In broad outline the figure of Beaumont has been, of course, manifest to the vision of poet-critics in the past. To none more palpably than to the latest of the melodious immortals of the Victorian strain. "If a distinction must be made," wrote Swinburne as early as 1875, "if a distinction must be made between the Dioscuri of English poetry, we must admit that Beaumont was the twin of heavenlier birth. Only as Pollux was on one side a demigod of diviner blood than Castor can it be said that on any side Beaumont was a poet of higher and purer genius than Fletcher; but so much must be allowed by all who have eyes and ears to discern in the fabric of their common work a distinction without a difference. Few things are stranger than the avowal of so great and exquisite a critic as Coleridge, that he could trace no faintest line of demarcation between the plays which we owe mainly to Beaumont and the plays which we owe solely to Fletcher. To others this line has always appeared in almost every case unmistakable. Were it as hard and broad as the line which marks off, for example, Shakespeare's part from Fletcher's in _The Two Noble Kinsmen_, the harmony would of course be lost which now informs every work of their common genius.... In the plays which we know by evidence surer than the most trustworthy tradition to be the common work of Beaumont and Fletcher there is indeed no trace of such incongruous and incompatible admixture as leaves the greatest example of romantic tragedy ... an unique instance of glorious imperfection, a hybrid of heavenly and other than heavenly breed, disproportioned and divine. But throughout these noblest of the works inscribed generally with the names of both dramatists we trace on every other page the touch of a surer hand, we hear at every turn the note of a deeper voice, than we can ever recognize in the work of Fletcher alone. Although the beloved friend of Jonson, and in the field of comedy his loving and studious disciple, yet in that tragic field where his freshest bays were gathered Beaumont was the worthiest and the closest follower of Shakespeare.... The general style of his tragic or romantic verse is as simple and severe in its purity of note and regularity of outline as that of Fletcher's is by comparison lax, effusive, exuberant.... In every one of the plays common to both, the real difficulty for a critic is not to trace the hand of Beaumont, but to detect the touch of Fletcher. Throughout the better part of every such play, and above all of their two masterpieces, _Philaster_ and _The Maid's Tragedy_, it should be clear to the most sluggish or cursory of readers that he has not to do with the author of _Valentinian_ [Fletcher] and _The Double Marriage_ [Fletcher and Massinger]. In those admirable tragedies the style is looser, more fluid, more feminine.... But in those tragic poems of which the dominant note is the note of Beaumont's genius a subtler chord of thought is sounded, a deeper key of