Posterity has taken leave to differ with the Rev. W. Cartwright. The conversations in Fletcher’s comedies are often lively, but the wit is generally a gentlemanlike banter; that is, what was gentlemanlike in that day. Real wit keeps; real humor is of the same nature in Aristophanes and Mark Twain; but nothing grows mouldy so soon as mere fun, the product of animal spirits. Fletcher had far more of this than of true humor. Both he and Beaumont were skilled in that pleasantry which in good society is the agreeable substitute for the more trenchant article. There is an instance of this in Miramont’s commendation of Greek in the “Elder Brother:”-- “Though I can speak no Greek, I love the sound on ’t; It goes so thundering as it conjured devils; Charles speaks it loftily, and, if thou wert a man, Or had’st but ever heard of Homer’s Iliads, Hesiod and the Greek poets, thou would’st run mad, And hang thyself for joy thou ’dst such a gentleman To be thy son. O, he has read such things To me!” “And do you understand ’em, brother?” “I tell thee no; that ’s not material; the sound ’s Sufficient to confirm an honest man.” The speech of Lucio in the “Woman-hater” has a smack of Molière in it:-- “Secretary, fetch the gown I used to read petitions in, and the standish I answer French letters with.” Many of the comedies are impersonations of what were then called humors, like the “Little French Lawyer;” and some, like the “Knight of the Burning Pestle,” mere farces. Nearly all have the merit of being lively and amusing, which, to one who has read many comedies, is saying a great deal. In what I said just now I did not mean that Fletcher does not sometimes show an almost tragic power, as he constantly does tragic sensibility. There are glimpses of it in “Thierry and Theodoret,” and in the death-scene of the little Hengo in “Bonduca.” Perhaps I should rather say that he can conceive a situation with some true elements of tragedy, though not of the deepest tragedy, in it; but when he comes to work it out, and make it visible to us in words, he seems to feel himself more at home with the pity than the terror of it. His pathos (and this is true of Beaumont also) is mixed with a sweetness that grows cloying. And it is always the author who is speaking, and whom we hear. At best he rises only to a simulated passion, and that leads inevitably to declamation. There is no pang in it, but rather the hazy softness of remembered sorrow. Lear on the heath, at parley with the elements, makes all our pettier griefs contemptible, and the sublime pathos of that scene abides with us almost like a consolation. It is not Shakespeare who speaks, but Sorrow herself:--