These characteristics of the Fletcherian habit mark all the author's independent plays from _The Faithfull Shepheardesse_ of 1607 or 1608 to _Rule a Wife_ of 1624. The man himself, I think, was better than the dramaturgic artist catering to the public market. For his personal, nay noble, ideals, let the reader turn to the poem appended to _The Honest Mans Fortune_, and judge. The characteristics sketched above are of the maker of a mimic world. Since I have elsewhere discussed them in full,[177] and the marvellous success that the dramaturge achieved in Shakespeare's Globe, this brief enumeration must suffice. Fletcher's mental habit affords an additional criterion for the determination of authorship in the unquestioned Beaumont-Fletcher plays, and in the analysis of plays in which the collaboration of the poets has been conjectured but not so fully attested. FOOTNOTES: [177] _The Fellows and Followers of Shakespeare_ (Part Two) in _Representative English Comedies_, Vol. III. CHAPTER XXI BEAUMONT'S DICTION From a consideration of Beaumont's work in his poems, in his _Maske_ and _Woman-Hater_, and such portions of the three unquestioned Beaumont-Fletcher plays as are marked by his idiosyncrasies of versification, we may arrive at conclusions concerning his diction, rhetorical and poetic. 1. Rhetorical Peculiarities in General. Beaumont's frequent use in prose of the enclitics 'do' and 'did' has been observed by students of his style. The same peculiarity marks his verse, and occasionally enables the reader to determine the authorship of passages where the metrical tests are inconclusive. His rhetoric is sometimes of the repetitive order, but, as Oliphant has indicated, rather for ends of word-play and irony than for mere expansion as with Fletcher. Such, for instance, is the ironical repetition of a speaker's words by his interlocutor. I note also a tendency to purely dramatic quotation, not common in Fletcher's writing,--_e. g._, in _The Woman-Hater_: "Lisping cry 'Good Sir!' and he's thine own"; or "Every one that does not know, cries 'What nobleman is that?'"--and in _A King and No King_ "That hand was never wont to draw a sword, But it cried 'Dead' to something." This test alone, if we had not others of rhetoric and metre, would go far to deciding the respective contributions of our authors to the personality of Captain Bessus in the latter play. The Bessus of the first three acts, undoubtedly Beaumont's, is resonant with such cries and conversational citations; the Bessus of the last two, in a role almost as extensive, uses the device but once. Beaumont sometimes indulges in enumerative sentences; but the enumerations are generally in prose and (it will be recalled that he was a member of the Inner Temple) of a mock-legal character, not mere redundancies of detail such as we find in Fletcher. Among other peculiarities of expression is his frequent employment of 'ha' as an interrogative interjection.