The play contains many genuinely poetic passages, and some of those lines of meteoric beauty--"our lives are but our marches to the grave"--in which Beaumont abounded, and that Fletcher too rarely coined. With all the rankness of its humour, the play has such literary and dramatic excellence that one cannot but regret the infrequency with which Fletcher produced that of which he was capable. But even this best of Fletcher's heroic-dramatic plays contains, as Mr. More has observed, "one of those sudden conversions which make us wonder whether in his heart he felt any difference between a satyr-like lust and a chaste love--the conversion of the lecherous old king." I grant Fletcher's surpassing excellence in comedy, especially the comedy of manners and intrigue as, for instance, _The Chances_ and the _Rule a Wife and Have a Wife_, and I have elsewhere acknowledged his supremacy after Shakespeare in that realm. But we are now considering not that kind of composition or its technique, but the fibre which might be expected to show itself in compositions involving the element of seriousness. _The Humorous Lieutenant_ is of that kind,--it is called a tragicomedy by some. Has it one tithe of the serious insight into human life of any of Beaumont's plays involving ethical conflict? Inquiring further into the fibre of Fletcher, let us pass in brief review another play, a genuine tragicomedy this time, _A Wife for a Month_, written the year before he died, of whose heroine Mr. More says that "from every point of view, ethical and artistic, she is one of the most finely drawn and truest women in the whole range of English drama." The complication, here, assuredly affords opportunity for the display of sound and manly fibre; and the tragicomedy is instructive in more ways than one: it illustrates Fletcher's skill in construction and his disregard of probability; his sense of moral conflict and his insensibility to moral beauty; his power to conceive characteristic situations and his impotence to construct natural characters; his capability of noble sentiment and poetic expression and his beastly perverseness of fancy, his prostitution of art to sordid sensationalism. The story of the cumulative torments to which a lustful usurper subjects the maiden, Evanthe, whom he desires, and Valerio whom she loves, is graphically estimated by one of the _dramatis personae_,--"This tyranny could never be invented But in the school of Hell: earth is too innocent." Beside it Zola's _L'Assommoir_ smells sweet, and a nightmare lacks nothing of probability. Ugly, however, as the fundamental assumption is: namely, that the tyrant should permit a wedding on condition that at the end of a month the husband shall suffer death,--and with provision that meanwhile the honeymoon shall be surrounded with restriction more intolerable than death itself; and incredible as is the contrivance of the sequel,--kept a-going by the