ee, and as far
As honour gives me leave, be thy Amintor.
When we meet next, I will salute thee fairly
And pray the gods to give thee happy days.
My charity shall go along with thee
Though my embraces must be far from thee.
I should ha' kill'd thee, but this sweet repentance
Locks up my vengeance, for which thus I kiss thee,
The last kiss we must take."

The beautiful play of _Philaster_ has already been glanced at; it is
sufficient to add that its detached passages are deservedly the most famous
of all. The insufficiency of the reasons of Philaster's jealousy may be
considered by different persons as affecting to a different extent the
merit of the piece. In these two pieces tragedy, or at least tragi-comedy,
has the upper hand; it is in the next pair as usually arranged (for the
chronological order of these plays is hitherto unsolved) that Fletcher's
singular _vis comica_ appears. _A King and no King_ has a very serious
plot; and the loves of Arbaces and Panthea are most lofty, insolent, and
passionate. But the comedy of Bessus and his two swordsmen, which is fresh
and vivid even after Bobadil and Parolles (I do not say Falstaff, because I
hold it a vulgar error to consider Falstaff as really a coward at all), is
perhaps more generally interesting. As for _The Scornful Lady_ it is comedy
pure and simple, and very excellent comedy too. The callousness of the
younger Loveless--an ugly forerunner of Restoration manners--injures it a
little, and the instantaneous and quite unreasonable conversion of the
usurer Morecraft a little more. But the humours of the Lady herself (a most
Molieresque personage), and those of Roger and Abigail, with many minor
touches, more than redeem it. The plays which follow [49] are all comical
and mostly farcical. The situations, rather than the expressions of _The
Custom of the Country_, bring it under the ban of a rather unfair
condemnation of Dryden's, pronounced when he was quite unsuccessfully
trying to free the drama of himself and his contemporaries from Collier's
damning charges. But there are many lively traits in it. _The Elder
Brother_ is one of those many variations on _cedant arma togae_ which men of
letters have always been somewhat prone to overvalue; but the excellent
comedy of _The Spanish Curate_ is not impaired by the fact that Dryden
chose to adapt it after his own fashion in The _