In 1603 her sister-in-law, Cicely (Baker) Sackville, now Countess of Dorset and the Earl, her husband, that fine old dramatist of Beaumont's Inner Temple, and former acquaintance at Fotheringay of John Fletcher's father, had taken possession of the manor of Knole, near Sevenoaks in Kent, where their descendants live to-day. Before 1609, Fletcher's stepsister Cicely, named after her aunt, the Countess, had become the Lady Cicely Blunt. Grisogone became the Lady Grisogone Lennard, having married, about 1596, a great friend of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, and of his Countess (Sir Philip Sidney's sister), Sir Henry, the son of Sampson Lennard of Chevening and Knole. The Lennard estate lay but three and a half miles from that of their connections, the Dorsets, of Knole Park. If young Fletcher ever went down to see his stepmother at Sissinghurst, or his own mother's family in Cranbrook, he was but twenty-six miles by post-road from Chevening and still less from Aunt Cicely at Knole. Beaumont, himself, as we shall see, married the heiress of Sundridge Place a mile and a half south of Chevening, and but forty minutes across the fields from Knole. His sister Elizabeth, too, married a gentleman of one of the neighbouring parishes. The acquaintance of both our dramatists with Bakers and Sackvilles was enhanced by sympathies literary and dramatic. A still younger Sir Richard Baker, cousin to John Fletcher's stepsisters, and to the second and third Earls of Dorset, was an historian, a poet, and a student of the stage--on familiar terms with Tarleton, Burbadge, and Alleyn. And the literary traditions handed down from Thomas Sackville, the author of _Gorboduc_ and _The Mirror for Magistrates_ were not forgotten by his grandson, Richard, third Earl of Dorset, the contemporary of our dramatists,--for whom, if I am not mistaken, their portraits, now hanging in the dining-room of the Baron Sackville at Knole, were painted.[45] * * * * * I have dwelt thus at length upon the conditions antecedent to, and investing, the youth of Beaumont and of Fletcher, because the documents already at hand, if read in the light of scientific biography and literature, set before us with remarkable clearness the social and poetic background of their career as dramatists. When this background of birth, breeding, and family connection is filled in with the deeper colours of their life in London, its manners, experience, and associations, one may more readily comprehend why Dryden says in comparing them with Shakespeare, "they understood and imitated the conversation of gentlemen [of contemporary fashion] much better; whose wild debaucheries and quickness of wit in repartees, no poet before them could paint as they have done." FOOTNOTES: [37] _Cal. State Papers (Dom.)_, April 7, 1593. [38] _Briefe View of the State of the Church._ [39] Nichols's _Progresses of Queen Elizabeth_, II, 506-510.