Francis Beaumont
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"Francis Beaumont" was a dramatist in the English Renaissance theatre, most famous for his collaborations with John Fletcher (playwright)/John Fletcher.

Beaumont was the son of Sir Francis Beaumont of Grace-Dieu/Grace Dieu, near Thringstone in Leicestershire, a justice of the Court of Common Pleas (England)/common pleas. He was born at the family seat and was educated at Broadgates Hall (now Pembroke College, Oxford) at age thirteen. Following the death of his father in 1598, he left university without a degree and followed in his father's footsteps by entering the Inner Temple in London in 1600.

Accounts suggest that Beaumont did not work long as a lawyer. He became a student of poet and playwright Ben Jonson; he was also acquainted with Michael Drayton and other poets and dramatists, and decided that was where his passion lay. His first work, Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, appeared in 1602. The 1911 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica describes the work as "not on the whole discreditable to a lad of eighteen, fresh from the popular love-poems of Christopher Marlowe/Marlowe and Shakespeare, which it naturally exceeds in long-winded and fantastic diffusion of episodes and conceits." In 1605, Beaumont wrote commendatory verses to Jonson's Volpone.

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Interest makes some people blind, and others quick-sighted.

236

Envy, like the worm, never runs but to the fairest fruit; like a cunning bloodhound, it singles out the fattest deer in the flock.

219

All confidence which is not absolute and entire, is dangerous. There are few occasions but where a man ought either to say all, or conceal all; for, how little so ever you have revealed of your secret to a friend, you have already said too much if you think it not safe to make him privy to all particulars.

190

Honor's a thing too subtle for wisdom; if honor lie in eating, he's Right Honorable.

171

Let no man fear to die, we love to sleep all, and death is but the sounder sleep.

167

Upon my buried body lie / Lightly, gentle earth.

123

Let us have a care not to disclose our hearts to those who shut up theirs against us.

105

Mortality, behold and fear! / What a change of flesh is here!

97

Faith without works is like a bird without wings; though she may hop with her companions on earth, yet she will never fly with them to heaven.

97

Kiss till the cow comes home.

90

Oh, love will make a dog howl in rhyme.

82