tly with Mr.
Beaumont, and Wood says he assisted Ben Johnson in a Comedy called
The Widow. After Beaumont's death, it is said he consulted Mr. James
Shirley in forming the plots of several of his plays, but which those
were we have no means of discovering. The editor of Beaumont and
Fletcher's plays in 1711 thinks it very probable that Shirley supplied
many that were left imperfect, and that the players gave some remains
of Fletcher's for Shirley to make up; and it is from hence (he says)
that in the first act of Love's Pilgrimage, there is a scene of an
ostler transcribed verbatim out of Ben Johnson's New Inn, Act I. Scene
I. which play was written long after Fletcher died, and transplanted
into Love's Pilgrimage, after printing the New Inn, which was in the
year 1630, and two of the plays printed under Fletcher's name. The
Coronation and The Little Thief have been claimed by Shirley as his;
it is probable they were left imperfect by the one, and finished by
the other. Mr. Fletcher died of the plague in the forty ninth year of
his age, the first of King Charles I. An. 1625, and was buried in St.
Mary Overy's Church in Southwark.

Beaumont and Fletcher, as has been observed, wrote plays in concert,
but what share each bore in forming the plots, writing the scenes,
&c. is unknown. The general opinion is, that Beaumont's judgment was
usually employed in correcting and retrenching the superfluities of
Fletcher's wit, whose fault was, as Mr. Cartwright expresses it, to do
too much; but if Winstanley may be credited, the former had his share
likewise in the drama, for that author relates, that our poets meeting
once at a tavern in order to form the rude draught of a tragedy,
Fletcher undertook to kill the king, which words being overheard by
a waiter, he was officious enough, in order to recommend himself,
to lodge an information against them: but their loyalty being
unquestioned, and the relation of the circumstance probable, that the
vengeance was only aimed at a theatrical monarch, the affair ended in
a jest.

The first play which brought them into esteem, as Dryden says, was
Philaster, or Love lies a Bleeding; for, before that, they had written
two or three very unsuccessfully, as the like is reported of Ben
Johnson before he writ Every Man in his Humour. These authors had with
the advantage of the wit of Shakespear, which was their precedent,
great natural gifts improved by study. Their plots are allowed
generally mo