as young Francis' earliest effort in rhyme. The dedication of the _Metamorphosis_ to "my loving friend, Master Michael Drayton," favours the conjectured composition by John, for he is writing other complimentary poems to Drayton in the years immediately following 1602. But, though F. B.'s lines prefatory to the _Metamorphosis_ are not unworthy of a fanciful youngster, they are negligible; as is the evidence of their authorship. Certain flimsy love-poems included in a volume published forty years later, twenty-four years after Beaumont's death, as of his composition, have also been attributed to his boyhood at the University, or at the Inner Temple. Most of them have been definitely traced to other authors, and of the rest of this class still unassigned there is no reason to believe that he was the author. In the same volume, however, there appears as by Beaumont a metrical tale based upon Ovid, called _Salmacis and Hermaphroditus_, of which we cannot be certain that he was not the author. The poem was first published, without name of writer, in 1602,[22] and was not assigned to Francis Beaumont until 1639, when Lawrence Blaiklock included it among the _Poems_: By Francis Beaumont, Gent., entered on the Stationers' Registers, September 2, and published, 1640. Blaiklock evidently printed from John Hodgets's edition of 1602, carelessly omitting here and there a line, and introducing absurd typographical mistakes. Either because he had private information that Beaumont was the author, or because he wished to profit by Beaumont's reputation, he goes so far as to sign the initials, F. B., to the verse dedication, _To Calliope_, and to alter the signature, A. F., appended to an introductory sonnet, _To the Author_, so as to read I. F. (suggesting John Fletcher). These licenses, in addition to the reckless inclusion in the 1640 volume of several poems by authors other than Beaumont, vitiate Blaiklock's evidence. On the other hand, the original publisher, Hodgets, was the publisher also, in 1607, of _The Woman-Hater_, a play now reasonably accepted as by Beaumont, originally alone; and, in Hodgets's edition of the _Salmacis and Hermaphroditus_, one of the introductory sonnets is signed J. B., and another W. B. The 'J. B.' sonnet is not unworthy of Beaumont's brother John. And if the W. B. of the other verses, _In Laudem Authoris_, is William Basse,--who in a sonnet, written after Beaumont's death, speaks of him as "rare Beaumont,"--there is further justification for entertaining the possibility of Beaumont's authorship of the _Salmacis_. For Basse was one of the group of pastoralists to which Francis' friend Drayton, and Drayton's friend, William Browne, belonged,--a group with which Francis must have been acquainted. But of that we shall have more to say when we come to consider Beaumont's later connection with Drayton, and with the dramatic activities of the Inner Temple at a time when Browne and other pastoralists were members of it.