red of the Inner Temple, November 27, 1597, at his father's request. Some say with John, but I do not find the latter in the Records. Francis may have re

odged and pursued his studies in one of the lesser Inns, called Inns of Chancery, attached to the Inner Temple and under its supervision: Clifford's Inn across Fleet Street; or, across the Strand, Lyon's Inn,-or, let us hope, by preference, Clement's Inn; where had lain Jack Falstaff in the days when he was "page to Thomas Mo

cholar, he would be transferred to the Inn of Court, itself. We may assume that about 1602, Beaumont would be sitting in Clerks' Commons in the Hall of the Inner Temple. Bread and beer for breakfast,-provided on only four days of the week. At 12 o'clock he would be summoned to dinner by the blowing of a horn,-"thou horne of hunger that cal'st the inns a court to their manger." For his mess of meat,-in Lent, fish,-on other occasions, loins of mutton, or beef,-he would make himself a trencher of bread. At 6 or 7 o'clock would come supper,-bread and beer again. After dinne

rank of poets and dramatists. But, that by no means precludes his continuance for several years, perhaps till 1608, in the juridical university, or his intimate association with and residence in the stately old quadrangles of what would be his college,-the Inner Temple. And for a young man of his temperament the atmosphere was as poetic as juridical. The young man's fancy was fired by

as Master of the Chapel Children, produced the "tragicall comedie" Damon and Pythias, and the tragedy of Palamon and Arcite, to the great edification of the Queen, and the permanent improvement of the Senecan style of drama by the fusion of the ideal and the commonplace, of the romantic, the serious, and the humorous in an appeal to popular interest. "He was highly valued," this Edwardes, "by those that knew him," says Anthony Wood, "especially his associates in Lincoln's Inn." And it was in the Middle Temple, just fourteen months after Beaumont joined the Inns of Co

at Gray's in every term. "They had revels and masques some of which," as a member of that society has recently said, "have never been forgotten, and I think cannot be forgotten while English history lasts."[18] From a very early date, perhaps not long after the society was established in Edward the Third's reign in the old manor of Portpool, "they were addicted at the Christmas season to a great outburst of revelry of every kind. The revelings began at All Hallows; at Christmas a Prince of Portpoole was appointed; who was also Lord of Misrule, and he kept things gaily alive through Christmas and until toward the end of January." These and other disguises, masques, and mummeries, are lineal descendants of the mummings of the Ancient Order of the Coif, such as regaled King Richard II at Christmas 1389; and, amalgamated with St. George plays and other folk-shows and even with sword-dances, they influenced the course of rural drama throughout the realm. It may be a bow drawn at a venture but I cannot withhold the suspicion that the Lord of Pool of the Revesby Sword-Play and of other popular compositions derives from the historic Prince of Misrule of the Gray's Inn Christmas revels. It was George Gascoigne of Gray's Inn who by a translation from Ariosto int

rding to Spedding,[20] the speeches of the six councillors for the famous court of the Prince of Purpoole in 1594 were written by him and him alone. He furnished the money and much of the device for gorgeous masques before Queen Elizabeth; and under her successor he was prime mover in many a masque, like that of the Flowers, presented by the gentlemen of Gray's Inn, in 1614, which, alone, cost him about ￡10,000 as reckoned in the money of to-day. The masques by the four Inns, in honour of the Elector Palatine's marriage, the year before, are said

privilege, but as a function, to entertain royalty upon summons. As Gray's Inn had its flavour of romance, its literary and dramatic history, its Sidney, its Bacon, its Gascoigne; so also the "anciently allied House" of the Inner Temple. There lingered the tradition, to say the least, of Chaucer's stirring poetry; there the spirit of Sir Francis Drake,-stirring romances of the Spanish main; there the memory of the Christmas revels of 1562 at which was first acted the Gorboduc of Thomas Sackville (afterwards Earl of Dorset, and connected by marriage with the Fletchers), and Thomas Norto

