Born, near Hitchin, 1559(?). Educated at Trinity College, Oxford(?). First poems printed, 1594. First part of Homer translation pub., 1598. Prolific writer for stage. Died, in London, 12 May 1634. Buried in churchyard of St. Giles-in-the-Fields. Works: “Σκια Νυκτος” (under initials: G. W. Gent.), 1594; “Ovid’s Banquet of Sence” (anon.), 1595; Completion of Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander,” 1598; “The Blind Beggar of Alexandria,” 1598; “Seaven Bookes of the Iliades of Homere,” translated, 1598; “Achilles’ Shield” translated, 1598; “An Humorous Dayes Mirth” (under initials: G. C.), 1599; “Eastward Hoe” (with Jonson and Marston), 1605; “All Fools,” 1605; “The Gentleman Usher,” 1606; “Monsieur d’Olive,” 1606; “Sir Gyles Goosecappe” (anon.), 1606 (performed 1601); “Bussy d’Ambois” (anon.), 1607; “The Tragedie of Cæsar and Pompey” (anon.), 1607; “The Conspiracie and Tragedie of Charles, Duke of Byron,” 1608 (performed 1605); “Euthymiæ Raptus,” 1609; “The Iliades of Homer” (complete), [1611]; “May Day,” 1611; “The Widowes Teares” (“by Geor. Chap.”), 1612; Translation of Petrarch’s “Seven Penitentiall Psalms,” 1612; “An Epicede” (anon.), 1612; “The Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois,” 1613; “Memorable Masque,” 1614; “Eugenia,” 1614; “Andromeda Liberata,” 1614; “Twenty Four Bookes of Homere’s Odisses translated,” 1614; Iliad and Odyssey translations together, 1616; “Divine Poem” of Musæus translated, 1617; Hesiod’s “Georgicks” translated, 1618; “Two Wise Men” (anon.), 1619; “Pro Vere Autumni Lachrymæ,” 1622; “A Justification of a Strange Action of Nero,” 1629; Homer’s “Batrachomyomachia” translated, 1624; “The Warres of Pompey and Cæsar” (anon.), 1631. Posthumous: “The Ball” (with Shirley), 1639 (acted 1632); “The Tragedy of Chabot” (with Shirley), 1639 (acted 1635); “The Tragedy of Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany,” 1654; “Revenge for Honour,” 1654. He contributed verses to: Jones’s “Nennio,” 1595; Jonson’s “Sejanus,” 1605, and “Volpone,” 1606; Fletcher’s “Faithful Shepherdesse,” 1610 (?); “Parthenia,” 1611; Field’s “A Woman is a Weathercock,” 1612. Collected Works: in 3 vols., 1874–75.

Personal

	’Tis true that Chapman’s reverend ashes must
	Lye rudely mingled with the vulgar dust,
	’Cause carefull heyers the wealthy only have,
	To build a glorious trouble o’re the grave.
	Yet doe I not despaire some one may be
	So seriously devout to poesie,
	As to translate his reliques, and find roome
	In the warme church to build him up a tombe,
	Since Spenser hath a stone.

  Not the meanest of the English poets of his time; who dying the 12th of May 1634, aged 77 years, was buried in the yard on the south side of the Church of S. Giles’s in the Fields near London. Over his grave, near to the south wall of the church, was soon after a monument erected, built after the way of the old Romans, by the care and charge of his beloved friend Inigo Jones the King’s Archatect; whereon is engraven this, Georgius Chapmannus Poeta Homericus, Philosophus verus (etsi Christianus Poeta) plusquam celebris, &c.

  In Chapman scholarship appears to have exerted its best traditional influences, instead of its wine being turned to vinegar by any infusion of vanity or jealousy. He seems to have been esteemed by patrons of the highest rank and eminence—Bacon was one of their number—and to have enjoyed in an exceptional degree the good-will of his fellow-poets. Jonson “loved” Chapman, knew a piece of his “Iliads” by heart, and averred that, next himself, “only Fletcher and Chapman could make a masque.” Marston and Shirley were associated with him as playwrights. Webster speaks of him with what may be described as an excess of enthusiasm; for he seems to place him at the head of contemporary dramatists. This general esteem, in which the younger growth of lovers of letters seems to have shared, was probably due to the dignity of Chapman’s character as well as to the reputation which his learning and talents had secured him.

