dangerous subject is handled, that Helena’s forwardness loses her no honor; delicacy dispenses with its laws in her favor, and nature, in her single case, seems content to suffer a sweet violation.  Aspatia, in the Maid’s Tragedy, is a character equally difficult with Helena, of being managed with grace.  She too is a slighted woman, refused by the man who had once engaged to marry her.  Yet it is artfully contrived, that while we pity we respect her, and she descends without degradation.  Such wonders true poetry and passion can do, to confer dignity upon subjects which do not seem capable of it.  But Aspatia must not be compared at all points with Helena; she does not so absolutely predominate over her situation but she suffers some diminution, some abatement of the full lustre of the female character, which Helena never does.  Her character has many degrees of sweetness, some of delicacy; but it has weakness, which, if we do not despise, we are sorry for.  After all, Beaumont and Fletcher were but an inferior sort of Shakspeares and Sidneys.

Philaster.—­The character of Bellario must have been extremely popular in its day.  For many years after the date of Philaster’s first exhibition on the stage, scarce a play can be found without one of these women-pages in it, following in the train of some pre-engaged lover, calling on the gods to bless her happy rival (his mistress), whom no doubt she secretly curses in her heart, giving rise to many pretty equivoques by the way on the confusion of sex, and either made happy at last by some surprising turn of fate, or dismissed with the joint pity of the lovers and the audience.  Donne has a copy of verses to his mistress, dissuading her from a resolution, which she seems to have taken up from some of these scenical representations, of following him abroad as a page.  It is so earnest, so weighty, so rich in poetry, in sense, in wit, and pathos, that it deserves to be read as a solemn close in future to all such sickly fancies as he there deprecates.

* * * * *

JOHN FLETCHER.

Thierry and Theodoret.—­The scene where Ordella offers her life a sacrifice, that the king of France may not be childless, I have always considered as the finest in all Fletcher, and Ordella to be the most perfect notion of the female heroic character, next to Calantha in the Broken Heart.  She is a piece of sainted nature.  Yet, noble as the whole passage is, it must be confessed that the manner of it, compared with Shakspeare’s finest scenes, is faint and languid.  Its motion is circular, not progressive.  Each line revolves on itself in a sort of separate orbit.  They do not join into one another like a running-hand.  Fletcher’s ideas moved slow; his versification, though sweet, is tedious, it stops at every turn; he lays line upon line, making up one after the other, adding image to image so deliberately, that we see their junctures.  Shakspeare mingles everything,