plied an honorary 'freedom' of the others. Beaumont would know not only William Browne, the poet of the Inner Temple from 1611 on, and all Browne's poetic fellows in that House, but Browne's less poetic friend, Christopher Brooke, counsel for Shakespeare's company of King's Players, who earlier in the century had entered Lincoln's Inn; and, also, Brooke's chamber-fellow, John Donne, whose secret marriage with the daughter of the Lieutenant of the Tower, i

ordinary wit, published in 1602, and ascribed by some one writing in a contemporary hand upon the title-page, to John B

use assaies he

hould crie, is

iter, in 1602,[22] and was not assigned to Francis Beaumont until 1639, when Lawrence Blaiklock included it among the Poems: By Francis Beaumont, Gent., entered on the Stationers' Registers, September 2, and published, 1640. Blaiklock evidently printed from John Hodgets's edition of 1602, carelessly omitting here and there a line, and introducing absurd typographical mistakes. Either because he had private information that Beaumont was the author, or because he wished to profit by Beaumont's reputation, he goes so far as to sign the initials, F. B., to the verse dedication, To Calliope, and to alter the signature, A. F., appended to an introductory sonnet, To the Author, so as to read I. F. (suggesting John Fletcher.) These licenses, in addition to the reckless inclusion in the 1640 volume of several poems by authors other than Beaumont, vitiate Blaiklock's evidence. On the other hand, the original publisher, Hodgets, was the publisher also, in 1607, of The Woman-Hater, a play now reasonably accepted as by Beaumont, originally alo

joyous irony is not unlike that of The Woman-Hater and The Knight of the Burning Pestle. The poem is a voluptuous and rambling expansion of the classical theme "which sweet-lipt Ovid long agoe did tell." The writer, like many a lad of 1602, has steeped himself in the amatory fable and fancy of Marlowe, Chapman, and Shakespeare; and the passionate imaginings are such as characterize poetic lads of seventeen in any period. It is not impossible that here we have Francis Beaumont's earliest attempt at a poem of some proportions, and that he was st

Autumne comes,

blush of the

aves, the Summ

weaving by the

e, his greene lo

ornament from

le the garments

ounces of he

shed in June of the latter year; and also, in 1605, to Drayton's revision of the Barrons Wars. On April 19, 1606, Drayton issued a volume entitled Poems Lyrick and Pastoral, which included with other verses a revision, under the name of Eglogs, of his Idea, the Shepheard's Garland, first published in 1593. In the eighth eclogue of t

nymph that in

arnwood with he

ter to those

yrsis and s

r the southern

r waters they

s, so good li

r might broth

ister unto t

t few like, I

ature truly

rst, she in the

rtilla, Elizabeth is again celebrated by Drayton twenty-four years later, in his Muses Elizium. Since these Pastorals are in confessed sequence with those of "the prime pastoralist of England," and the pastoral Thyrsis and young Palmeo have already sung divinely of the clear waters of their native stream, it would appear that they too are disciples at that time of Master Edmund Spenser in his Shepheards Calender. And since these brothers, so like in wit and feature, and in charming devotion to their sister, are al

Most of them returned home decorated with the honours of knighthood, a title which he dispensed with a profusion which astonished those who remembered the sober days of Elizabeth."[25] One of those thus decorated was the poet's brother Henry, who was dubbed knight bachelor at Worksop in Derbysh

as head of the family by John,[27] who later married a daughter of John Fortescue-also of a poetic race-and left by her a large family. The sister, Elizabeth (Mirtilla) probably continued to live at Grace-Dieu until her marriage to Thomas Seyliard of Kent. And that Francis occasionally came home on visits from London we have other proof than that afforded by Drayton. The provision o

TNO

d Associations (Lond., 1886), pp. 36, 78, 253. For the Beaumonts, and what follows, see, also, Ind

f Court, et

n first appears in

ay's Inn in Six Lectures on the I

assical Tragedies, In

d Life of Franc

. E. Class. Trag

ramaticus, Sh. Soc.

aticus, (

., I, 143-145; Elton, Michael Drayton, pp. 13, 58; Child

Hist. Engl. 1

ts of Engl., Vol.

that John had been admitted to the Inner Templ