Than a dove’s motion, when the head’s pluck’d off’—
is certainly in the manner of Shakespear, with his subtlety and strength of illustration. But, on the other hand, in what immediately follows, relating to their husbands left dead in the field of battle,
‘Tell him if he i’ th’ blood-siz’d field lay swoln,
Shewing the sun his teeth, grinning at the moon,
What you would do’—
I think we perceive the extravagance of Beaumont and Fletcher, not contented with truth or strength of description, but hurried away by the love of violent excitement into an image of disgust and horror, not called for, and not at all proper in the mouth into which it is put. There is a studied exaggeration of the sentiment, and an evident imitation of the parenthetical interruptions and breaks in the line, corresponding to what we sometimes meet in Shakespear, as in the speeches of Leontes in the Winter’s Tale; but the sentiment is overdone, and the style merely mechanical. Thus Hippolita declares, on her lord’s going to the wars,
‘We have been soldiers, and we cannot weep,
When our friends don their helms, or put to sea,
Or tell of babes broach’d on the lance, or women
That have seethed their infants in (and after eat them)