This passage, as we have observed in the preceding section, does not display in full proportion or untrammeled variety the metrical peculiarities of Fletcher's popular dramatic blank verse. The verse is lyric and declamatory: his purely dramatic verse whether in the _Monsieur Thomas_ of his earlier period, _The Chances_ of the middle period, or _A Wife for a Month_ and _Rule a Wife_ of his later years, has the feminine endings, redundant syllables, anapaestic substitutions, the end-stopped and sometimes fragmentary lines, the hurried and spasmodic utterance of conversational speech. But, from the rhetorical point of view, this soliloquy--in fact, the whole _Faithfull Shepheardesse_--affords a basis for further discrimination between Fletcher and Beaumont in the joint-plays; for it displays idiosyncrasies of tone-quality and diction which persist, after Beaumont's death, in Fletcher's dramas of 1616 to 1625 as they were in 1607-1609: sometimes slightly modified, more often exaggerated, but in essence the same. In Clorin's soliloquy, the reader cannot but notice, first, a tendency toward alliteration, the _fed_ and _flocks_, _fat_ and _fruitful_, _fresh_ and _fair_, _pleasing_ and _pipes_,--alliteration palpable and somewhat crude, but not yet excessive; second, a balanced iteration of words,--"be far away, Since thou art far away" (ll. 16-17), and, five lines further down, "But thou art gone and these are gone with thee," and in lines 31 and 32 "as freely give ... as I gained them free"; and an iteration of phrases, rhetorical asseverations, negatives, alternatives, questions,--"Thus I salute thy grave; thus do I pay," "thus I free," "thus put I off" (lines 4, 6, 9); third, a preference for iteration in triplets,--"No more shall these smooth brows," "No more the company," "Nor the shrill ... sound" (lines 10-14), "Or charmed," "or love-sick," "or through too much heat" (lines 35 and 36); fourth, a fondness for certain sonorous words,--"all ensuing heats ... all sports" (lines 7-8), "all my endeavours ... all green wounds" (lines 32-33), and the "alls" of lines 16 and 23; fifth, a plethora of adjectives,--"holy earth," "cold arms," "truest man," "fat plains"--many of them pleonastic--"misty film," "dulling rheum"--some forty nouns buttressed by epithets to twenty standing in their own strength; and a plethora of nouns in apposition (preferably triplets),--"all sports, delights, and jolly games" (line 8), "Berries and Chestnuts, Plantanes" (line 42); sixth, an indulgence in conversational tautology: for Fletcher is rarely content with a simple statement,--he must be forever spinning out the categories of a concept; expounding his idea by what the rhetoricians call division; enumerating the attributes and species painstakingly lest any escape, or verbosely as a padding for verse or speech. Of this mannerism The _Faithfull Shepheardesse_ affords many instances more typical than those contained in these forty-three lines; but even here