He is impressed with the frailty of mankind and the brevity of life: 'Frail man' and 'transitory man' fell readily from his lips who was to die so young. He emphasizes the objective quality of evil: "Good gods, tempt not a frail man!" prays Philaster; and Arbaces struggling against temptation: "What art thou, that dost creep into my breast; And dar'st not see my face?" Once temptation has taken root, it grows insidiously: Panthea "feels a sin growing upon her blood"; and Arbaces moralizes
There is a method in man's wickedness
It grows up by degrees.
It is natural, therefore, that Beaumont should frequently fall back upon 'conscience' and its 'sensibility.' And upon the efficacy of repentance. So Leucippus in Beaumont's portion of Cupid's Revenge, prays the gods to hold him back,—"Lest I add sins to sins, till no repentance will cure me." Arbaces finds repentance. Evadne knows that it is 'the best sacrifice.'
From this consciousness of uneasy greatness and frail mortality the poet seeks refuge in descriptions of pastoral life. His pictures of idyllic beauty and simplicity are too well-known to warrant repetition here: Bellario weaving garlands by the fountain's side; Philaster's rhapsody in the woods; Valerio's "Come, pretty soul, we now are near our home" to Viola in the Coxcombe, and Viola's "what true contented happiness dwells here, More than in cities!" The same conception marks as Beaumont's the shrewdly humorous conversation in prose between the citizens' wives in A King and No King, beginning—
Lord, how fine the fields be! What sweet living 'tis in the country!—
Ay, poor souls, God help 'em, they live as contentedly as one of us.
Through the fourth act of Philaster, and wherever else Beaumont portrays the countryside or country men and women, there blows the fresh breeze of the Charnwood forest in his native Leicestershire.
But his most poetic themes are of the friendship of man for man, and of the 'whiteness' of women's innocence, the unselfishness of their love, their forgivingness, and the reverence due from men who so little understand them. "And were you not my King," protests the blunt Mardonius to his hasty lord, "I should have chose you out to love above the rest." "I have not one friend in the court but thou," says Prince Leucippus; and his devoted follower can only stammer "You know I love you but too well." In that fine summing up of Melantius to Amintor, one seems to hear Beaumont himself:
The name of friend is more than family
Or all the world besides.
With woman's purity his darkest pages are starred. She is 'innocent as morning light,' 'more innocent than sleep,' 'as white as Innocence herself.' 'Armed with innocence' a tender spotless maid 'may walk safe among beasts.' Her 'prayers are pure,' and she is 'fair and virtuous still to ages.'[179] His fairest heroines are philosophers of 'the truth of maids and perjuries of men.' "All the men I meet are harsh and rude," says Aspatia,