Is great Jove jealous that I am imploy'd On her Love-errands? | She did never yet Claspe weak mortality in her white arms, As he hath often done: I only come To celebrate the long-wish'd Nuptials [+!] Here | in Olym|pia, | which | are now | perform'd. Betwixt two goodly rivers, | that have mixt Their gentle, rising waves, and are to grow [+!] In | to a thou|sand streams | [+!] great | as themselves. In these nine verses there are no Fletcherian jolts, no double endings. In only two lines trisyllabic feet occur; in only two, final pauses. There are stress-syllable openings in two, with the compensating anapaests; feminine caesurae, in three (dotted); and a stress-syllable opening for the verse-section after the caesura occurs in but one, whereas there are at least three such in the passage from _Monsieur Thomas_, quoted above. Nothing could be more pronounced than the difference between the metrical style of Fletcher's _Monsieur Thomas_ and _Rule a Wife_ and that of Beaumont's _Maske_, as illustrated here. Fletcher abounds in double endings, trisyllabic feet, and end-stopped lines, and such conversational or lyrical cadences; Beaumont uses them much more sparingly. But while the difference between the genuinely dramatic blank verse of Fletcher and that of Beaumont is sometimes as pronounced as this, it would be unscientific to base the criterion upon comparison of a mature, conversationally dramatic, composition of the former with a stiffly rhetorical declamatory composition of the latter. For a more suitable comparison we must set Beaumont's _Maske_ side by side with something of Fletcher's written in similar formal and declamatory style,--_The Faithfull Shepheardesse_, for instance, a youthful production in the pastoral spirit and form. Of this a small part, but sufficient for our purpose, is composed in blank verse; and I have cited in the next chapter with another end in view, the opening soliloquy,--to which the reader may turn. But as exemplifying certain of Fletcher's metrical peculiarities, in a style of verse suitable to be compared with Beaumont's in _The Maske_, the following lines from Act I, 1, are perhaps even more distinctive. "What greatness," says the Shepherdesse,-- What greatness, | or what private hidden power, [+!] Is | there in me, | to draw submission From this rude man and beast? Sure I am mortal, 105 The Daughter of a Shepherd; | he was mortal, And she that bore me mortal: | prick my hand, And it will bleed; a Feaver shakes me, and The self-same wind that makes the young Lambs shrink