Many of Fletcher's excesses and defects not only in the plays written with Beaumont, but in plays written after his death, have been conferred from the day of Flecknoe to the present upon Beaumont. There is very little "sinne-lamenting sorrow" in the _Valentinian_ of Fletcher, or of Fletcher and Massinger, and very little in Fletcher's _Wife for a Month_; but in many of Beaumont's scenes in _The Maides Tragedy_, and _A King and No King_, and _The Coxcombe_ the genuine accents of "sinne-lamenting sorrow" are heard. Fletcher certainly "loosed the bonds of conduct and left human nature as a mere bundle of irresponsibilities," but not Beaumont. Let the reader turn to that poet's scenes in the joint-plays (two-thirds of the great ones) as I have indicated them, or to what I have unrolled of Beaumont's mental habit, and judge for himself.[259] The concession of the essayist from whom, as a representative of enlightened modern opinion upon the subject, I have been quoting,--that "as Fletcher's work stands, he may appear utterly devoid of conscience, a man to whom our human destinies were mere toys," I hail with delight, although I think that Fletcher the man had more honest ideals than Fletcher the dramatist. But, as a critic, I resent the surmise that Fletcher "was by nature of a manlier, sounder fibre than Beaumont." In the heroic-romantic comedy, _The Humorous Lieutenant_, Fletcher displays, indeed, as Mr. More says, "a strain almost like that of Shakespeare, upon whom he manifestly modelled himself in everything except Shakespeare's serious insight into human motives." But does that play reveal anything of manlier, sounder fibre than Beaumont's _A King and No King_?