well grounded in school learning, was sent to the University, but whether first to this of Oxon, or that of Cambridge, is to me unknown. Sure I am that he spent some time in Oxon, where he was observed to be most excellent in the Latin and Greek tongues, but not in logic or philosophy, and therefore I presume that that was the reason why he took no degree here." Warton says much the same in his History of English Poetry, stating that Chapman "passed two years at Trinity College, Oxford, with a contempt of philosophy, but in close attention to the Greek and Roman classics."

And herein, judging from our point of view, he acted wisely. What they called logic and philosophy in those days was in truth but a mere display of verbal wordsplitting. Aldrich was yet unborn, and the Barbara Calarent, which distressed our youthful memories, was known only in the treatises on the scholastic logic which had survived all the changes in religious belief. While Aldrich is now set aside as a mere teacher of artificial intellectual jugglery, what must have been the logic, and with it the philosophy, which Oxford offered three centuries ago to her children? It is necessary, indeed, to remember what was the condition of the scholastic logic in the days when Chapman was an undergraduate in order to understand the taste for quibbling, which was so common with many of the Elizabethan dramatists, and which is not altogether absent from Shakspeare, though Shakspeare was never at either University. The scholastic logic and philosophy, even when at their best, were a dreary substitution of the art of playing with words for the art of thinking. But what must they have been in their decay, when the Reformation had destroyed the raison d'être of the professors of the art itself, and it merely lingered as a conservative element in the University curriculum? How obstinately it thus lingered is to be judged from the fact that until Whately hinted at the true art, which John Stuart Mill afterwards developed, the one standard classic was Aldrich, to whose authority Oxford bowed down as if the admirable and accomplished Dean of Christchurch was as great in the science of logic as he was in music and architecture.

It is not, however, in his plays so much as in his translation of Homer that Chapman shows how lovingly he had read the old Greeks and Romans. On this translation he worked, after the completion of the Humorous Day's Mirth, not returning to the stage for six years to come. This translation is usually thought by far his greatest work, and whatever be its merits as a translation, according to our modern standards of translation, it has unquestionably been felt as a work of real genius by many who cared little for any purely critical standard as to what constitutes a strict translation. Keats declared that to him the first reading of Chapman's Homer was like the discovery of a new planet by an astronomer gazing into the skies. Pope offered it a more qualified homage, and wished to "damn it with faint praise," declaring that it was a work that Homer might have written before coming to years of

discretion; but Waller said that he could never read it without a degree of rapture.

The Iliad was reprinted in 1843, but we fancy that it is now little known, even to scholars, and we wonder that with the Odyssey and one or two other of his classical works it is not now reprinted by one of those enterprising publishers, who love to reprint old books, rather for love than for money. As for conveying to the unlearned reader any true conception of the Iliad and Odyssey of the real Homer himself, every scholar who is not bitten with an inevitable love for translating, knows that it is an impossibility. Everybody knows what the Psalms in prose, themselves a translation, have suffered at the hands of the versifiers. Let the unlearned in Greek meditate on this, and be satisfied that there is only one way to comprehend the infinite charm of the Iliad and Odyssey, and that is, to learn to read them with care in Greek. Let them think on Tate and Brady, and Sternhold and Hopkins, and even Keble, and the old Scotch version, and then form their conclusions as to translations from any of the Greek poets. At the same time, if their passion for knowing something of Homer is insurmountable, they ought to add Chapman's version to all the rest; only let them not think that either Chapman, or Pope, or Cowper, or Lord Derby, or anybody else is Homer himself.

As soon as his translating labours were over Chapman returned, as we have said, to play-writing, and learnt what it was to be shut up in the Fleet by will of the king. One of his best comedies followed his liberation. All Fools is one of those comedies which are only not farces, because of the merit of their dialogue, and the less absolute improbability of their story. Here is the ever popular plot of the universal misunderstandings and the trickeries of all the dramatis personæ, but sustained by a dialogue, often rich and musical, and exhibiting that real poetic gift which appears in Chapman's prose almost as in his verse. Few writers, indeed, could be named whose prose runs almost imperceptibly into verse, and in whom the occasional alternations between verse and prose dialogue seem so little unnatural.

One of his next plays, The Gentleman Usher, contains one of his finest passages, and it must be quoted at length as an illustration of the sustained quality both of his verse and his ideas, and also in contrast with a piece of prose in which he writes about women in a strain far more like that which was popular among the play-writers, and, which comes to the same thing, the audiences of his day. Thus it is that he makes Strozzi address his wife Cynanche:

Come near me, wife; I fare the better far
For the sweet food of thy divine advice.

Let no man value at a little price

A virtuous woman's counsel; her wing'd spirit
Is feathered oftentimes with heavenly words;

And like her beauty, ravishing and pure.
The weaker body, still the stronger soul,
When good endeavours do her powers apply,

Her love draws nearest man's felicity.
Oh, what a treasure is a virtuous wife,
Discreet and loving; not one gift on earth
Makes a man's life so highly bound to heaven,
She gives him double forces to endure

And to enjoy, by being one with him;
Feeling his joys and griefs with equal sense;
And like the twins Hippocrates reports,

If he fetch sighs, she draws her breath as short;
If he lament, she melts herself in tears;

If he be glad she triumphs; if he stir

She moves his way; in all things his sweet ape,
And is in alteration passing strange.

