The veriest tiro in criticism who knows anything of the subject in hand must perceive, what is certainly not beyond a schoolboy’s range of vision, that the metre and the language of this play are in great part so like the language and the metre of Fletcher that the first and easiest inference would be to assume the partnership of that poet in the work.  In former days it was Jonson whom the critics and commentators of their time saw good to select as the colleague or the editor of Shakespeare; but a later school of criticism has resigned the notion that the fifth act was retouched and adjusted by the author of Volpone to the taste of his patron James.  The later theory is more plausible than this; the primary objection to it is that it is too facile and superficial.  It is waste of time to point out with any intelligent and imaginative child with a tolerable ear for metre who had read a little of the one and the other poet could see for himself—­that much of the play is externally as like the usual style of Fletcher as it is unlike the usual style of Shakespeare.  The question is whether we can find one scene, one speech, one passage, which in spirit, in scope, in purpose, bears the same or any comparable resemblance to the work of Fletcher.  I doubt if any man more warmly admires a poet whom few can have studied more thoroughly than I; and to whom, in spite of all sins of omission and commission,—­and many and grievous they are, beyond the plenary absolution of even the most indulgent among critical confessors—­I constantly return with a fresh sense of attraction, which is constantly rewarded by a fresh sense of gratitude and delight.  It is assuredly from no wish to pluck a leaf from his laurel, which has no need of foreign grafts or stolen garlands from the loftier growth of Shakespeare’s, that I venture to question his capacity for the work assigned to him by recent criticism.  The speech of Buckingham, for example, on his way to execution, is of course at first sight very like the finest speeches of the kind in Fletcher; here is the same smooth and fluent declamation, the same prolonged and persistent melody, which if not monotonous is certainly not various; the same pure, lucid, perspicuous flow of simple rather than strong and elegant rather than exquisite English; and yet, if we set it against the best examples of the kind which may be selected from such tragedies as Bonduca or The False One, against the rebuke addressed by Caratach to his cousin or by Caesar to the murderers of Pompey—­and no finer instances of tragic declamation can be chosen from the work of this great master of rhetorical dignity and pathos—­I cannot but think we shall perceive in it a comparative severity and elevation which will be missed when we turn back from it to the text of Fletcher.  There is an aptness of phrase, an abstinence from excess, a “plentiful lack” of mere flowery and superfluous beauties, which we may rather wish than