More ink than was necessary has been spilt over the motive of this wildly melodramatic play.  Seward expressed an opinion that there was nothing in the action of the brother and sister deserving such severe retribution.  To him Mason retorted, with somewhat childish seriousness, that, the characters being supposed pagan, the speech of the princess must be held a sacrilegious blasphemy.  So Sidney no doubt intended it, and so Beaumont, who was evidently the author of the scene in question, intended it too, and he would possibly, if left to himself, have executed the rest in a manner consonant with this intention.  But his collaborator took the opportunity of adding a scene between certain of the lords of the court, in which, with characteristic coarseness, he represented the condemned worship in the light of mere vulgar licence.  The fact is that not only the playwrights, but, no doubt, the majority of the audience as well, were interested chiefly in the extravagance of the plot, and cared little or nothing for the adequacy of the motive.  As a drama the piece is decidedly poor, and the construction which ends the sister’s part of the tragedy in the second act leaves much to be desired.  There is, moreover, something particularly and unnecessarily revolting in Hidaspes’ passion for the deformed dwarf, and something forced in the contrast between Leucippus’ licentious relations with Bacha at the beginning of the play and the self-righteousness of his later attitude.  Both faults are unfortunately rather typical, one of the extravagant colouring affected by the dramatists, the other of the coarse and hasty characterization to which Fletcher in particular is apt to condescend.  There are, however, some good passages in the play, though it is not always easy to assign them to their author.  The scenes in which Urania appears are pretty, though inferior to the very similar ones in the nearly contemporary Philaster.  The song of the maidens as they watch by their dying mistress, palinode and dirge in one, is striking in the blending of diverse modes: 

Cupid, pardon what is past,
And forgive our sins at last! 
Then we will be coy no more,
But thy deity adore;
Troths at fifteen we will plight,
And will tread a dance each night,
In the fields or by the fire,
With the youths that have desire.

* * * * *

Thus I shut thy faded light,
And put it in eternal night. 
Where is she can boldly say,
Though she be as fresh as May,
She shall not by this corpse be laid,
Ere to-morrow’s light do fade? (II. v.)

There is a suggestion of better things, too, in the lines: 

                            he is like
    Nothing that we have seen, yet doth resemble
    Apollo, as I oft have fancied him,
    When rising from his bed he stirs himself,
    And shakes day from his hair. (I. iii.)