I never saw a drunken man before; But these I think are so.... My state is such, I know not how to think A prayer fit for me; only I could move That never Maiden more might be in love! When, rescued from thieves in the country, she finds that her rescuer is even more a peril,[224] with what childlike trust she appeals: Pray you, leave me here Just as you found me, a poor innocent, And Heaven will bless you for it! When again deserted, with what pathos she sighs: "I'll sit me down and weep; All things have cast me from 'em but the earth. The evening comes, and every little flower Droops now, as well as I!" And, finally, when she has rediscovered Ricardo, and conquered his self-reproach by her forgiveness, which is "to love you," with what admirable touch of nature and delicious humour she gives verisimilitude to her story and herself:[225] Methinks I would not now, for any thing, But you _had_ mist me: I have made a story Will serve to waste many a winter's fire, When we are old. I'll tell my daughters then The miseries their Mother had in love, And say, "My girls, be wiser"; yet I would not Have had more wit myself. Ricardo, too, is a creative study in the development of personality; and the rural scenes and characters are convincing. In the main plot Beaumont had no hand whatever, unless it be in the prose of the trial-scene at the end of the fifth act. The rest is Fletcher's; but in a few scenes his work has been revamped, and in verse as well as style degraded by the reviser. Oliphant thinks that here and there Massinger may be traced;[226] and here and there, Rowley.[227] I should be sorry to impute any of the mutilations to the former. I think that the irregular lines, trailing or curtailed, the weak endings, the finger-counted syllables, puerile accentuation, and bad grammar have much nearer kinship with the earlier output of the latter. But of whatever sins of supererogation his revisers may have been guilty, the prime offense is Fletcher's--in dramatizing that story at all. To make a comedy out of cuckoldry was not foreign to the genius of the Elizabethans: for the pruriency of it we can make historical allowance. But a comedy in which the wittol-hero successfully conducts the cuckolding of himself is nauseating. And that the wittol, his adulterous wife, and the fornicator should conclude the affair in mutual gratulation is, from the dramatic point of view, worse even than prurient and nauseating; it is unnatural, and therefore unsuited to artistic effect. No amount of technical ingenuity on Fletcher's part could have made his contribution to this play worthy of literary criticism.