Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/145

Rh of poetry in dialogue or soliloquy or song; although Marlowe and Webster both outsoar them on occasion, and Dekker's sweetness is purer and more artless, and in all of these the poetic and dramatic interpenetrate more closely. Like Webster, they are indebted for many of their finest phrases to Shakespeare. But, while Webster remembers the thrilling tragic touches, the "cover their faces" of King Lear, Beaumont and Fletcher reproduce what is most romantic. Viola's description of her love in Twelfth Night is recalled by Aspatia's words—

"Strive to make me look      Like Sorrow's monument:  and the trees about me       Let them be dry and leafless:  let the rocks       Groan with continual surges:  and behind me       Make all a desolation."

Thinking of Cleopatra, she bids her friends take for lovers "two dead cold aspics."

"They cannot flatter nor forswear: one kiss                            Makes a long peace for all."

In comedy Beaumont and Fletcher follow, on the whole, the beaten track, and describe in flowing verse and easy dialogue the adventures, serious and comic, of lovers. They have some interesting studies in humours and in the mock heroic—very slight and hasty when compared with Jonson's elaborate workmanship. These it is the fashion now to attribute mainly to Beaumont. Lazarillo, the gourmet in The Woman Hater, Bessus in A King and No King—the merest sketch when compared with