The verses, On the Tombs in Westminster, attributed to our poet-dramatist, are of doubtful authorship, but in diction and turn of thought they are paralleled by more than one of the poems which we have found to be his:—
Mortality, behold, and feare,
What a change of flesh is here!
Thinke how many royall bones
Sleep within these heap of stones:
Here they lye, had realmes and lands,
Who now want strength to stir their hands;
Where from their pulpits, seal'd with dust,
They preach "In greatnesse is not trust."
Here's an acre sown, indeed,
With the richest, royall'st seed
That the earth did e're suck in
Since the first man dy'd for sin:
Here the bones of birth have cry'd,
"Though gods they were, as men they dy'd";
Here are sands, ignoble things,
Dropt from the ruin'd sides of kings.
Here's a world of pomp and state
Buried in dust, once dead by fate.
If the lines are not by Francis, they still preach the calm, deterministic spirit of his poems and his tragedies; and they are worthy of him.
Beaumont's surviving brother of Grace-Dieu continued for many years to write epistolary, panegyric, and religious poems, which won increasing favour among scholars and at Court. They were collected and published by his son, in 1629. Of his Battle of Bosworth Field, which contains some genuinely poetic passages, I have already spoken. In his lines to James I Concerning the True Forme of English Poetry, composed probably the year of Francis' death, or the year after, he desiderates regularity of rhyme,
Pure phrase, fit epithets, a sober care
Of metaphors, descriptions cleare, yet rare,
Similitudes contracted, smooth and round,
Not vex't by learning, but with nature crown'd,—
strong and unaffected language, and noble subject. They made an impression upon his contemporaries in verse; and, though he was but a minor poet, he has come to be recognized as one of the "first refiners" of the rhyming couplet,—a forerunner, in the limpid style, of Waller, Denham, and Cowley. His translations from Horace, Juvenal, Persius, and Prudentius are done with spirit. His later poems set him before us an eminently pious soul, kindly, courtly, and cultivated. His greatest work, the Crowne of Thornes, in eight books, is lost. It was evidently dedicated to Shakespeare's Earl of Southampton, for in his elegy on the Earl, 1624, he says:
Shall ever I forget with what delight
He on my simple lines would cast his sight?
His onely mem'ry my poore worke adornes,
He is a father to my crowne of thornes:
Now since his death how can I ever looke
Without some tears, upon that orphan booke?
That this poem was printed we gather also from the elegy of Thomas Hawkins upon Sir John.
I have already said that John was raised by Charles I, undoubtedly through the influence of the Duke of Buckingham, to the baronetcy in 1626. He died only a year or two later,[114] and was lamented in verse by his sons, and by poets and scholars of the day. On the appearance of his poetical remains, Jonson wrote "This booke will live; it hath a genius," and "I confesse a Beaumont's booke to be The bound and frontire of our poetrie." And Drayton—
There is no splendour, which our pens can give
By our most labour'd lines, can make thee live
Like to thine owne.