Makes me | a-cold; | my fear says I am mortal. 110 [+!] Yet have I heard | (my Mother told it me, And now I do believe it), | if I keep My Virgin Flower uncropt, pure, chaste, and fair, No Goblin, | Wood-god, Fairy, Elf, or Fiend, [+!] Sa|tyr, or oth|er power that haunts the Groves, 115 Shall hurt my body, | or by vain illusion [+!] Draw | me to wan|der | after idle fires. We have here, in fifteen lines, four double endings, nine final pauses (end-stopped verses), four stress-syllable openings with compensating anapaests, and seven feminine caesurae. In every way this sample even of Fletcher's more formal style displays, in its salient characteristics, a much closer resemblance in kind to the sample of his later blank verse quoted from _Rule a Wife_, above, than to that quoted from Beaumont's _Maske_. When we pass from samples to larger sections, and compare percentages in the one hundred and thirty-one blank verses of _The Maske_ and the first one hundred and sixty-three of _The Shepheardesse_, we find that in respect of final pauses there is no great difference. There are, in the former, more than is usual with Beaumont--sixty per cent; in the latter, less than is usual with Fletcher--fifty per cent. But in other respects Beaumont's _Maske_ reveals peculiarities of verse altogether different from those of Fletcher, even when he is writing in the declamatory pastoral vein. In the one hundred and thirty-one lines of the _Maske_ we find but one double ending; whereas in the first one hundred and sixty-three blank verses of _The Shepheardesse_ we count as many as fourteen. In these productions the proportion of feminine caesurae is practically uniform--about forty per cent. But when we come to examine the more subtle movement of the rhythm, we find that in _The Maske_ not more than ten per cent of the lines open with the stress-syllable, while in the blank verse of the _Shepheardesse_ fully thirty-five out of every hundred lines have that opening and, consequently, impart the lyrical cadence which pervades much of Fletcher's metrical composition. In the matter of anapaestic substitutions, and of stress-syllable openings for the verse-section after the caesura, Beaumont is similarly inelastic; while the Fletcher of the _Shepheardesse_ displays a marvellous freedom. It follows that in the _Maske_ we encounter but rarely the rhetorical pause, within the verse, compensating for an absent thesis or arsis; while in the pastoral verse of Fletcher we find frequent instances of this delicate dramatic as well as metrical device, and an occasional jolting caesura.