of a given plot, incidents, or other fashioning cause, to determine the characters which it was in its turn to illustrate, and here he showed resourceful craftsmanship.  In the case of the present play he had to fashion characters in vacuo and then weave them into such a plot as they might be capable of sustaining.  In other words, he reversed the formai order of artistic creation, and attempted to make the abstract generate the concrete, instead of making the individual example imply, while being informed by, the fundamental idea.

So much for the formal and theoretic side of the question.  A few words as to the general tone and purpose of the play.  For some reason unexplained, having selected his characters, which one may almost say exhibit every form of love except a wholesome and a human one, the author deemed it necessary that the whole should redound to the praise and credit of cloistral virginity and glozing ‘honour,’ and whatever else of unreal sentiment the cynicism of the renaissance had grafted on the superstition of the middle age.  Again comparing the Faithful Shepherdess with Fletcher’s other work, we find that when he is dealing with actual men and women in his romantic plays he troubles himself little concerning the moral which it may be possible to extract from his plot; he is rightly conscious that that at all events is not the business of art:  but when he comes to create in vacuo he is at once obsessed by some Platonic theory regarding the ethical aim of the poet.  The victory, therefore, shall be with the powers of good, purity and vestal maidenhood shall triumph and undergo apotheosis at his hands, the world shall see how fair a monument of stainless womanhood he can erect in melodious verse.  Well and good; for this is indeed an object to which no self-respecting person can take exception.  There was, however, one point the importance of which the author failed to realize, namely, that this ideal which he sought to honour was one with which he was himself wholly out of sympathy.  Consequently, in place of the supreme picture of womanly purity he intended, he produced what is no better than a grotesque caricature.  His cynical indifference is not only evident from many of his other works, but constantly forces itself upon our attention even in the present play.  The falsity of his whole position appears in the unconvincing conventionality of the patterns of chastity themselves, and in the unreality of the characters which serve them as foils—­Cloe being utterly preposterous except as a study in pathlogy, and Amarillis essentially a tragic figure who can only be tolerated on condition of her real character being carefully veiled.  It appears again in the utterly irrational conversion and purification of these characters, and we may further face it in the profound cynicism, all the more terrible because apparently unconscious, with which the author is content to dismiss Thenot, cured of his altruistic devotion by the shattering at one blow of all that he held most sacred in woman.