Francis Beaumont: Dramatist / A Portrait, with Some Account of His Circle, Elizabethan and Jacobean, / And of His Association with John Fletcher

by Charles Mills Gayley

and the finality of her definition of death (which, as if in premonition of his too sudden fate, is characteristic of Beaumont),—

'T is less than to be born; a lasting sleep;
A quiet resting from all jealousy,
A thing we all pursue; I know, besides,
It is but giving over of a game
That must be lost;—

by the pathetic irony of Aspatia's farewell to love in The Maides Tragedy,

So with my prayers I leave you, and must try
Some yet-unpractis'd way to grieve and die;

and the heroism (in Cupid's Revenge, the final scene, undoubtedly of Beaumont's verse) of Urania's confession to Leucippus,

I would not let you know till I was dying;
For you could not love me, my mother was so naught;

by Panthea's cry of horror, in A King and No King,

I feel a sin growing upon my blood;

and by those flashes of incomparable verity that intensify the gloom of The Maides Tragedy: Amintor's

Those have most power to hurt us, that we love;
We lay our sleeping lives within their arms;