NOTES ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.
Seward's Preface. 1750.
The King And No King, too, is extremely spirited in all its characters; Arbaces holds up a mirror to all men of virtuous principles but violent passions. Hence he is, as it were, at once magnanimity and pride, patience and fury, gentleness and rigor, chastity and incest, and is one of the finest mixtures of virtues and vices that any poet has drawn, &c.
These are among the endless instances of the abject state to which psychology had sunk from the reign of Charles I. to the middle of the present reign of George III.; and even now it is but just awaking.
Ib. Seward's comparison of Julia's speech in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, act iv. last scene—
Madam, 'twas Ariadne passioning, &c.—
with Aspatia's speech in the Maid's Tragedy—
I stand upon the sea-beach now, &c. (Act ii.)
and preference of the latter.
It is strange to take an incidental passage of one writer, intended only for a subordinate part, and compare it with the same thought in another writer, who had chosen it for a prominent and principal figure.
Ib. Seward's preference of Alphonso's poisoning in A Wife for a Month, act i. sc. 1, to the passage in King John, act v. sc. 7,—
Poison'd, ill fare! dead, forsook, cast off!
Mr. Seward! Mr. Seward! you may be, and I trust you are, an angel; but you were an ass.
Ib.
Every reader of taste will see how superior this is to the quotation
from Shakspeare.
Of what taste?
Ib. Seward's classification of the Plays:—
Surely Monsieur Thomas, The Chances, Beggar's Bush, and the Pilgrim, should have been placed in the very first class! But the whole attempt ends in a woeful failure.