Excerpt from The Works of Beaumont and Fletcher

Hirley dramatist when concluding his Preface to the beaumont and fletcher, pronounces an interdict by way of an Opinion he must be a bold man that dares undertake to write their lives. Yet Shirley lived at the same time as our authors, was a member of the same literary guild to which they belonged, and moreover stood towards one of them, Fletcher, in the position of friend. What had deserved the name boldness under his circumstances, would escape with no such ambiguous epithet under those of a modern biographer. Biography and history differ beyond common idea in this, that a subtle philosophical process will oftentimes, from the multifold, inter-dependent, full-fraught, known facts of the latter, elicit other facts unrecognised before, even by the age itself when they took place whilst the facts of a particular life, unless it were prominent enough to be historic, are so scanty, exclue sive, and meagre, that a similar process, applied to them, would seldom have a similar effect. Man's general nature is sufficiently uniform to admit of our reasoning out consequences which must have occurred at a certain time past, because parallel situations would always produce them; but man, as an individual, being far more variable than any other sentient creature upon earth, to divine from all he ever did aught he would ever do again, baffles the calculus of probabilities in most cases. Hence, without exact and abundant contemporaneous memoirs, it becomes an easier matter to develope, by help of those few and superficial we may have, the united life of Mankind during a given period gone by, than the life of one Man.

Such desirable memoirs of Beaumont and of Fletcher we should now possess, had Shirley not been either too modest or too proud for a biographer, a very circumspect or a very careless friend. He gives us in his preface but a single trait, and that at second-hand, of their private character. His aforesaid preface, less a critique than a panegyrical flourish, little elucidates even the character of their works. I cannot well forgive him the amiable, or the unamiable, motive of his silence, through which my present task seems yet more hopeless than that of a Jew under Pharaoh, as to make my bricks I have only the straw and not the clay. But let me excuse Shirley, if possible, though his costiveness places me in the predicament of a tombstone-poet, expected to draw out a handsome epitaph from a proper name, two calendar dates, and here lies. An inventive age leaves the business of criticism to a barren one.

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