We find him afterwards admitted a student in the Inner-Temple, but we have no account of his making any proficiency in the law, which is a circumstance attending almost all the poets who were bred to that profession, which few men of sprightly genius care to be confined to.  Before he was thirty years of age he died, in 1615, and was buried the ninth of the same month in the entrance of St. Benedictine’s Chapel, within St. Peter’s Westminster.  We meet with no inscription on his tomb, but there are two epitaphs writ on him, one by his elder brother Sir John Beaumont, and the other by Bishop Corbet.  That by his brother is pretty enough, and is as follows: 

  On Death, thy murderer, this revenge I take: 
  I slight his terror, and just question make,
  Which of us two the best precedence have,
  Mine to this wretched world, thine to the grave. 
  Thou should’st have followed me, but Death to blame
  Miscounted years, and measured age by fame. 
  So dearly hast thou bought thy precious lines;
  Thy 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.

Our poet left behind him one daughter, Mrs. Frances Beaumont, who lived to a great age and, died in Leicestershire since the year 1700.  She had been possessed of several poems of her father’s writing, but they were lost at sea in her voyage from Ireland, where she had lived sometime in the Duke of Ormond’s family.  Besides the plays in which Beaumont was jointly concerned with Fletcher, he writ a little dramatic piece entitled, A Masque of Grays Inn Gentlemen, and the Inner-Temple; a poetical epistle to Ben Johnson; verses to his friend Mr. John Fletcher, upon his faithful Shepherd, and other poem’s printed together in 1653, 8vo.  That pastoral which was written by Fletcher alone, having met with but an indifferent reception, Beaumont addressed the following copy of verses to him on that occasion, in which he represents the hazard of writing for the stage, and satirizes the audience for want of judgment, which, in order to shew his versification I shall insert.

  Why should the man, whose wit ne’er had a stain,
  Upon the public stage present his vein,
  And make a thousand men in judgment sit
  To call in question his undoubted wit,
  Scarce two of which can understand the laws,
  Which they should judge by, nor the party’s cause. 
  Among the rout there is not one that hath,
  In his own censure an explicit faith. 
  One company, knowing thy judgment Jack,
  Ground their belief on the next man in black;
  Others on him that makes signs and is mute,
  Some like, as he does, in the fairest sute;
  He as his mistress doth, and me by chance: 
  Nor want there those, who, as the boy doth dance
  Between the acts will censure the whole play;
  Some, if the wax lights be not new that day: 
  But multitudes there are, whose judgment goes
  Headlong, according to the actors clothes.