Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/140

120 look in vain for in the tragi-comedy of France or Holland. Such is Castiza's cry when her mother would be her betrayer—

"I cry you mercy! lady, I mistook you;      Pray, did you see my mother? which way went she?      Pray God I have not lost her;"—

and Vendice's

"joy's a subtle elf,—      I think man's happiest when he forgets himself."

The lines in The Atheist's Tragedy which describe the drowned soldier will find a place in every anthology gathered from the Elizabethans.

If, as seems to have been the case, Jonson to some extent eclipsed Shakespeare in the eyes of those who affected Scholarship and "art," the inheritors of his popularity were undoubtedly Beaumont and Fletcher. They belonged to a higher rank socially than the generality of the dramatists. John Fletcher, the elder, was the son of a president of a Cambridge College who was subsequently Dean of Peterborough, Bishop of Bristol, and Bishop of London. Francis Beaumont's father was a landed proprietor in Leicestershire, and a judge of the