who always affected to despise romance,1 is here attempting to satisfy the popular demand for it, without giving up his favorite study of humors and manners.

However, in his last play, the Jovial Crew, Brome has succeded in combining realism and romance with charming effect. His method here is to choose an amusing romantic plot, and develop it with humor-characters. The success of the combination is probably due to the fact that the plot itself is a mild satire on the love of romance in young ladies. With this idea in mind, the situation of the Spanish Gipsy is transferred to contemporary English country life, and supplied with humorcharacters, which Brome can draw with skill. The combination of these two forms of art is exactly what Jonson tried in his failure, the New Inn. But Jonson tried to write romance with very little action. As Dr. Tennant says in his analysis, three-fifths of the play is a bore. Brome, who is much less interested in satire, or in humor-study for its own sake, and who always has a keen eye for what is dramatic, has been able to avoid Jonson's mistake.

VERSIFICATION

'Each of the Elizabethan and Jacobean men has a metrical method of his own; Ford and Shirley have metrical methods not of their own, being for the most part only those of Jonson or Middleton weakened by toning down to a uniformity of manner; but Davenant, Suckling, and a whole host of minor Carolans (who, to our comfort, contributed only one or two plays each), have no metre properly so-called of any kind; they wrote in a system which even Wagner only ventured to hope for, not to act on, of music without bars; they had no

1 E. g., the Prologue to the Jovial Crew.

2 New Inn., ed. Tennant, Introduction, p. XXXV.

rule but their individual whim; and the result was a hybrid of irregular iambic, certainly not verse, and which it would be an insult to the ghosts of Milton, Landor, and De Quincey to call prose.'1 This statement of Fleay's, harsh and sweeping as it is, certainly applies to the versification of Brome. In fact, the lover of poetry must read through an arid waste to find a few lines to enjoy in the work of even the most conspicuous names in the dramatic literature of the reign of Charles. Massinger, interesting as he is as a playwright, has nothing but facility to recommend his verse. Symonds allows him scarcely a dozen lines of intrinsic beauty.2

If this is true of the romantic drama of the period, we may expect to find extremely careless work in the realistic comedies of manners. Why these should be written in verse at all is hard to see. Yet Brome, following the custom, wrote six out of the nine plays of this type partly in verse. The Antipodes, with the exception of a dozen lines, is wholly in verse. This rather useless practice, I suppose, we may attribute to literary convention.

As verse adds very little to comedies of manners, and in fact, detracts from the realism, we should not be overnice in criticizing Brome, Nabbes, and the rest, for their roughness. Cartwright, who had fair ability as a versifier, has shown in his Ordinary that long speeches and elaborate similes in the romantic manner hardly suggest the atmosphere of the dregs of London society. The more prosaic the verse, the better it is for this purpose. Brome, however, wrote as execrably for tragi-comedy as for his 'low and home-bred subjects.'

In the Prologue to the Northern Lass he says:
Gallants, and Friends-spectators, will yee see

A strain of Wit that is not Poetry?

1 Fleay, Chron. Hist., p. 314.

2 Massinger's Works, Mermaid Series, Introduction, p. XV.

I have Authority for what I say:

For He himself says so that Writ the Play,
Though in the Muses Garden he can walk;
And choicest flowers pluck from every stalk
To deck the Stage; and purposeth, hereafter,

To take your Judgements: now he implores your laughter. This boast Brome never succeeded in making good, for an analysis of the verse of his three tragi-comedies, in which he evidently expected to take our judgments, shows no more metrical skill than is apparent in the comedies of manners. His verse always averages rather poor, and shows carelessness and lack of ear. Every scene presents difficulties of scansion that frequently make the reader prefer to read the so-called verse as prose rather than take the trouble to determine the author's intention, if indeed, he had any. Lines of no rhythm at all are occasionally introduced, like these two in the Queen and Concubine (I. I.):

I was 'the' way but the Queen put me out on't.
But what of him now in the battail ?

A very irritating rhythm that is a marked mannerism with Brome, is produced by a huddling of unstressed syllables in the middle of an eleven-or twelve-syllable line. For instance, in the first scene of the Antipodes, he allows the following:

Might make a gentleman mad you'll say and him.
And not so much by bodily physieke (no !)

Another effect that may become very annoying is caused by the jolt at the end of a line with a hovering stress on the the tenth and eleventh syllables. For example :

With an odd Lord in towne, that looks like no Lord.
Some of your project searchers wait without sir.
With his old misbeliefe. But still we doubt not.

Another annoying point in Brome's rhythm is the uncertainty as to whether some twelve-syllable lines are Alexandrines, or lines with extra mid-line syllables, or lines with double feminine endings. For instance:

In competition for the crown as any man.
For you to rectifie your scrupulous judgement.
I am an old Courtier I, still true to th' Crown.

Other examples of carelessness in versification are the two fourteeners' in the first scene of the Lovesick Court, and the occurrence, four times in Brome's work, of a word divided at the end of a line.1

This accusation of general carelessness in technique is not a random generalization based on the verse-writer's early work. I can find no indication of development in skill, no progress of any sort. The examples quoted below, of the best verse I can find in Brome, are both from plays written probably in 1635, the middle period of his production. The late plays, the Antipodes, Court Begger, and Jovial Crew show no attempts at remedying the faults of the early work. The number of feminine endings and of run-on lines shows some slight variation, but no regular chronological progress. In the use of a certain definite type of verse to introduce variety, the four-stress heroic line, or ten-syllable tetrameter,' as Professor Cobb2 calls it, there is again no evidence of increase or decrease in frequency. While Shakespeare's use of this, varying

1 Antipodes 2. 3; New Academy 4. 1; Queen's Exchange 1. 1; Weeding Covent Garden, Prologue. Shirley is guilty of this in the Cardinal 1. 2, and Jonson used it in a few doggerel passages.

2 C. W. Cobb, 'A Type of Four-Stress Verse in Shakespeare,' New Shakespeareana 10. 1-15. Examples of this type in the

Queen's Exchange 1. 1 are :

Betwixt smooth flattery and honest judgements.
Whom my great wisdom would allot the Queen.

from sixteen to six per cent, makes an added chronological verse-test possible, no such check can be found for Brome, whose use does not vary much from an average of eight per cent.

The model of Brome in his versification I think was Fletcher. The evidence of personal friendship between the two men, and of some influences in details, as well as in the general style of tragi-comedy,1 makes the theory a priori not untenable. Among the distinguishing characteristics of the use of Fletcher given by Fleay 2 are the large number of feminine endings, and the 'abundance of trisyllabic feet, so that his lines have to be felt rather than scanned; it is almost impossible to tell when Alexandrines are intended.' Both these points are markedly characteristic of Brome's prosody. Professor C. H. Herford3 has pointed out another distinguishing trait of Fletcher-that the pause after two emphatic monosyllables, the first of which bears the verse stress, is common within the line, as well as at the end, and is very rare in Shakespeare.' The use of this in the middle of the line I have not noticed in Brome, but the jolting effect of it at the end, which is a serviceable BeaumontFletcher test,4 is one of the traits which I have tabulated as distinctly a mark of Brome.

The following table summarizes all these metrical peculiarities. It is based on the first hundred lines of six plays of different periods of Brome's work.

1 See above, pp. 20; 68.

2 Shakespeare Manual, p. 153.

"Eversley edition, Works of Shakspere (1904) 7. 154, note 1. 4 In an examination of a thousand lines of the work that is assigned to Beaumont alone, on external evidence. I have found practically no cases of hovering stress on the tenth and eleventh syllables.