Scene 4, with its mixture of blank verse and rhyme:

This is my fatal hour; heaven may forgive My rash attempt, that causelessly hath laid Griefs on me that will never let me rest, And put a Woman's heart into my brest. It is more honour for you that I die; For she that can endure the misery That I have on me, and be patient too, May live, and laugh at all that you can do--

are marked by characteristics utterly unlike those of Fletcher's dramatic verse. Also unlike Fletcher are the scenes which abound in lines of weak and light ending, and lines where the lighter syllables of every word must be counted to make full measure. Fletcher did not write:

Alas, Amintor, thinkst thou I forbear To sleep with thee because I have put on A maidens strictness;

or

As mine own conscience too sensible;--

I must live scorned, or be a murderer;--

That trust out all our reputation.

Nor did Fletcher write, with any frequency, improper run-on lines, such as III, 2, 135 (one of his collaborator's scenes):

Speak yet again, before mine anger grow Up beyond throwing down.

In this play the percentage of run-on lines in Fletcher's scenes is about nineteen; in the scenes not written by him, almost twenty-seven. Fletcher's double endings are over forty per cent; his collaborator's barely ten.

In _A King and No King_ similar Beaumontesque characteristics distinguish the major portion of the play from the few scenes generally acknowledged to be written by Fletcher. In Fletcher's scenes[155] one notes the high proportion of stress-syllable openings, and, consequently, of anapaestic substitutions, the subtle omission occasionally of the arsis, and not infrequently of the thesis (or light syllable) after the pause, and the use of the accented syllable at the beginning of the verse-section. While sometimes these characteristics appear in the other parts of the play, their relative infrequency is a distinctive feature of the non-Fletcherian rhythm. A comparison of the verse of Fletcher's Act IV, Scene 2, with that of his collaborator in