of their fortunes and the doomsmen of their deeds.”  His characters are gloomy; meditative and philosophic murderers, cynical informers, sad and loving women, and they are all themselves in every phrase that they utter.  But they are studied in earnestness and sincerity.  Unquestionably he is the greatest of Shakespeare’s successors in the romantic drama, perhaps his only direct imitator.  He has single lines worthy to set beside those in Othello or King Lear.  His dirge in the Duchess of Malfi, Charles Lamb thought worthy to be set beside the ditty in The Tempest, which reminds Ferdinand of his drowned father.  “As that is of the water, watery, so this is of the earth, earthy.”  He has earned his place among the greatest of our dramatists by his two plays, the theme of which matched his sombre genius and the sombreness of the season in which it flowered.

But the drama could not survive long the altered times, and the voluminous plays of Beaumont and Fletcher mark the beginning of the end.  They are the decadence of Elizabethan drama.  Decadence is a term often used loosely and therefore hard to define, but we may say broadly that an art is decadent when any particular one of the elements which go to its making occurs in excess and disturbs the balance of forces which keeps the work a coherent and intact whole.  Poetry is decadent when the sound is allowed to outrun the sense or when the suggestions, say, of colour, which it contains are allowed to crowd out its deeper implications.  Thus we can call such a poem as this one well-known of O’Shaughnessy’s

“We are the music-makers,
 We are the dreamers of dreams,”

decadent because it conveys nothing but the mere delight in an obvious rhythm of words, or such a poem as Morris’s “Two red roses across the moon;” because a meaningless refrain, merely pleasing in its word texture, breaks in at intervals on the reader.  The drama of Beaumont and Fletcher is decadent in two ways.  In the first place those variations and licences with which Shakespeare in his later plays diversified the blank verse handed on to him by Marlowe, they use without any restraint or measure.  “Weak” endings and “double” endings, i.e. lines which end either on a conjunction or proposition or some other unstressed word, or lines in which there is a syllable too many—­abound in their plays.  They destroyed blank verse as a musical and resonant poetic instrument by letting this element of variety outrun the sparing and skilful use which alone could justify it.  But they were decadent in other and deeper ways than that.  Sentiment in their plays usurps the place of character.  Eloquent and moving speeches and fine figures are no longer subservient to the presentation of character in action, but are set down for their own sake, “What strange self-trumpeters and tongue-bullies all the brave soldiers of Beaumont and Fletcher are,” said Coleridge.  When they die they die to the music of their own virtue.