Hero and Leander, 1598

  Chapman was a true and excellent poet, in some respects Marlowe’s superior, but altogether different from him in lines of thought and modes of expression, and labouring besides under the immense disadvantage of singing as it were in falsetto, by endeavouring to work in the style and spirit of another man’s performance.

  In Chapman’s continuation, as in everything that Chapman wrote, there are fine passages in abundance; but the reader is wearied by tedious digressions, dull moralising, and violent conceits. There are couplets in the “Tale of Teras” (Fifth Sestiad) that for purity of colour and perfection of form are hardly excelled by anything in the first two sestiads; such passages, however, are few.

  Marlowe died before he had completed the poem; it was finished by George Chapman, and no stronger proof of the greatness of Marlowe’s genius can be furnished than the contrast between the work of the two men. Chapman did not write without inspiration; but whereas Marlowe’s style … is all flame, his successor’s, even in his most brilliant moments, is half smoke.

Translation of Homer, 1598–1616

  I must confess that, to mine own ear, those continual cadences of couplets used in long continued poems are very tiresome and unpleasing, by reason that still methinks they run on with a sound of one nature, and a kind of certainty which stuffs the delight rather than entertains it. But yet, notwithstanding, I must not of my own daintiness condemn this kind of writing, which peradventure to another may seem most delightful; and many worthy compositions we see to have passed with commendation in that kind. Besides methinks sometimes to beguile the ear with a running out and passing over the rhyme, as no bound to stay us in the line where the violence of the matter will break through, is rather graceful than otherwise. Wherein I find my Homer-Lucan, as if he gloried to seem to have no bounds albeit he were confined within his measures, to be in my conceit most happy; for so thereby they who care not for verse or rhyme may pass it over without taking any notice thereof, and please themselves with a well-measured prose.

	Then in the strain beyond an Oaten Quill
	The learned shepherd of fair Hitching Hill
	Sung the heroic deeds of Greece and Troy,
	In lines so worthy life, that I employ
	My Reed in vain to overtake his fame.
	All praiseful tongues do wait upon that name.

	If all the vulgar tongues that speak this day
	Were ask’d of thy discoveries; they must say,
	To the Greek coast thine only knew the way.
	Such passage hast thou found, such returns made,
	As now of all men, it is call’d thy trade,
	And who make thither else, rob or invade.

  Brave language are Chapman’s Iliads.

  He hath been highly celebrated among men for his brave language in his translation of Homer’s Iliads, those I mean which are translated into Tessaradecasyllabons, or lines of fourteen syllables.

  That which is to be allowed him, and which very much contributed to cover his defects, is a daring fiery spirit that animates his translation, which is something like what one might imagine Homer himself would have writ before he arrived at years of discretion.

  He has by no means represented the dignity or the simplicity of Homer. He is sometimes paraphrastic and redundant, but more frequently retrenches or impoverishes what he could not feel and express. In the meantime, he labours with the inconvenience of an aukward, inharmonious, and unheroic measure, imposed by custom, but disgustful to modern ears. Yet he is not always without strength or spirit. He has enriched our languages with many compound epithets, so much in the manner of Homer, such as the silver-footed Thetis, the silver-throned Juno, the triple-feathered helme, the high-walled Thebes, the faire-haired boy, the silver-flowing floods, the hugely-peopled towns, the Grecians navy-bound, the strong-winged lance, and many more which might be collected. Dryden reports, that Waller never could read Chapman’s Homer without a degree of transport. Pope is of opinion, that Chapman covers his defects “by a daring fiery spirit that animates his translation, which is something like what one might imagine Homer himself to have writ before he arrived to years of discretion.” But his fire is too frequently darkened, by that sort of fustian which now disfigured the diction of our tragedy.

