THE DRAMA.

ALL THE WORLD'S A STAGE.. -Shakspeare.

FRANCIS BEAUMONT.

THIS gentleman was descended from a very ancient family of that name, seated at Grace-Dieu, in Leicestershire. His grandfather, John Beaumont, had been Master of the Rolls, and his father, Francis Beaumont, one of the Judges of the Court of Common Pleas. Nor was his descent less honourable on the side of his mother, whose name was Anne, the daughter of George Pierrepoint, of Home-Pierrepoint, in the county of Nottingham, Esq. and of the same family from which the present Duke of Kingston derives his ancestry.

Our poet, however, appears to have been only a younger son, Jacob mentioning a brother of his by the title of Sir Henry Beaumont, though Cibber with more propriety, in his Lives of the Poets, vol. I. p. 157, calls him Sir John Beaumont. He was born in the year 1585, and received his education at Cambridge, and he afterwards was entered a student in the Inner Temple. Although, out of fifty-three plays, which are collected together as the labours of Beaumont and Fletcher, Beaumont was concerned in much the greatest part of them, yet he did not live to complete his thirtieth year; he died 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. He left behind him only one daughter, Mrs. Frances Beaumont, who must then have been an infant, as she died in Leicestershire since the year 1700. She had been possessed of several MS. poems of her father's writing, which were lost in her voyage from Ireland, in which kingdom she had resided for some time, in the family of the Duke of Ormond.

JOHN FLETCHER.

THIS gentleman was not more meanly descended than his poetical colleague; his father, the Rev. Dr. Fletcher, having been first made Bishop of Bristol, by Queen Eliza