the extent to which all genius is unconscious and intuitive. But however that may be, the _result_ of their labors remains the same, there to behold in black and white, and Beaumelle, so far from being a poorly conceived and unsatisfactory wanton who is the chief defect of the play, is a figure of no mean verisimilitude who succeeds after a fashion in linking together the loose-knit dual structure of the drama; to whose main catastrophe she adds her own tragedy, a tragedy neither impressive nor deeply stirring, it is true, for she is a petty spirit from whom great tragedy does not proceed--but tragedy still--the eternal, inevitable tragedy of false romanticism, that has found its culmination in the person of Emma Bovary. In this study of Beaumelle, _The Fatal Dowry_ has been subjected to a much more intensive examination than it is the custom to bestow upon the dramas of the successors of Shakespeare. The truth is that the plays of the Jacobean period do not, as a rule, admit of such analysis. In most of them, and especially in the plays of Massinger, he who searches and probes them comes presently to a point beyond which critical inquiry is stopped short with a desperate finality; be they ever so strikingly splendid and glittering fair in their poetry and their characterization, these dazzling qualities lie upon the surface, and a few careful perusals exhaust their possibilities and tell us all there is to know of them. But _The Fatal Dowry_, though less imposing than a number of others, stands almost alone among its contemporaries in sharing with the great creations of Shakespeare the power to open new vistas, to present new aspects, to offer new suggestions, the longer it is studied. Perhaps this is due to the fact that, as has already been said, it is not so much a tragedy of the accepted type as a cross-section of life.