Beaumont and Fletcher, whom here and hereafter I take as one poet with
two names,--leaving undivided what a rare love and still rarer
congeniality have united. At least, I have never been able to
distinguish the presence of Fletcher during the life of Beaumont, nor
the absence of Beaumont during the survival of Fletcher.

But waiving, or rather deferring, this question, I protest against the
remainder of the position in 'toto'. And indeed, whilst I can never, I
trust, show myself blind to the various merits of Jonson, Beaumont and
Fletcher, and Massinger, or insensible to the greatness of the merits
which they possess in common, or to the specific excellencies which give
to each of the three a worth of his own,--I confess, that one main
object of this Lecture was to prove that Shakspeare's eminence is his
own, and not that of his age;--even as the pine-apple, the melon, and
the gourd may grow on the same bed;--yea, the same circumstances of
warmth and soil may be necessary to their full development, yet do not
account for the golden hue, the ambrosial flavour, the perfect shape of
the pine-apple, or the tufted crown on its head. Would that those, who
seek to twist it off, could but promise us in this instance to make it
the germ of an equal successor!

What had a grammatical and logical consistency for the ear,--what could
be put together and represented to the eye--these poets took from the
ear and eye, unchecked by any intuition of an inward impossibility;--
just as a man might put together a quarter of an orange, a quarter of an
apple, and the like of a lemon and a pomegranate, and make it look like
one round diverse-coloured fruit. But nature, which works from within by
evolution and assimilation according to a law, cannot do so, nor could
Shakspeare; for he too worked in the spirit of nature, by evolving the
germ from within by the imaginative power according to an idea. For as