SIR JOHN, the elder brother of Mr Francis Beaumont the famous dramatic poet, was born in the year 1582, and in 1626 had the dignity of a baronet conferred upon him by King Charles I. In his youth he applied himself to the Muses with good success; and wrote, The Crown of Thorns, a poem, in eight books: a miscellany, entitled Boisworth Field: Translations from the Latin poets: and several poems on religious and political subjects; as, On the Petitions; On the Blessed Trinity; A Dialogue between the World, a Pilgrim, and Virtue; Of the miserable State of Man; Of fickness, &c. He died in 1628. His poetic genius was celebrated by Ben Johnson, Michael Drayton, and others.

BEAUMONT and FLETCHER, two celebrated English dramatic writers, who flourished in the reign of James I, and so closely connected both as authors and as friends, that it has been judged not improper to give them under one article.

Mr Francis Beaumont was descended from an ancient family of his name at Grace-dieu in Leicestershire, where he was born about the year 1585 or 1586, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. His grandfather, John Beaumont, was master of the rolls, and his father Francis Beaumont one of the judges of the common pleas. He was educated at Cambridge, and afterwards admitted of the Inner Temple. It is not, however, apparent that he made any great proficiency in the law, that being a study probably too dry and unentertaining to be attended to by a man of his fertile and sprightly genius. And indeed we should scarcely be surprised to find that he had given no application to any study but poetry, nor attended on any court but that of the Muses: but, on the contrary, our admiration might fix itself in the opposite extreme, and fill us with astonishment at the extreme affluity of his genius and rapidity of his pen, when we look back on the voluminousness of his works, and then inquire into the time allowed him for them; works that might well have taken up a long life to have executed. For although, out of 53 plays which are collected together as the labours of these united authors, Mr Beaumont was concerned in much the greater part of them, yet he did not live to complete his 30th year, the king of terrors summoning him away in the beginning of March 1615, on the 9th day of which he was interred in the entrance of St Benedict's chapel in Westminster-Abbey. There is no inscription on his tomb: But there are two epitaphs to his memory; one by his elder brother Sir John Beaumont:

On death, thy murderer, this revenge I take; I flight his terrors, and just question make,

Which of us two the best precedence have, Mine to this wretched world, thine to the grave? Thou shouldest have follow'd me; but death, to blame, Miscounted years, and measur'd age by fame. So dearly hast thou bought thy precious lines; Their praise grew swiftly, so thy life declines. Thy muse, the hearer's queen, the reader's love, All ears, all hearts (but death's), could please and move.

Boisworth Field, p. 164.

The other is by Bishop Corbet. (Poems, p. 68.)

He that hath such acuteness and such wit, As would ask ten good heads to husband it: He that can write so well, that no man dare Resume it for the best; let him beware: Beaumont is dead; by whose sole death appears, Wit's a disease consumes men in few years.

He left a daughter, Frances Beaumont, who died in Leicestershire since the year 1700. She had in her possession several poems of her father's writing; but they were lost at sea in her voyage from Ireland, where she had lived for some time in the duke of Ormond's family.

Mr John Fletcher was not more meanly descended than his poetical colleague; his father, the Rev. Dr Fletcher, having been first made bishop of Bristol, by Queen Elizabeth, and afterwards by the same monarch, in the year 1593, translated to the rich see of London. Our poet was born in 1576; and was, as well as his friend, educated at Cambridge, where he made a great proficiency in his studies, and was accounted a very good scholar. His natural vivacity of wit, for which he was remarkable, soon rendered him a devotee to the muses; and his close attention to their service, and fortunate connection with a genius equal to his own, soon raised him to one of the highest places in the temple of poetical fame. As he was born near ten years before Mr Beaumont, fo did he also survive him by an equal number of years; the general calamity of a plague, which happened in the year 1625, involved him in its great destruction, he being at that time 49 years of age.

