To life againe to heare thy Buskin tread
And shake a Stage.
Therefore it is, that Jonson calls—
My Shakespeare rise; I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lye
A little further to make thee a roome:
Thou art a Moniment without a toombe,
And art alive still, while thy Booke doth live,
And we have wits to read, and praise to give.
That I not mixe thee so, my braine excuses;
I meane with great, but disproportion'd Muses.
That Beaumont was regarded by his immediate contemporaries not as a professional, but literary, dramatist,—a poet, and a person of social eminence,—appears from Drayton's Epistle to Henery Reynolds, Esq., Of Poets and Poesy, published 1627, from which I have earlier quoted. Here the writer, appraising the poets "who have enrich'd our language with their rhymes" informs his "dearly loved friend" that he does not
meane to run
In quest of these that them applause have wonne
Upon our Stages in these latter dayes,
That are so many; let them have their bayes,
That doe deserve it; let those wits that haunt
Those publique circuits, let them freely chaunt
Their fine Composures, and their praise pursue;
and thus, we may conjecture, he excuses the omission of such men as Middleton, Fletcher, and Massinger. Beginning with Chaucer, "the first of ours that ever brake Into the Muses' treasure, and first spake In weighty numbers," Drayton pays especial honour to "grave, morall Spencer," "noble Sidney ... heroe for numbers and for prose," Marlowe with his "brave translunary things," Shakespeare of "as smooth a comicke vaine ... as strong conception, and as cleere a rage, As any one that trafiqu'd with the Stage," "learn'd Johnson.... Who had drunke deepe of the Pierian spring," and "reverend Chapman" for his translations: then he passes to men of letters whom he had loved, Alexander and Drummond, and concludes the roll-call with his two Beaumonts and his Browne, his bosom friends, rightly born poets and "Men of much note, and no lesse nobler parts." This letter not only speaks the opinion of Drayton concerning the standing of the two Beaumonts in poetry, but incidentally asserts the popularity of their work, for the author informs his correspondents that he "ties himself here only to those few men"
Whose works oft printed, set on every post,
To publique censure subject have bin most.
By 1627 all of the dramas in which Francis had an undoubted share, except The Coxcombe had been printed; and some of his poems had appeared as early as 1618 in a little volume that included also Drayton's elegies on Lady Penelope Clifton and the three sons of Lord Sheffield, and Verses by 'N. H.'
