His goulden pen had clos'd her so about,
No bastard æglet's quill, the world throughout,
Had been of force to marre what he had made;
For why they were not expert in that trade.
What mortall soule with Marlo might contend,
That could 'gainst reason force him stoope or bend?
Whose siluer-charming toung mou'd such delight,
That men would shun their sleepe in still darke night
To meditate vpon his goulden lynes,

His rare conceyts, and sweete-according rimes.
But Marlo, still-admired Marlo's gon
To liue with beautie in Elyzium;

Immortall beautie, who desires to heare
His sacred poesies, sweete in euery eare:
Marlo must frame to Orpheus' melodie
Himnes all diuine to make heauen harmonie.
There euer liue the prince of poetrie,
Liue with the liuing in eternitie ! " *

As the piece just quoted, however despicable in itself, possesses a sort of interest from its connection with Marlowe's fragment, and as it is of such rare occurrence that little more than its title has been cited by poetical antiquaries, some other extracts from it have been appended to the present volumes.†

But Chapman, the well-known translator of Homer,had also been busy with a continuation of Marlowe's" halftold tale ;" and it appears to have been completed as early as Petowe's Second Part above described. "As Musæus, who wrote the loue of Hero and Leander, had two excellent schollers, Thamaras and Hercules, so hath he in England two excellent poets imitators of him in the same argument and subject, Christopher Marlow and George Chapman," are the words of Meres in his Palladis Tamia, &c. 1598.

* Sig. B ii.

+ See vol. iii,-Appendix iii.

Fol. 282. Meres, we may presume, had seen Chapman's Continuation in a manuscript copy. A little before the passage just quoted, he mentions Shakespeare's Sonnets, which certainly were not then in print.

At that date, however, there is little doubt that Chapman's portion of the poem had not been printed; nor does it seem to have been ever printed singly. The earliest edition of the complete work yet discovered is that of 1600;⁕ and, strangely enough, its title-page makes no mention of Chapman, though his name is coupled with Marlowe's in the title-pages of all the subsequent impressions. In this elaborate performance (the popularity of which is attested by repeated editions) Chapman has divided Marlowe's fragment into two Sestiads,† has added four other Sestiads from his own pen, and has prefixed a rhyming Argument to each

of the six.

A passage of the Third Sestiad, in which Chapman makes an apostrophe to the "free soul" of Marlowe, requires some notice here:

"Then, ho, most strangely-intellectual fire,
That, proper to my soul, hast power t' inspire
Her burning faculties, and with the wings
Of thy unspherèd flame visit'st the springs
Of spirits immortal! now (as swift as Time
Doth follow Motion) find th' eternal clime
Of his free soul, whose living subject stood
Up to the chin in the Pierian flood,
And drunk to me half this Musæan story,
Inscribing it to deathless memory:
Confer with it, and make my pledge as deep,
That neither's draught be consecrate to sleep;
Tell it how much his late desires I tender
(If yet it know not), and to light surrender

See note, p. xlvii. See too the second article in the list of editions, vol. iii. 2: according to the title-page, that edition ought also to contain Marlowe's First Book of Lucan; but in the Bodleian copy (the only one I have ever met with) the Lucan is wanting.

† Warton says, "I learn from Mr. Malone, that Marlowe finished only the two first Sestiads and about one hundred lines of the third." Hist. of Engl. Poet. iii. 434, ed. 4to. But this is a mistake; see vol. iii. 38, of the present work.

My soul's dark offspring, willing it should die
To loves, to passions, and society."

The words, "his late desires," seem capable of no other interpretation than the late wishes of Marlowe that Chapman should continue the poem; while the words which follow, "If yet it know not," seem to imply that those wishes had not been expressed to Chapman by Marlowe himself, but had been conveyed to Chapman by others. Perhaps, therefore, we are to understand,—that on some occasion, not long before his death, Marlowe, when speaking of the poem to his friends, had mentioned Chapman as the person whom he should choose to complete it, if he himself should not live to bring it to a close. I need hardly remind the reader that, in Marlowe's case, "his late desires" cannot be referred to wishes expressed during the lingering illness of a death-bed. As to the conclusion of the passage, "and to light surrender," &c., I must confess that I am far from understanding it clearly.—Most probably there is no authority (at least, no good authority) for Warton's statement that Chapman had formed a friendship with Marlowe;† and the lines just cited would certainly lead us to suppose that their acquaintance with each other, if any, had been very slight.

