but never gross.  He had the healthy coarseness of nature herself.  But Beaumont and Fletcher’s pages are corrupt.  Even their chaste women are immodest in language and thought.  They use not merely that frankness of speech which was a fashion of the times, but a profusion of obscene imagery which could not proceed from a pure mind.  Chastity with them is rather a bodily accident than a virtue of the heart, says Coleridge.

Among the best of their light comedies are The Chances, The Scornful Lady, The Spanish Curate, and Rule a Wife and Have a Wife.  But far superior to these are their tragedies and tragi-comedies, The Maid’s Tragedy, Philaster, A King and No King—­all written jointly—­and Valentinian and Thierry and Theodoret, written by Fletcher alone, but perhaps, in part, sketched out by Beaumont.  The tragic masterpiece of Beaumont and Fletcher is The Maid’s Tragedy, a powerful but repulsive play, which sheds a singular light not only upon its authors’ dramatic methods, but also upon the attitude toward royalty favored by the doctrine of the divine right of kings, which grew up under the Stuarts.  The heroine, Evadne, has been in secret a mistress of the king, who marries her to Amintor, a gentleman of his court, because, as she explains to her bridegroom, on the wedding night,

                  I must have one
  To father children, and to bear the name
  Of husband to me, that my sin may be
  More honorable.

This scene is, perhaps, the most affecting and impressive in the whole range of Beaumont and Fletcher’s drama.  Yet when Evadne names the king as her paramour, Amintor exclaims: 

O thou hast named a word that wipes away
All thoughts revengeful.  In that sacred name
“The king” there lies a terror.  What frail man
Dares lift his hand against it?  Let the gods
Speak to him when they please; till when, let us
Suffer and wait.

And the play ends with the words

                On lustful kings,
  Unlooked-for sudden deaths from heaven are sent,
  But cursed is he that is their instrument.

Aspatia, in this tragedy, is a good instance of Beaumont and Fletcher’s pathetic characters.  She is troth-plight wife to Amintor, and after he, by the king’s command, has forsaken her for Evadne, she disguises herself as a man, provokes her unfaithful lover to a duel, and dies under his sword, blessing the hand that killed her.  This is a common type in Beaumont and Fletcher, and was drawn originally from Shakspere’s Ophelia.  All their good women have the instinctive fidelity of a dog, and a superhuman patience and devotion, a “gentle forlornness” under wrongs, which is painted with an almost feminine tenderness.  In Philaster, or Love Lies Bleeding, Euphrasia, conceiving a hopeless passion for Philaster—­who is in love with Arethusa—­puts on the dress of a page and enters his service.  He employs her to carry messages to his lady-love, just as Viola, in Twelfth Night, is sent by the duke to Olivia.  Philaster is persuaded by slanderers that his page and his lady have been unfaithful to him, and in his jealous fury he wounds Euphrasia with his sword.  Afterward, convinced of the boy’s fidelity, he asks forgiveness, whereto Euphrasia replies,