“Of Fletcher and his works I speak. His works! says Momus, nay, his plays you’d say! Thou hast said right, for that to him was play Which was to others’ brains a toil.” The general tradition seems to have been that Beaumont contributed the artistic judgment, and Fletcher the fine frenzy. There is commonly a grain of truth in traditions of this kind. In the plays written by the two poets conjointly, we may find an intellectual entertainment in assigning this passage to one and that to the other, but we can seldom say decisively “This is Beaumont’s,” or “That is Fletcher’s,” though we may find tolerably convincing arguments for it. We have, it is true, some grounds on which we may safely form a conclusion as to the individual characteristics of Fletcher, because a majority of the plays which go under their joint names were written by him alone after Beaumont’s death. In these I find a higher and graver poetical quality, and I think a riper grain of sentiment, than in any of the others. In running my eye along the margin, I observe that by far the greater number of the isolated phrases I have marked, whether for poetical force or felicity, but especially for picturesqueness, and for weight of thought, belong to Fletcher. I should never suspect Beaumont’s hand in such verses as these from “Bonduca” (a play wholly Fletcher’s):-- “Ten years of bitter nights and heavy marches, When many a frozen storm sung through my cuirass, And made it doubtful whether that or I Were the more stubborn metal.” Where I come upon a picturesque passage in the joint plays, I am apt to think it Fletcher’s: so too where there is a certain exhilaration and largeness of manner, and an ardor that charges its words with imagination as they go, or with an enthusiasm that comes very near it in its effect. Take this from the same play:-- “The gods of Rome fight for ye; loud fame calls ye, Pitched on the topless Apennine, and blows To all the underworld, all nations, seas, And unfrequented deserts where the snow dwells, Wakens the ruined monuments, and there, Where nothing but eternal death and sleep is, Informs again the dead bones with your virtues.”