father, thus leaving the matter of single or double authorship doubtful. In the address 'To the Readers of this Comedy,' prefixed to the quarto of 1635, we are told that the 'Author had no intent to wrong any one in this Comedy,' but the title-page bears the names of both dramatists. In the Prologue of this edition, the words 'Authors intention' may point to either single or double authorship, because of the omission of the apostrophe. Dyce suggests that if the play was really written in eight days, as Burre states it to have been, the probabilities are that more than one hand was engaged upon it. The external evidences, however, are so incomplete and contradictory that they do not satisfactorily bear out any theory of authorship.

It is necessary, then, to refer to the play's internal features for evidence of real value. Fleay did not apply his metrical tests at all closely to this comedy, and made a worthless division, giving Beaumont all the prose, and declaring the rest 'mixed.' Boyle reduced the results of his study of the play to the form of a chart, in which he attempted to designate the authorship of every scene in Weber's divisions of the acts. He disregarded the Induction, the scattered songs, and the remarks of the Citizen and the Wife. In the body of the play, he found the distinguishing marks of the style to exist in the following proportions: prose, 473 lines; verse, 1152 lines; double endings, 268; run-on lines, 205; light endings, 8; weak endings, 1; rimes, 270. In percentages, the verse amounts to 23. 2 in double endings; 18 in runon lines; 0.7 in light endings; 23. 4 in rimes. Boyle did not attempt to determine the dramatists' proportionate shares in the prose, but formed the following summary upon the basis of the verse:

Macaulay and Oliphant did not give detailed study to the authorship of the play. Macaulay simply wrote:

From internal evidence we should be disposed to attribute the play to a single writer: and we can have little hesitation in ascribing it to that one of our authors of whom the mock-heroic style is characteristic 1.

He accordingly attributed the play wholly to Beaumont. Oliphant reached the same conclusion. He

wrote:

It is, in my opinion, wholly or almost wholly his. Every scene shows traces of his hand, though the latter part of V. 4 may belong to Fletcher, who may also have revised II. 2. But I cannot think Fletcher would be contented with writing only a part of two scenes; and, as there is nothing in the play that might not be Beaumont's, I must give it wholly to the latter.

Now, through the application of such standards of judgment as are supplied to me by the critical methods outlined above, and by my personal impressions of Beaumont and Fletcher, I have concluded that Boyle gave too much, and Macaulay and Oliphant too little of the credit of this play's composition to Fletcher. It is not necessary here to write a critique upon all of Fletcher's peculiarities as manifested in his independent plays; suffice it to say that, to my mind, these peculiarities are demonstrably present in The Knight of the Burning Pestle in the scenes, though only in the scenes, which develop

1 Francis Beaumont, p. 82.

The Works of Beaumont and Fletcher. Englische Studien, Band XIV,

p. 88.

the love-adventures of Luce and Jasper. The lovetheme is, indeed, of so conventional a sort that either dramatist might have projected it as a mere piece of hack work, but whatever characterization and distinguishing features of plot it contains are in Fletcher's manner. The love of Luce and Jasper is, to be sure, purer than that usually conceived by Fletcher, but it is marked by the colorless sentimentality which is always present when he tries to depict a virtuous passion, while its insipidity is unrelieved by the poetic beauty infused by Beaumont (as the critics generally agree) into Bellario's love-lornness and Aspatia's repining moods. Again, Luce is of the same mold as Fletcher's heroines in her weak and unresisting submission to the feigned assaults of Jasper (3. 107-114) and in her tearful tributes to the memory of her lord and persecutor (4. 277-315). Fletcher's women, in his independent plays, are almost invariably either wholly vicious, or passively and imperturbably meek. No one will hesitate in the classification of Luce. So far as her relations with Jasper are concerned, she is the personification of meekness, and of a false and badly motived devotion. Moreover, she nowhere exhibits either the resourceful, but virtuous, sagacity of Aspatia, or the strong selfassertion, combating with a sense of duty, which animates Evadne, or the genuine and inspiriting, if excessive, devotion of Euphrasia-Bellario-three female characters in the early plays in whose delineation their creator, presumably Beaumont, has shown an insight into woman's nature of a truth and subtlety nowhere manifested by Fletcher singly, and not approached in the portrayal of Luce.

I feel, too, that Jasper's pointless and unprovoked trial of Luce's fidelity (3. 73-99), and the sensational

entrances and exits of the lovers in the coffin (4. 268-351) are forced, irrational and melodramatic devices, which are akin to the many similar offenses in Fletcher's later dramas, but which are not noticeably paralleled in the plays originating before Beaumont's death.

This ascription of the love-scenes to Fletcher is borne out by a metrical analysis. In the first of them (1. 1-65) more than half the lines contain double endings, the distiguishing mark of Fletcher's verse. In the second (3. 1-150), the proportion of double endings is small (34 out of 104 verses), but, also, there are only 19 run-on lines, which scarcity is indicative of Fletcher, and only 18 rimes; these latter, being spoken by Humphrey, are, I think, added by Beaumont. In the coffin-scene, 48 of the 104 lines have double endings, only 18 are run-on, and there are no rimes.

In this apportionment of Fletcher's share I agree with Boyle. I see no reason, however, for his additional ascriptions to Fletcher. They consist of all the scenes, exclusive of Act 5, in which Humphrey appears, and seem to be founded on the fact that these contain a fair proportion of double-ending rimes; but, as Oliphant points out, Boyle should have noted that these rimes are not (or very, very rarely) to be found in Fletcher, while they are not uncommon in Beaumont's burlesque.

All of the play, exclusive of the love-scenes, I should, in the absence of sufficient evidence pointing to Fletcher's authorship, assign to Beaumont. A large part of it, some 1500 lines indeed, is in prose, and Fletcher's complete disuse of prose after his partner's death argues that Beaumont was the chief, if not the only, employer of it in the early plays.

Judging from metrical considerations, almost all of the verse might reasonably be assigned to Beaumont. Only 23.2 per cent. of the verses contains double endings, and this is but little more than the 20 per cent. which, according to Oliphant, represents Beaumont's average proportion of such endings—a wide distance from the 70 per cent. in Fletcher. The 18 per cent. in run-on lines fairly represents Beaumont's liking for that metrical form. The proportion of rimes, a feature totally absent from Fletcher's independent plays, is 23.4 per cent.!

The test of Beaumont's general literary qualities, when applied to this piece, leads to the same conclusion as the metrical test. Beaumont's more serious attributes, of course, have no place in this rollicking comedy. His lighter, but none the less sound and deeply sympathetic, moods nowhere find a better exemplification. The prose passages are used for the exploitation of his gift for broad and easy caricature. The wholesome and genuine humor there resident in the conception of the Citizen and the Wife, of Ralph, and of the Merrythought family, has no counterpart in Fletcher's drama. The essence of Fletcher's comedy is merely the wit of fashionable repartee, a skilful and amusing battle of words. The humor of The Knight of the Burning Pestle is inwrought with the cardinal absurdities of human nature itself; it is vital and pervasive.

The tendency to burlesque, which the later critics with one accord regard as peculiar to Beaumont, here finds the fullest possible exercise. Metrically, it is developed in the nonsensical rimes of Humphrey, and the swelling pentameters of Ralph. Beaumont had elsewhere exercised his faculty for burlesque characterization in The Woman Hater and The Triumph