In the main, what reality the characters retain in our memories is due to the power of the verse to reflect clearly the emotions of the moment. There is a notable absence of the merely sonorous, the turgid declamation, the mouthing of strange words, and an absence of over-crowding thought or fancy. Beaumont and Fletcher had no desire to make their style sententious, weighty, and philosophical. They knew what they wanted to say, and they said it clearly and rapidly. They had room for ornament and rhetorical device, but none for eccentricity or obscurity. Another remark of Dryden's, that they perfected the English language, deserves consideration as the view of a century later, and can be appreciated even now. The characteristics of their style, so far as it can be considered as a common property, seem due to an effort to make dialogue correspond as nearly as possible to natural speech. This is particularly true of Fletcher, who is the more revolutionary of the two and the more persistent in his mannerisms. His structure is loose and conversational, and his blank verse overruns the borders of the rigid pentameter and approaches the irregularity of prose. Numerous added syllables and a large percentage of feminine endings further mark his departures from past models, and, combined with his end-stopped lines, give his verse a peculiar monotony. Both writers rise now and then to an intensely imaginative phrase or a beautifully wrought description. The verse of neither is suggestive of the intricacies of human feeling or the splendor of human intellect, but the verse of both, of Fletcher preëminently, reveals a fertility of imagination and an extraordinary mobility of words. These merits of style gave Beaumont and Fletcher their seventeenth century reputation and have continued to attract readers in the generations since. Ethical objections to their plays drove them from the stage in spite of their theatrical effectiveness. They wrote with little ethical intention. Unlike some of their contemporaries, they did not seek to discover the abodes of sin and to chastise the monster, nor did they study human nature in the light of moral law. They dealt with themes that would please their audience and would offer a sufficient range of emotions for the exhibition of their poetic powers. Without imaginations that touched spiritual heights or penetrated to the real significance of moral conflict, they entered unhesitatingly upon the task of holding up a mirror to a society loose in manners and unprincipled in morals. They were not so much guilty of intentional immorality as impotent to produce moral effect. If their imaginations kept too frequent company with the gross and the unhealthy, they also sought at times the sweeter and nobler aspects of life. What won for their ethics high laudation from their contemporaries was their rhetorical and dramatic exaltation of ideals of magnanimity and dreams of idyllic love and devoted friendship.