popularity, were in Herrick's time more to the taste of the
town than Shakespeare's. They were gentlemen, and fine
and fashionable gentlemen, as far as their dramatic function
went; they knew the slang of their circle, and used its coarsest
trick of phrase, its current quips and mots, with an admired
freedom. Shakespeare, after all, was a poet and a commoner
first, and only a man about town, consulting the fashions of
the town, afterwards. Shirley, in the preface already men-
tioned, calls the playhouse at Blackfriars "an academy, where
the three hours' spectacle, while Beaumont and Fletcher were
presented, was usually of more advantage to the hopeful
young heir than a costly, dangerous foreign travel." And
it cannot be denied, he adds, "but that the young spirits
of the time, whose birth and quality made them impatient
of the sourer ways of education, have, from the attentive
hearing of these pieces, got ground in point of wit and carriage
of the most severely employed students. How many passable
discoursing dining wits stand yet in good credit upon the bare
stock of two or three of these single scenes?"

It was this London of wit and fashion that Beaumont and
Fletcher had to reckon with, as well as the London of the
'prentices of Cheap whom they sometimes flaunted; and it
must be admitted that they contrived a wonderful amount
of poetry, even in the passages which ministered to its grossest
humours. In some of these wildest scenes, the flower of song
blossoms most fragrant, like the rose in Hogarth's most terrible
print; while again the song in some passages is the index
to a whole vein of lyrical fancy, hidden in the text.

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