that they themselves had had none-too-pleasant experiences with money-lenders. Pontalier, however, is very well conceived and skillfully executed. Occupying a relation to Novall Junior quite similar to that of Romont to Charalois, he is yet differentiated from his parallel, while at the same time he is kept free from any taint of the despicableness and fawning servility which are chiefly prominent in the parasites of the vicious and feather-brained young lord. There is something really pathetic about this brave, honorable soldier, committed to the defense of an unworthy benefactor, ranged on the side of wrong against right, by his very best qualities: his noble sense of gratitude, his loyalty, his devotion to what he conceives to be his duty. It will be observed that he never joins with the rest of the group about Novall Junior in their jibes against Charalois and Romont.

The last figure for consideration, and not the least important, is Beaumelle. So general has been the misconception of her character that it calls for a more detailed analysis than has been accorded to the other personages of the drama, or than the place she occupies might appear to warrant. That place, indeed, is not a striking one; she is scarce more than a character of second rank, appearing in but few scenes and speaking not many lines. Yet her part in the story is one of such potentialities that in Rowe’s version of the same theme her analogue becomes the central figure, and even in The Fatal Dowry a failure to understand her has probably been at the bottom of most of the less favorable judgments that have been passed upon the play, while those critics who appraise it higher yet acknowledge her to be its one outstanding defect. “The Fatal Dowry,” says Saintsbury (Hist. Eng. Lit., vol. ii, p. 400) “... is ... injured by the unattractive character of the light-of-love Beaumelle before her repentance (Massinger never could draw a woman).” She is declared by Swinburne to be “too thinly and feebly drawn to attract even the conventional and theatrical sympathy which Fletcher might have excited for a frail and penitent heroine: and the almost farcical insignificance and baseness of her paramour would suffice to degrade his not involuntary victim beneath the level of any serious interest or pity.” If these and similar pronouncements were well founded, the play as a cross-section of life would have the great weakness of being unconvincing at a very vital point. A study of the text, however, will discover Beaumelle to be portrayed, in the brief compass of her appearance, in no wise inadequately, but rather, if anything, somewhat beyond the requirements of her dramatic function—will reveal her, not, indeed, a personage of heroic 

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