traits never found in him but often found in some other collaborator with Fletcher, or in some reviser of Fletcher's plays, sometimes Massinger but more frequently Field. The latter dramatist modeled himself upon Beaumont, but though he caught, on occasion, something of the master's trick, no one steeped in the style of Beaumont can for a moment mistake for his even the most dramatic or poetic composition of Field. As to the scenes in prose supposed by some to have been written by Beaumont, there is not one that bears his distinctive impress, nor one that might not have been written by Daborne, Field, or Massinger, or by any of the half-dozen experts whose industry swelled the output of the Fletcherian syndicate. There being no evidence of Beaumont in any of these plays, it is unnecessary to investigate, here, the vexed question of the original date of each. Suffice it to repeat that concerning none is there definite or generally accepted information that it was written before Beaumont's retirement from dramatic activity. Passing in review, the qualities of Beaumont as a dramatist we find that in characterization he is, when at his best, true to nature, gradual in his processes, and discriminating in delineation. He is melodramatic at times in sudden shifts of crisis; but he is uniformly sensitive to innocence, beauty, and pathos,--contemptuous of cowardice, braggadocio, and insincerity,--appreciative of fidelity, friendship, noble affection, womanly devotion, self-sacrifice, and mercy, of romantic enterprise, and of the virile defiance of calumny, evil soliciting, and tyranny. In the delineation of lust he is frankly Elizabethan rather than insidiously Jacobean. He portrays with special tenderness the maiden of pure heart whose love is unfortunately placed too high, a Bellario, Euphrasia, or Urania,--or crossed by circumstance, a Viola, Arethusa, Aspatia, Panthea. He distinctively appropriates Shakespeare's girl-page; under his touch her grace suffers but slight diminution, and that by excess of sentimentality rather than by lack of individual endowment. His love-lorn lasses are integral personalities. No one, not maintaining a thesis, could mistake Viola with her shrewd inventiveness and sense of humour for Arethusa, or Arethusa with her swift despairs for Bellario, or Bellario with her fearlessness and noble mendacity for the countrified Urania, or any of them for the lachrymose Aspatia, or the full-pulsed Panthea. I find them as different each from the other as all from the tormenting Oriana or that seventeenth century Lydia Languish, Jasper's mock-romantic Luce.