Sentiment in their plays usurps the place of character.
Eloquent and moving speeches and fine figures are no longer subservient to the presentation of character in action, but are set down for their own sake, "What strange self-trumpeters and tongue-bullies all the brave soldiers of Beaumont and Fletcher are," said Coleridge.

When they die they die to the music of their own virtue.

When dreadful deeds are done they are described not with that authentic and lurid vividness which throws light on the working of the human heart in Shakespeare or Webster but in tedious rhetoric.

Resignation, not fortitude, is the authors' forte and they play upon it amazingly.

The sterner tones of their predecessors melt into the long drawn broken accent of pathos and woe.
This delight not in action or in emotion arising from action but in passivity of suffering is only one aspect of a certain mental flaccidity in grain.