The characters are well grouped; and the spirit of merriment prevails. The reversals of motive and fortune, the recognitions and the denouement are as excellently and puerilely absurd as could be desired of such an amalgam of romance and farcical intrigue. Richard Brome, writing in praise of the author for the quarto of 1639, implies that the play was not well received at its "first presenting,"--"when Ignorance was judge, and but a few What was legitimate, what bastard knew." That first presenting was between 1608 and 1612; and the few might have cared more for Jonson's _Every Man in his Humour_ or _Volpone_, or something by Shakespeare, or soon afterwards for Beaumont and Fletcher's _Philaster_ or _A King and No King_. But, as Brome assures us, "the world's grown wiser now." That is to say, it had learned by 1639 "what was legitimate," and could believe that in Fletcher's _Monsieur Thomas_ and the like, "the Muses jointly did inspire His raptures only with their sacred fire." But even as transmogrified by D'Urfey and others the play did not survive its century. No better example could be afforded of the kind of comedy that Fletcher was capable of producing in his earlier period. It shows us with what ability he could dramatize a romantic tale; with what license as a realist imagine and portray an unmoral, when not immoral, semblance of contemporary life. That was either before Beaumont had joined forces with him; or when Beaumont was not pruning his fancy; was not hanging "plummets" on his wit "to suppress Its too luxuriant-growing mightiness," nor persuading him that mirth might subsist "untainted with obscenity," and "strength and sweetness" and "high choice of brain" be "couched in every line." I am not claiming too much for Beaumont. In his later work as in his earlier there is the frank animalism, at times, of Elizabethan blood and humour; but one may search in vain his parts of the joint-plays as well as his youthful _Knight of the Burning Pestle_ and those portions of _The Woman-Hater_ which Fletcher did not touch, for the Jacobean salaciousness of Fletcher's _Monsieur Thomas_ and the carnal cynicism which lurks beneath the pastoral garb of innocence even in _The Faithfull Shepheardesse_;--characteristics that find utterance again, untrammeled, in the dramas written after the younger poet was dead,--and Fletcher could no longer, as in those earlier days, wisely submit each birth To knowing Beaumont e're it did come forth, Working againe untill _he_ said 'twas fit; And make him the sobriety of his wit.[61]