His judgment as a critic was recognized by his contemporaries, as well as the poetic brilliance of the dramas which he was creating under their eyes. His language, too, was praised for its distinction while he was yet living. In the manuscript outline of the _Hypercritica_, which appears to have been filled in at various times between 1602 and 1616, Bolton says: "the books out of which wee gather the most warrantable English are not many to my remembrance.... But among the cheife, or rather the cheife, are in my opinion these: Sir Thomas Moore's works; ... George Chapman's first seaven books of Iliades; Samuell Danyell; Michael Drayton his Heroicall Epistles of England; Marlowe his excellent fragment of Hero and Leander; Shakespeare, Mr. Francis Beamont, and innumerable other writers for the stage,--and [they] presse tenderly to be used in this Argument; Southwell, Parsons, and some few other of that sort." In the final version of the _Hypercritica_, prepared between 1616 and 1618,[127] Bolton omits the later dramatists altogether;[128] but that is not to be construed by way of discrimination against Shakespeare and Beaumont. There is no doubt that Bolton knew the Beaumonts personally, and appreciated their worth, and as early as 1610;--for to his _Elements of Armories_ of that year, he prefixes a "Letter to the Author, from the learned young gentleman, I. B., of Grace-Dieu in the County of Leicestershire, Esquier,"[129] who highly compliments the invention, judicial method, and taste displayed in the _Elements_, and returns the manuscript with promise of his patronage. Further information of the esteem in which Francis was held, is afforded by the eulogies, direct or indirect, written soon after his death by those who were near enough to him in years to have known him, or to assess his worth untrammeled by the critical consensus of a generation that knew him not. The tender tributes of his brother and of his contemporary, Dr. Corbet, successively Bishop of Oxford, and of Norwich, have already been quoted. A so-called "sonnet," signed I. F., included in an Harleian manuscript between two poems undoubtedly by Fletcher, may not have been intended for the dead poet; but I agree with Dyce, who first printed it,[130] that it seems "very like Fletcher's epicede on his beloved associate":-- Come, sorrow, come! bring all thy cries, All thy laments, and all thy weeping eyes! Burn out, you living monuments of woe! Sad sullen griefs, now rise and overflow! Virtue is dead; O cruel fate! All youth is fled; All our laments too late. Oh, noble youth, to thy ne'er-dying name, Oh, happy youth, to thy still-growing fame, To thy long peace in earth, this sacred knell Our last loves ring--farewell, farewell, farewell! Go, happy soul, to thy eternal birth! And press his body lightly, gentle Earth!