Page:Amyntas, a tale of the woods; from the Italien of Torquato Tasso (IA amyntastaleofwoo00tass).pdf/27

 to interest us for her fate: and the Faithful Shepherdess, with all the more sympathetic beauty of her virtue, appears to us, nevertheless, too much like a conscious and laboured contradiction to Fletcher's ordinary ideas respecting women and chastity. Beaumont and Fletcher both seem to think, that if they make a woman chaste, they make her every thing; which is the mistake of a gross habit of life, and after all not a very sincere one. The characters of these heroines enable us to anticipate the becoming conclusion of their stories, and thus help to dullen the dramatic interest, even if it were more artfully managed than it is. But poetry is the great beauty of both the works; more abstract and etherial in Comus; more natural to the scene, and of a rich rusticity without meanness, in the Faithful Shepherdess. The persons in the Aminta, though placed in a