Fleay and other scholars have grounded an additional criterion upon the fact that the unaided plays of Fletcher contain but an insignificant quantity of prose. They consequently have ascribed to Beaumont most of the prose passages in the joint-plays. But, because in his later development Fletcher found that conversational blank verse would answer all the purposes of prose, it does not follow that in his youthful collaboration with Beaumont he never wrote prose. We find, on the contrary, in the joint-plays that the prose passages in scenes otherwise marked by Fletcher's characteristics of verse, display precisely the rhetorical qualities of that verse. The prose of Mardonius in Act IV, Scene 2 of _A King and No King_, and the prose of Act V, Scenes 1 and 3, which by metrical tests are Fletcher's, are precisely the prose of Fletcher's Dion in Act II, Scene 4 and Act V, Scene 3 of _Philaster_, and the tricks of alliteration, triplet, and iteration, are those of Fletcher's verse in the same scenes. FOOTNOTES: [149] Some sixteen plays in all. [150] _The Chances_, I, 1, p. 222 (Dyce); but as a rule I use in this chapter the text of the _Cambridge English Classics_. [151] For these scenes, and the reasons for asserting that Fletcher revised them, see Chapter XXIV below. [152] The reader may judge for himself by referring to the citation from the _Letter_ and the poems to the Countess in Chapters VII and XI, above. [153] Fleay, Boyle, Oliphant, Alden. And even G. C. Macaulay, who once claimed the whole play for Beaumont, says now "perhaps Fletcher's." [154] Q 1622, slightly modernized. [155] IV, 1, 2, 3; V, 1, 3. [156] Quarto of 1619 as given by Alden. CHAPTER XIX FLETCHER'S DICTION