  Chapman I have sent in order that you might read the “Odyssey;” the “Iliad” is fine, but less equal in the translation, as well as less interesting in itself. What is stupidly said of Shakspeare is really true and appropriate of Chapman: “mighty faults counterpoised by mighty beauties.”… It is as truly an original poem as the “Faery Queen;”—it will give you small idea of Homer, though a far truer one than Pope’s epigrams, or Cowper’s cumbersome most anti-Homeric Miltonism. For Chapman writes and feels as a poet,—as Homer might have written had he lived in England in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. In short, it is an exquisite poem, in spite of its frequent and perverse quaintnesses and harshnesses, which are, however, amply repaid by almost unexampled sweetness and beauty of language, all over spirit and feeling.

  He would have made a great epic poet, if indeed he has not abundantly shown himself to be one; for his Homer is not so properly a translation as the stories of Achilles and Ulysses re-written. The earnestness and passion which he has put into every part of these poems, would be incredible to a reader of mere modern translations. His almost Greek zeal for the glory of his heroes can only be paralleled by that fierce spirit of Hebrew bigotry, with which Milton, as if personating one of the zealots of the old law, clothed himself when he sat down to paint the acts of Samson against the uncircumcised. The great obstacle to Chapman’s translations being read, is their unconquerable quaintness. He pours out in the same breath the most just and natural, and the most violent and crude expressions. He seems to grasp at whatever words come first to hand while the enthusiasm is upon him, as if all other must be inadequate to the divine meaning. But passion (the all in all in poetry) is everywhere present, raising the low, dignifying the mean, and putting sense into the absurd. He makes his readers glow, weep, tremble, take any affection which he pleases, be moved by words, or in spite of them, be disgusted and overcome their disgust.

	Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
	And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
	Round many western islands have I been
	Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
	Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
	That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
	Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
	Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
	Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
	When a new planet swims into his ken,
	Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
	He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
	Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
	Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

  Chapman often caught the ideas of Homer, and went on writing Homerically, at once the translator and the original.

  The Homer of Chapman, whatever its defects, alone of all English versions has this crowning merit of being, where it is most successful, thoroughly alive. He has made for us the best poem that has yet been Englished out of Homer, and in so far gives us a truer idea of him.

  His greatest performance, and it was a gigantic one, was his translation of Homer, which, in spite of obvious faults, excels all other translations in the power to rouse and lift and inflame the mind. Some eminent painter, we believe Barry, said that, when he went into the street after reading it, men seemed ten feet high. Pope averred that the translation of the Iliad might be supposed to have been written by Homer before he arrived at years of discretion; and Coleridge declares the version of the Odyssey to be as truly an original poem as the “Faery Queen.”

  Between Chapman and Homer there is interposed the mist of the fancifulness of the Elizabethan age, entirely alien to the plain directness of Homer’s thought and feeling…. Chapman’s style is not artificial and literary like Pope’s, nor his movement elaborate and self-retarding like the Miltonic movement of Cowper. He is plain-spoken, fresh, vigorous, and to a certain degree, rapid; and all these are Homeric qualities. I cannot say that I think the movement of his fourteen-syllable line, which has been so much commended, Homeric…. But as eminently as Homer is plain, so eminently is the Elizabethan literature in general, and Chapman in particular, fanciful…. Homer expresses himself like a man of adult reason, Chapman like a man whose reason has not yet cleared itself…. The Elizabethan poet fails to render Homer because he cannot forbear to interpose a play of thought between his object and its expression.

  It bears from first to last the impress of a genius worthy even of the great task which the English poet set himself and carried through with indomitable devotion. As a translation proper it inevitably suffered from the influence of later schools of poetry, as well as from its own undeniable defects in the way of scholarly accuracy. But the neglect which befell Chapman’s “Homer” by reason of the success of the version by Pope and his coadjutors, produced the reaction in its favour represented by Charles Lamb, Coleridge and Keats. They judged it, again to quote Mr. Swinburne, by the standard of original work rather than of pure translation,—not that this latter is the criterion by which “Pope’s Homer” itself can claim to stand or fall. Of more recent critics, none worthy of the name has refused Chapman’s “Homer” the praise due to its vigour and passion, qualities without which Homer can never be fitly reproduced. But it is equally true that Chapman’s style has characteristics which are partly proper to himself, partly shared by him with the literary age to which he belonged; and that these characteristics are entirely foreign to other Homeric qualities,—above all to those of simplicity and directness.

