“I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness; I never gave you kingdom, called you children; You owe me no subscription: then let fall Your horrible pleasure; here I stand, your slave, A poor, infirm, weak, and despis’d old man:-- But yet I call you servile ministers, That have with two pernicious daughters join’d Your high-engender’d battles ’gainst a head So old and white as this.” What confidence of simplicity is this! We call it Greek, but it is nature, and cosmopolitan as she. That white head and Priam’s--the one feebly defiant, the other bent humbly over the murderous hand of Achilles--are our sufficing epitomes of desolate old age. There is no third. Generally pity for ourselves mingles insensibly with our pity for others, but here--what are we in the awful presence of these unexampled woes? The sorrows of Beaumont and Fletcher’s personages have almost as much charm as sadness in them, and we think of the poet more than of the sufferer. Yet his emotion is genuine, and we feel it to be so even while we feel also that it leaves his mind free to think about it, and the dainty expression he will give to it. Beaumont and Fletcher appeal to this self-pity of which I just spoke by having the air of saying, “How would _you_ feel in a situation like this?” I am not now speaking of their poetical quality. That is constant and unfailing, especially in Fletcher. In judging them as poets, the question would be, not _what_ they said, but _how_ they said it.