During the joint lives of these two great poets, it appears that they wrote nothing separately, excepting one little piece by each, which seemed of too trivial a nature for either to require affinitie in .viz. The Faithful Shepherd, a pastoral, by Fletcher; and The Masque of Gray's-Inn Gentlemen, by Beaumont. Yet what share each had in the writing or designing of the pieces thus composed by them jointly, there is no possibility of determining. It is however generally allowed, that Fletcher's peculiar talent was wit, and Beaumont's; though much the younger man, judgment. Nay, to extraordinary was the latter property in Mr Beaumont, that it is recorded of the great Ben Johnson, who seems moreover to have had a sufficient degree of self-opinion of his own abilities, that he constantly, so long as this gentleman lived, submitted his own writings to his censure, and, as it is thought, availed himself of his judgment at least in the correcting, if not even in the contriving all his plots. It is probable, therefore, that the forming the plots and contriving the conduct of the fable, the writing of the more ferious and pathetic parts, and lopping the redundant branches of Fletcher's Beaumont, wit, whose luxuriance, we are told, frequently stood in need of castration, might be in general Beaumont's portion in the work: while Fletcher, whose conversation with the beau monde (which indeed both of them from their births and stations in life had been ever accustomed to), added to the volatile and lively turn he possessed, rendered him perfectly master of dialogic and polite language, might execute the designs formed by the other, and raise the superstructure of those lively and spirited scenes which Beaumont had only laid the foundation of; and in this he was so successful, that though his wit and raillery were extremely keen and poignant, yet they were at the same time so perfectly genteel, that they used rather to please than disgust the very persons on whom they seemed to reflect. Yet that Fletcher was not entirely excluded from a share in the conduct of the drama, may be gathered from a story related by Winifanley, viz. that our two bards having concerted the rough draught of a tragedy over a bottle of wine at a tavern, Fletcher said, he would undertake to kill the king; which words being overheard by the waiter, who had not happened to have been witness to the context of their conversation, he lodged an information of treason against them. But on their explanation of it only to mean the destruction of a theatrical monarch, their loyalty moreover being unquestioned, the affair ended in a jest.

On the whole, the works of these authors have undoubtedly very great merit, and some of their pieces deservedly stand on the list of the present ornaments of the theatre. The plots are ingenious, interesting, and well managed; the characters strongly marked; and the dialogue sprightly and natural: yet there is in the latter a coarseness which is not suitable to the politeness of the present age; and a fondness of repartee, which frequently runs into obscenity; and which we may suppose was the vice of that time, since even the delicate Shakespeare himself is not entirely free from it. But as these authors have more of that kind of wit than the last-mentioned writer, it is not to be wondered if their works were in the licentious reign of Charles II. preferred to his. Now, however, to the honour of the present taste be it spoken, the tables are entirely turned; and while Shakespeare's immortal works are our constant and daily fare, those of Beaumont and Fletcher, though delicate in their kind, are only occasionally served up: and even then great pains are taken to clear them of that fume, which the haut gout of their contemporaries considered as their supreme relish, but which the more unprincipled taste of ours has been justly taught to look on as, what it really is, no more than a corrupt and unwholesome taint.

Some of their plays were printed in quarto during the lives of the authors; and in the year 1645 there was published in folio a collection of such plays as had not been printed before, amounting to between thirty and forty. This collection was published by Mr Shirley, after the shutting up of the theatres; and dedicated to the earl of Pembroke by ten of the most famous actors. In 1679 there was an edition of all their plays published in folio; another edition in 1711 by Mr Tonson, in seven volumes 8vo, and the last in 1751.

a town of the Netherlands, in Hainault, on the confines of the territory of Liege. It was ceded to the French in 1684; and taken in 1691 by the English, who blew up the castle. It is situated between the rivers Maas and Sambre, in E. Long. 4. 1. N. Lat. 50. 12.

BEAUMONT le Roger, a town of Upper Normandy in France. E. Long. o. 56. N. Lat. 49. 2.

BEAUMONT le Vicomte, a town of Maine in France. E. Long. o. 10. N. Lat. 48. 12.

BEAUMONT sur Oise, a town in the Ile de France, seated on the declivity of a hill, with a bridge over the river Oise. E. Long. 2. 29. N. Lat. 49. 9.