  The more he admired Homer, the more Chapman felt bound to dress him up in the height of rhetorical conceit. He excused himself by the argument, that we have not the epics as Homer imagined them, that “the books were not set together by Homer.” He probably imagined that, if Homer had had his own way with his own works, he would have produced something much more in the Chapman manner, and he kindly added, ever and anon, a turn which he fancied Homer would approve. The English reader must be on his guard against this custom of Chapman’s, and must remember, too, that the translator’s erudition was exceedingly fantastic…. Chapman has another great fault, allied indeed to a great excellence. In his speed, in the rapidity of the movement of his lines, he is Homeric. The last twelve books of the “Iliad” were struck out at a white heat, in fifteen weeks. Chapman was carried away by the current of the Homeric verse, and this is his great saving merit. Homer inspires him, however uncouth his utterance, as Apollo inspired the Pythoness.

  Chapman’s Homer is one of the great achievements of the Elizabethan age, a monument of skill and devotion. The mistranslations are many and grievous, and it is clear that Chapman’s knowledge of Greek was not profound; but through the whole work there breathes a spirit of sleepless energy that amply atones for all crudities and conceits.

  The greatest of English translators…. His version, with all its faults, outlived the popularity even of Pope, was for more than two centuries the resort of all who, unable to read Greek, wished to know what the Greek was, and, despite the finical scholarship of the present day, is likely to survive all the attempts made with us. I speak with all humility, but as having learnt Homer from Homer himself, and not from any translation, prose or verse. I am perfectly aware of Chapman’s outrageous liberties, of his occasional unfaithfulness (for a libertine need not necessarily be unfaithful in translation), and of the condescension to his own fancies and the fancies of his age, which obscures not more perhaps than some condescensions which nearness and contemporary influences prevent some of us from seeing the character of the original. But at the same time, either I have no skill in criticism, and have been reading Greek for thirty years to none effect, or Chapman is far nearer Homer than any modern translator in any modern language.

  The literalists will never like him, of course; he drops words that worry him—whole lines indeed with which he does not choose to grapple; he adds words, too—whole lines, scenes almost; there is vulgarity sometimes, and coarseness; he calls things by their old homely names; there is no fine talk about the chest or the abdomen, but the Greek lances drive straight through the ribs or to the navel, and if a cut be clean and large—we are not told of crimson tides—but the blood gurgles out in great gouts as in a slaughter-house; there may be over-plainness, and over-heat, and over-stress; but nowhere weakness; and his unwieldy, staggering lines—fourteen syllables long—forge on through the ruts which the Homeric chariots have worn, bouncing and heaving and plunging and jolting, but always lunging forward with their great burden of battle, of brazen shields, and ponderous war-gods.

  Chapman’s aim was to reproduce the sense of his original. Having chosen the long ballad-metre as his vehicle of translation, he stuck so closely to the text that, though translating paraphrastically, he rendered the Greek in an even smaller number of English lines. No material thought is omitted in his version; none is added; by his literal fidelity, and (it must be added) by his own genuine poetical feeling, he catches something of the greatness of his author, but his metre is not equal to the epic dignity of the subject, and his verses are devoid of grace, proportion, and harmony.

  To render the comparatively unknown Homer into good English verse was an achievement worthy of the acknowledgments Chapman received. His translation is to this day, in spite of its faults, the best that England possesses…. Even in his fine translation of Homer, he is unable to forego his tendency to obscurity, and constrained and inflated expression. It is universally admitted that even a translation must take some colouring from its translator, and no man in England was less Hellenic than Chapman. Swinburne has rightly observed that his temperament was more Icelandic than Greek, that he handled the sacred vessels of Greek art with the substantial grasp of the barbarian, and when he would reproduce Homer he gave rather the stride of a giant than the step of a god.

  Chapman secures an animated swiftness of movement, but not the easy, rapid, varied flowingness of Homer. At its worst Chapman’s movement is a ponderous bear-trot; and at its best a resonant, clanking swiftness, aglow with fire. But even this broken or jarring rapidity, in place of the fluid one of Homer, is gained at the loss of plainness of idea, of simplicity in expression, and of nobleness of manner. His style is loose, tortuous, and archaic, and its ideas are often curious, fantastic, and irrational. But, condemn this version as we may, it is the one mature students like best, as young students do Pope’s.

