Whether the anonymous writer on _The Time Poets_[134] was a personal acquaintance of Beaumont we cannot tell. The definite qualities of the poet which he emphasizes are, however, as likely to be drawn from life and conversation as from the perusal of his dramas. The lines, apparently composed between 1620 and 1636, begin, One night, the great Apollo, pleas'd with Ben, Made the odde number of the Muses ten; The fluent Fletcher, Beaumont rich in sense, In complement and courtship's quintessence; Ingenious Shakespeare, Massinger that knows The strength of plot to write in verse or prose,-- and continue with "cloud-grappling Chapman" and others, as of the ten Muses. That Thomas Heywood, the dramatist, was a personal friend,--we may be sure,--the kind of friend who having a sense of humour did not resent Beaumont's genial satire in _The Knight of the Burning Pestle_ upon his bourgeois drama of _The Foure Prentises_ of London. Writing as late as 1635, he remembers Francis as a wit: Excellent Bewmont, in the formost ranke Of the rarest Wits, was never more than Franck.-- The touch of familiarity with which Heywood[135] causes that whole row of poets, many of them then dead, Robin Green, Kit Marlowe, the Toms (Kyd, Watson and Nashe), mellifluous Will, Ben, and the rest, to live for posterity as human, and lovable, gracefully heightens the compliment for one and all. We may surmise that one more eulogist of Beaumont, his kinsman,[136] Sir George Lisle, a marvellously gallant cavalier, who distinguished himself at Newberry, and was shot by order of Fairfax about the end of the Civil War, was old enough in 1616 to have known our poet. Though Sir George, in his verses for the Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647, lays special stress upon the close-woven fancy of the two playwrights, he seems to have a first-hand information, not common to the younger writers of these commendatory poems, concerning Beaumont's share in at least one of the tragedies. He ascribes to him, not to Fletcher,--as we know by modern textual tests, correctly,--the nobler scenes of "brave Mardonius" in _A King and No King_. One attaches, therefore, more than mere literary, or hearsay, significance to his selection for special praise of Beaumont's force, when he says, Thou strik'st our sense so deep, At once thou mak'st us Blush, Rejoyce, and Weep. Great father Johnson bow'd himselfe when hee (Thou writ'st so nobly) vow'd he envy'd thee. FOOTNOTES: [121] From the portrait at Knole Park. [122] _Encyc. Brit., sub nomine._ [123] By Cockerell, in the _Variorum Edition of B. and F.'s Works_, Vol. I, 1904. See Frontispiece to this volume. [124] _Historical Portraits_, Vol. II, 1600-1700, Oxford, 1911. [125] Not to the third Earl, Richard, as Cyril Brett, _Drayton's Minor Poems_, p. xix, has it.