It may not be altogether fanciful to transfer this description of their physical bearing to their mental equipment, and draw some conclusions as to their several endowments and their respective share in the work that goes under their common name.  Of course it is impossible to draw hard and fast lines of demarkation, and assign to each poet his own words.  They, above all others, would probably have resented so dogmatic a procedure, and affirmed the dramas to be their joint offspring,—­even as a child partakes of the nature of both its parents.

Their plays are organic structures, with well worked-out plots and for the most part well-sustained characters.  They present a complete fusion of the different elements contributed by each author; never showing that agglomeration of incongruous matter so often found among the work of the lesser playwrights, where each hand can be singled out and held responsible for its share.  Elaborate attempts, based on verse tests, have been made to disentangle the two threads of their poetic fabric.  These attempts show much patient analysis, and are interesting as evidences of ingenuity; but they appeal more to the scholar than to the lover of poetry.  Yet a sympathetic reading and a comparison of the plays professedly written by Fletcher alone, after Beaumont’s death, with those jointly produced by them in the early part of Fletcher’s career, shows the different qualities of mind that went to the making of the work, and the individual characteristics of the men that wrote it.  Here Swinburne’s eloquence gives concreteness to the picture.

In the joint plays there is a surer touch, a deeper, more pathetic note, a greater intensity of emotion; there is more tragic pathos and passion, more strong genuine humor, nobler sentiments.  The predominance of these graver, sweeter qualities may well be attributed to Beaumont’s influence.  Although a disciple of Jonson in comedy, he was a close follower of Shakespeare in tragedy, and a student of the rhythms and metres of Shakespeare’s second manner,—­of the period that saw ‘Hamlet,’ ‘Macbeth,’ and the plays clustering around them.  Too great a poet himself merely to imitate, Beaumont yet felt the influence of that still greater poet who swayed every one of the later dramatists, with the single exception perhaps of Jonson.  But in pure comedy, mixed with farce and mock-heroic parody, he belongs to the school of “rare Ben.”

Fletcher, on the other hand, is more brilliant, more rapid and supple, readier in his resources, of more startling invention.  He has an extraordinary swiftness and fluency of speech; and no other dramatist, not even Shakespeare, equals him in the remarkable facility with which he reproduces in light, airy verse the bantering conversations of the young beaux and court-gentlemen of the time of James I. His peculiar trick of the redundant syllable at the end of many of his lines is largely responsible in producing this effect of ordinary speech, that yet is verse without