Chapman offends, to a still greater degree than Marlowe, by loading the narrative with excrescences, which render it deficient in unity and due subordination of parts; and he has all Marlowe's proneness to conceits and apothegms. He disappoints us by unexpected inequalities and strange im

* Vol. iii. 46.

+ Warton states that Chapman, having gone to London in his youth," soon commenced a friendship with Spenser, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Daniel." Hist. of Engl. Poet. iii. 447, ed. 4to. According to Wood (cited by Warton, ibid. p. 448), Chapman was a man "religious and temperate, qualities rarely meeting in a poet;" and as Marlowe unhappily appears not to have possessed those "qualities," it is unlikely that any intimacy should have existed between him and Chapman.

proprieties; he loves frigid personifications; his meaning is not always transparent, his versification not always happy. But he has great depth of thought; he rises not unfrequently to the real poetic enthusiasm; his pictures have a truly graphic force of delineation; his touches of fancy are often bright and delicate; his pathos is sometimes profound. Chapman has not received justice from Warton, who mentions only slightly and disparagingly his continuation of Hero and Leander. It is, on the whole, a less perfect perform

*“At length George Chapman, the translator of Homer, completed, but with a striking inequality, Marlowe's unfinished version." Hist. of Engl. Poet. iii. 434, ed. 4to. (which, indeed, is nearly what Phillips had said in the Theat. Poet. (Modern Poets,) p. 25, ed. 1675).—To this opinion we may oppose that of Chapman's contemporary, Chettle, who speaks of him as

"Coryn, full of worth and wit,

That finisht dead Musæus' gracious song
With grace as great and words and verse as fit."

England's Mourning Garment, n. d. Sig. D 2. At a much later period Chapman published a version of Musæus,—The Divine Poem of Musœus. First of all Bookes. Translated according to the originall, By Geo: Chapman, 1616, 12mo. It is dedicated to Inigo Jones. In an address "To the Commune Reader" Chapman mentions "that partly excellent poem of Maister Marloe's."—This translation being of extraordinary rarity, I subjoin, as a specimen, the concluding lines;

"No more the false light for the curst winde burn'd,
That of Leander euer to be mourn'd

Blew out the loue and soule; when Hero still
Had watchfull eyes and a most constant will
To guide the voyage; and the morning shin'd,
Yet not by her light she her loue could finde.
She stood distract with miserable woes,

And round about the sea's broad shoulders throwes
Her eye, to second the extinguisht light,

And tried if any way her husband's sight,

Erring in any part, she could descry.

⁕ Erring] i. e. wandering.

ance than Marlowe's (much shorter) portion of the tale: but if the superiority of the one poet over the other is to be decided by individual passages, there will be no small difficulty in determining to whom the palm is due.

The Second and Fourth Books of Virgil's Æneid by Lord Surrey, some of Ovid's Epistles by Turberville, and Gascoigne and Kinwelmersh's paraphrase and alteration of the Phœnissœ of Euripides under the title of Iocasta, were all, or nearly all,⁕ the specimens of blank-verse translation from the ancient poets, which our language afforded, till Mar

When at her turret's foote she saw him lye
Mangled with rockes and all embru'd, she tore
About her brest the curious weede she wore,
And, with a shrieke, from off her turret's height
Cast her faire body headlong, that fell right

On her dead husband, spent with him her breath,
And each won other in the worst of death."

⁕ Of course, Grimoald's blank-verse translations from the Alexandreis of Gaultier are not to be taken into account.— In Steevens's list of Ancient Translations from Classic Authors (Malone's Shakespeare, by Boswell, i. 380), there occurs Virgil's Eclogues and Georgicks, translated into blank verse by W. Webbe, Lond. 1589. Qy. was there ever any such book? Webbe, indeed, gives translations of the First and Second Eclogues in his Discourse of English Poetrie, (p. 71, sqq. ed. Haslewood), but they are in English hexameters; and ibid. (p. 54), he says that he once turned the Georgics" to that same English verse which other such workes were in, though it were rudely," &c, and that his version had fallen into the hands of a person, who, he was told, either had published or intended to publish it.—Peele translated one of the Iphigenias of Euripides into English verse (qy. if blank-verse?); but in all probability it was never printed. I learn this fact from some Latin lines (in MS.) by Dr. Gager,—In Iphigeniam Georgii Peeli Anglicanis versibus redditam. The "Effiginia a Tragedye showen on the Innocentes daie at nighte by the Children of Powles," 1571, which is mentioned in Cunningham's Extracts from the Accounts of the Revels at Court, &c, p. 13, is very unlikely to have been Peele's translation; for at that date Peele, there is good reason to believe, was under twenty years of age.