In the comedy that delineates humours, _The Woman-Hater_, as regards both poetry and technique, falls below several plays of Dekker, Chapman, Marston, Middleton, and Jonson, and below the earlier efforts of Shakespeare; but in characterization it is as good as some of Shakespeare's. There is no comic figure in _Love's Labour's Lost_, the _Two Gentlemen of Verona_, or the _Comedy of Errors_, that surpasses Beaumont's Hungry Courtier; and the humorous dialogue and the prose as a whole of _The Woman-Hater_ are more natural, and more intelligible to the modern ear. With Shakespeare's later comedies that in any degree avail themselves of the 'humours' element, or with Jonson's masterpieces in this kind, _The Woman-Hater_, of course, can not be placed in comparison. But if for the nonce, we consider Beaumont's _Knight of the Burning Pestle_, merely in its 'humours' aspect, we must acknowledge that its characters are as clear-cut, as typical of the time and as provocative of laughter as those of _Every Man in his Humour_, which for all its historic significance most people nowadays read, or might read, with a yawn; and that it is less artificial in construction, more human in motive and character, more modern in mirth than _The Silent Woman_,--even though the object of its ridicule be now _caviare_ to the general. To set Beaumont's burlesque as a comedy of manners beside any of Shakespeare's comedies from 1594 down, would be futile, but of the early Shakespearian plays mentioned above none shakes more with fun than _The Knight of the Burning Pestle_, and not one gives us the flavour of London,--its citizens, their affectations and ideals, their reading, habits and life,--or of England, that the _Knight_ affords in every scene. If Shakespeare instead of writing, say, the _Comedy of Errors_ had written _The Knight of the Burning Pestle_, scholars would now be flooding us with _Variorum_ editions of it, women's literary clubs would be likening him with fervour to Cervantes, and the public might be so well educated to its allusions and ideas that our Hebrew emperors of the theatrical world and arbiters of dramatic vogue would be "starring" it through the country to the delight of audiences that wisely make a show of understanding and enjoying everything that Shakespeare wrote. To what unrealized extent the fate of plays hangs upon the tradition of the green-room, the actor's whim, the manager's enterprise or ignorance, and luck, is material for an essay in itself. I am not asserting that _The Knight of the Burning Pestle_ pretends to poetry, as do all of Shakespeare's plays; but that for chuckling and side-long mirth, and for manners and insight into the life of a rarely interesting period, it is fine comedy, while as burlesque it is equalled by few of the kind in our language and excelled by none.