Gold is right precious; but his price infects
With pride and avarice; Authority lifts

Hats from men's heads, and bows the strongest knees,

Yet cannot bend in rule the weakest hearts;

Music delights but one sense, nor choice meats;

One quickly fades, the others stir to sin.
But a true wife, both sense and soul delights,
And mixeth not her good with any ill;
Her virtues, ruling hearts, all powers command;
All store, without her, leaves a man but poor,
And with her, poverty is exceeding store;
No time is tedious with her, her true worth
Makes a true husband think his arms enfold,
With her alone, a complete world engold.

Surely such verse as this, with all its bit of quaintness, is poetry as Lamb said, of the true Shakspearean metal. But whether the fine ladies and gentlemen of those free and easy days loved it as well as the subjoined piece of prose from the comedy of May Day, may well be doubted. This is the way that Ludovico advises his friend Aurelio to press his suit with a woman:-" She shall endure thee; do the worst thou canst to her ; aye, and endure thee till thou canst not endure her. But then thou must use thyself like a wise man, and a wise man, how deep soever she is in thy thoughts, carry not the print of it in thy looks; be bold and careless, and stand not sauntering afar off, as I have seen you, like a dog in a furmety pot, that licks his chops and wags his tail, and fain would lay his lips to it, but he fears 'tis too hot for him; that's the only way to make her too hot for thee. He that holds religious and sacred thoughts of a woman, he that bears so reverend a respect to her, that he will not touch her but with a kissed hand and a timorous heart; he that adores her like his goddess, let him be sure that she will shun him like her slave. Alas, good souls, women of themselves are tractable and tactable enough, and would return Quid for Quod still, but we are they that spoil 'em, and we shall answer for't another day. We are they that put a kind of wanton melancholy into 'em, that makes 'em think their noses bigger than their faces, greater than the sun in brightness; and whereas nature made 'em but half fools, we make 'em all fool. And this is our palpable flattery of them, where they had rather have plain dealing."

VOL. XXX.-No. 175.

8.

Of Chapman's tragedies, the most characteristic are the four semihistorical plays, Bussy d'Ambois, The Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois, Byron's Conspiracy, and Byron's Tragedy. In reality they are dramatic poems rather than dramas; Chapman's failure in inventing real living men and women being more conspicuous in tragedy than in comedy. No one can deny their bombast; but that any competent critic, or any real poet, could detect nothing in them but bombast, is astonishing. Dryden's criticism especially deserves quoting, partly as a master-piece of vilification, and partly as an illustration of what can be written against bombast by a great poet who could himself descend to the lowest bombastic level. Jealousy there could be none, except that Bussy d'Ambois was still sometimes played on the London stage. The quotation also may be profitably compared with the current theatrical newspaper criticisms of to-day, of which it may safely be said that not one word will ever be read a score of years hence. Thus, then, writes Dryden :-" I have sometimes wondered in the reading, what was become of those glaring colours which amazed me in Bussy d'Amloir upon the theatre; but when I had taken up what I supposed a fallen star, I found I had been cozened with a jelly; nothing but a cold, dull mass, which glittered no longer than when it was shooting; a dwarfish thought, dressed up in gigantic words, repetition in abundance, looseness of expression, and gross hyperbole; the sense of one line expanded prodigiously into ten; and, to sum up all, incorrect English, and a hideous mingle of false poetry and true nonsense; or at best, a scantling of wit, which lay gasping for life, and groaning beneath a heap of rubbish. A famous modern poet used to sacrifice every year a Statius to Virgil's Manes; and I have indignation enough to burn a D'Ambois annually to the memory of Jonson." This comes from the Epistle Dedicatory to The Spanish Fryar, and is indeed a very masterpiece of vituperation. Walter Scott, too, editing The Spanish Fryar, adds his own opinion, that "if Dryden could have exhausted every copy of this bombast performance, the public would have been no great losers." Yet in this play is a passage which may rank with Dryden's finest bursts of angry and most expressive metaphor :

Your voice

Is like an Eastern wind, that where it flies,
Knits nets of caterpillars, with which you catch
The prime of all the fruit the kingdom yields.
You have a tongue so scandalous, 'twill cut
A perfect crystal; and a breath that will
Kill to that wall a spider.

Less ambitious in plan were some of Chapman's later performances. The May Day and The Widow's Tears (in the latter of which we have him by no means glorifying women in general and widows in particular) were published in 1611 and 1612. In 1613, on occasion of the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth with the Palsgrave, the Societies of Lincoln's Inn and the Middle Temple showed their loyalty by exhibiting a superb

masque at Whitehall, at the cost of more than 1,000l. for which Chapman wrote the verses, and Inigo Jones designed the machinery. Of Chapman's gifts in the way of writing such trifles, Jonson thought highly, for he said to Drummond that "next himself, only Fletcher and Chapman could make a masque."

After this Chapman returned to his beloved translations, including Hesiod, Juvenal, Musæus and Petrarch. Many years afterwards he wrote his tragedy of Cæsar and Pompey. And then "at length," writes Wood, "this most eminent and reverend poet, having lived seventy-seven years in this vain and transitory world, made his last exit in the parish of St. Giles' in the Fields, near London," and over his grave was set a monument by his friend Inigo Jones, in which he is styled poeta Homericus, Philosophus verus, etsi Christianus poeta plus quam celebris. Compare this with the views concerning Chapman and his contemporaries for which Prynne lost his ears, his 3,000l., and his liberty for life.