Sorrow can make a verse without a Muse;
and "Thou art gone,"—
Gone like the day thou diedst upon, and we
May call that back again as soon as thee.
In still another way the lines on the death of Sidney's daughter are instructive. Its noble tribute to Sidney's Arcadia is payment of a debt manifest in more than one of the dramas to which Beaumont had contributed. Of Sir Philip, Beaumont here writes:
He left two children, who for virtue, wit,
Beauty, were lov'd of all,—thee and his writ:
Two was too few; yet death hath from us took
Thee, a more faultless issue than his book,
Which, now the only living thing we have
From him, we'll see, shall never find a grave
As thou hast done. Alas, would it might be
That books their sexes had, as well as we,
That we might see this married to the worth,
And many poems like itself bring forth.
The Arcadia had already brought forth offspring: in prose, Greene's Menaphon and Pandosto, and Lodge's Rosalynde; in verse, Day's Ile of Guls. It had fathered, immediately, the subplot of Shakespeare's King Lear,—and, indirectly, portions of the Winter's Tale, and As You Like It, and of other Elizabethan plays.[100] Within the twelve months immediately preceding August 1612, it had inspired also, as we have already observed, Beaumont and Fletcher's Cupid's Revenge, the finest scenes in which are Beaumont's dramatic adaptation of romantic characters and motives furnished by Sir Philip. And from that same "faultless issue," the Arcadia, virtue, art, and beauty, loved of all, had earlier still been drawn by Beaumont, certainly for The Maides Tragedy, and, perhaps, for Philaster as well.
The acquaintance with the Rutland family was continued after the death of Francis by his brother John, and his sister Elizabeth. The Nymph "of beauty most divine ... whose admirèd vertues draw All harts to love her" in John's poem, The Shepherdess, is Lady Katharine Manners, daughter of Francis, sixth Earl of Rutland, and now the wife of George Villiers, Marquis of Buckingham; and the Shepherdess herself "who long had kept her flocks On stony Charnwood's dry and barren rocks," the country dame "For singing crowned, whence grew a world of fame Among the sheep cotes," is Elizabeth Beaumont of Grace-Dieu, back on a visit from her Seyliard home in Kent. She had wandered into the summer place of the Rutlands and Buckinghams near the Grace-Dieu priory—"watered with our silver brookes," and had been welcomed and had sung for them. And now John repays the courtesy with indirect and graceful compliment.
With the Villiers family, as I have earlier intimated, the Beaumonts were connected not only by acquaintance as county gentry but by ties of blood. Sir George Villiers, a Leicestershire squire, had married for his second wife, about 1589, Maria Beaumont, a relative of theirs, who had been brought up by their kinsmen of Coleorton Hall to the west of them on the other side of the ridge. It will be remembered that one of those Coleorton Beaumonts, Henry, was an executor of Judge Beaumont's will in 1598. The father of the Maria, or Mary, Beaumont whom Henry Beaumont nurtured as a waiting gentlewoman in his household, was his second cousin, Anthony Beaumont of Glenfield in Leicestershire. While Maria was living at the Hall, the old Knight, Sir George Villiers of Brooksby, recently widowed, visited his kinswoman, Eleanor Lewis, Henry's wife, at Coleorton, "found there," writes a contemporary, Arthur Wilson, "this young gentlewoman, allied, and yet a servant of the family," was fascinated by her graces and made her Lady Villiers. This Sir George Villiers was of an old and distinguished family. Leland mentions it first among the ten families of Leicestershire, "that be there most of reputation."[101] And he says "The chiefest house of the Villars at this time is at Brokesby in Leicestershire, lower by four miles than Melton, on the higher ripe [bank] of Wreke river. There lie buried in the church divers of the Villars. This Villars [of 1540] is lord of Hoby hard-by, and of Coneham in Lincolnshire.... He is a man of but two hundred marks of land by the year." This "Villars" was the father of the Sir George who married Maria Beaumont. Brooksby, near Melton Mowbray, is only two or three hours' drive from Coleorton.