duty, and he had discharged it with unflinching courage. He had kept his word to Hughes; he had done all that he could for him, even to offering his own chance of fame and fortune a sacrifice to him. Now he could do no more, and if he could not help being glad that the sacrifice had not been accepted of him, he was not to be blamed. He was very much to be praised, and he rewarded himself with a full recognition of his virtue; he imagined some words, few but rare, from Peace, expressing her sense of his magnanimity, when she came to know of it. He hoped that a fact so creditable to him, and so characteristic, would not escape the notice of his biographer. He wished that Hughes could know what he had done, and in his revery he contrived that his generous endeavor should be brought to the old man's knowledge; he had Hughes say that such an action was more to him than the publication of his book.

Throughout his transport of self-satisfaction there ran a nether torment of question whether Peace Hughes could possibly suppose that he was privy to that paragraphing about his book, and this finally worked to the surface, and became his whole mood. After his joy ful riot it was this that kept him awake till morning, that poisoned all his pleasure in his escape from self-sacrifice. He could only pacify himself and get some sleep at last by promising to stop at the publishers on his way down to the Every Evening office in the morning, and beseech her to believe that he had nothing to do with priming the press, and that he wished Mr. Brandreth had not told him of it. Nothing less than this was due him in the character that he desired to appear in hereafter.

He reached the publishers' office before Mr. Brandreth came down, and when he said he would like to see Miss Hughes, the clerk answered that Miss Hughes had sent word that her father was not so well, and she would not be down that day. "He's pretty low, I believe," the clerk volunteered.

"I'm afraid so," said Ray.

He asked if the clerk would call a messenger to take a note from him to his office, and when he had despatched it he went up to see Hughes.

"Did you get our message?" Peace asked him the first thing.

"No," said Ray. "What message?"

VOL. LXXXV.-No. 509.-75

You must tell him the truth," said the girl, sadly.

66

Is that Mr. Ray?" Mrs. Denton called from the sick-room. "Come in, Mr. Ray. Father wants you."

"In a moment. Come here, Mrs. Denton," Ray called back.

She came out, and he told her what he had told Peace. She did not seem to see its bearing at once. When she realized it all, and had spent her quick wrath in denunciation of Mr. Brandreth's heartlessness, she said, desperately: "Well, you must come now. Perhaps it isn't his book; perhaps it's something else. But he wants you."

She had to rouse her father from the kind of torpor in which he lay like one dead. She made him understand who was there, and then he smiled, and turned his eyes appealingly toward Ray. "Put your ear as close to his lips as you can. He can't write any more. He wants to say something to you."

Ray stooped over and put his ear to the drawn lips. A few whiffs of inarticulate breath mocked the dying man's endeavor to speak. "I'm sorry; I can't catch a syllable," said Ray.

A mute despair showed itself in the old man's eyes.

"Look at me father!" cried Mrs. Denton. "Is it about your book?"

The faintest smile came over his face. "Did you wish to ask Mr. Ray if he would speak to Mr. Brandreth about it?" The smile dimly dawned again.

"Well, he has spoken to him. He went to see him last night, and he's come to tell you"-Ray shuddered and held

To knowing Beaumont, ere it did come forth, And made him the sobriety of his wit."

And Richard Brome also alludes to the copious ease of Fletcher, whom he had known:

"Of Fletcher and his works I speak. His works! says Momus, nay, his plays you'd say! Thou hast said right, for that to him was play Which was to others' brains a toil."

The general tradition seems to have been that Beaumont contributed the artistic judgment and Fletcher the fine frenzy. There is commonly a grain of truth in traditions of this kind. In the plays written by the two poets conjointly, we may find an intellectual entertainment in assigning this passage to one and that to the other, but we can seldom say decisively this is Beaumont's" or "that is Fletcher's," though we may find tolerably convincing arguments for it.

We have, it is true, some grounds on which we may safely form a conclusion as to the individual characteristics of Fletcher, because a majority of the plays which go under their joint names were written by him alone after Beaumont's death. In these I find a higher and graver poetical quality, and I think a riper grain of sentiment, than in any of the others. In running my eye along the margin, I observe that by far the greater number of the isolated phrases I have marked, whether for poetical force or felicity, but especially picturesqueness, or for weight of thought, belong to Fletcher. I should never suspect Beaumont's hand in such verses as these from Bonduca (a play wholly Fletcher's): "Ten years of bitter nights and heavy marches, When many a frozen storm sung through my cuirass,

And made it doubtful whether that or I Were the more stubborn metal." Where I come upon a picturesque passage in the joint plays, I am apt to think it Fletcher's: so too where there is a certain exhilaration and largeness of manner, and an ardor that charges its words with imagination as they go, or with an enthusiasm that comes very near it in its effect. Take this from the same play:

"The gods of Rome fight for ye; loud fame calls ye,

Pitched on the topless Apennine, and blows
To all the underworld, all nations, seas,
And unfrequented deserts where the
dwells,

snow

Wakens the ruined monuments, and there,
Where nothing but eternal death and sleep is,
Informs again the dead bones with your vir-
tues."

In short, I am inclined to think Fletcher the more poet of the two. Where there is pathos or humor, I am in doubt whether they belong to him or his partner, for I find these qualities both in the plays they wrote together and in those which are wholly his. In the expression of sentiment going far enough to excite a painless æsthetic sympathy, but stopping short of tragic passion, Beaumont is quite the equal of his friend. In the art of heightening and enriching such a sentiment by poetical associations and pictorial accessories, Fletcher seems to me the superior. Both, as I have said, have the art of being pathetic, and of conceiving pathetic situations; but neither of them had depth enough of character for that tragic pathos which is too terrible for tears; for those passionate convulsions when our human nature, like the sea in earthquake, is sucked away deep down from its habitual shores, leaving bare for a moment slimy beds stirring with loathsome life, and weedy tangles before undreamed of, and instantly hidden again under the rush of its reaction. Theirs are no sudden revelations, flashes out of the very tempest itself, and born of its own collisions; but much rather a melancholy Ovidian grace like that of the Heroic Epistles, conscious of itself, yet not so conscious as to beget distrust, and make us feel as if we had been cheated of our tenderness. If they ope the sacred source of sympathetic tears, it is not without due warning and ceremonious preparation. I do not mean to say that their sentiment is not real because it is pensive, and not passionate. It is real, but it is never heart-rending. I say it all in saying that their region is that of fancy. and imagination may be of one substance, as the northern lights and lightning are supposed to be; but the one plays and flickers in harmless flashes and streamers over the vault of the brain, the other condenses all its thought-executing fires into a single stab of flame. their humor. It is playful, intellectual, elaborate, like that of Charles Lamb when he trifles with it, pleasing itself with artificial dislocations of thought, and never glancing at those essential incongruities in the nature of things at sight of which

Fancy

And so of