General

  Detraction is the sworne friend to ignorance: For mine owne part I have ever truly cherisht my good opinion of other mens worthy Labours, especially of that full and haightned stile of maister Chapman.

	Reverent Chapman, who hath brought to us
	Musæus, Homer, and Hesiodus
	Out of the Greek, and by his skill hath rear’d
	Them to that height and to our tongue endear’d
	That, were those poets at this day alive,
	To see their books thus with us to survive,
	They would think, having neglected them so long,
	They had bin written in the English tongue.

  George Chapman, a poetical writer, flourishing in the reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James, in that repute for his translations both of “Homer,” and “Hesiod,” and what he wrote of his own proper genius, that he is thought not the meanest of English poets of that time, and particularly for his Dramatic writings.

  A dwarfish thought [“Bussy d’Ambois”], dressed up in gigantic words, repetition in abundance, looseness of expression, and gross hyperboles; the sense of one line expanded prodigiously into ten; and, to sum up all, uncorrect English, and a hideous mingle of false poetry and true nonsense.

  I can give him no greater Commendation, than that he was so intimate with the famous Johnson, as to engage in a Triumvirate with Him, and Marston in a Play called “Eastward-Hoe;” a Favour which the haughty Ben could seldome be perswaded to.

  Of all the English play-writers, perhaps approaches nearest to Shakespeare in the descriptive and didactic, in passages which are less purely dramatic. Dramatic imitation was not his talent. He could not go out of himself, as Shakespeare could shift at pleasure, to inform and animate other existences, but in himself he had an eye to perceive and a soul to embrace all forms and modes of being.

  His diction is chiefly marked by barbarous ruggedness, false elevation, and extravagant metaphor. The drama owes him very little; his “Bussy D’Ambois” is a piece of frigid atrocity, and in the “Widow’s Tears,” where his heroine Cynthia falls in love with a sentinel guarding the corpse of her husband, whom she was bitterly lamenting, he has dramatized one of the most puerile and disgusting legends ever fabricated for the disparagement of female constancy.

  His “Bussy d’Ambois,” though not without interest or some fancy, is rather a collection of apophthegms or pointed sayings in the form of a dialogue than a poem or a tragedy. In his verses the oracles have not ceased. Every other line is an axiom in morals—a libel on mankind, if truth is a libel. He is too stately for a wit, in his serious writings—too formal for a poet.

  Chapman, who assisted Ben Jonson and some others in comedy, deserves but limited praise for his “Bussy d’Amboise.” The style in this and in all his tragedies is extravagantly hyperbolical: he is not very dramatic, nor has any power of exciting emotion except in those who sympathize with a tumid pride and self-confidence. Yet he has more thinking than many of the old dramatists; and the praise of one of his critics, though strongly worded, is not without some foundation, that we “seldom find richer contemplations on the nature of man and the world.”

  His mastery of English is something wonderful even in an age of masters, when the language was still a mother-tongue, and not a contrivance of pedants and grammarians.

  Chapman was a man with great elements in his nature, which were so imperfectly harmonized that what he was found but a stuttering expression in what he wrote and did. There were gaps in his mind; or, to use Victor Hugo’s image, “his intellect was a book with some leaves torn out.” His force, great as it was, was that of an Ajax, rather than that of an Achilles. Few dramatists of the time afford nobler passages of description and reflection. Few are wiser, deeper, manlier in their strain of thinking. But when we turn to the dramas from which these grand things have been detached, we find extravagance, confusion, huge thoughts lying in helpless heaps, sublimity in parts conducing to no general effect of sublimity, the movement lagging and unwieldy, and the plot urged on to the catastrophe by incoherent expedients. His imagination partook of the incompleteness of his intellect. Strong enough to clothe the ideas and emotions of a common poet, it was plainly inadequate to embody the vast, half-formed conceptions which gasped for expression in his soul in its moments of poetic exaltation. Often we feel his meaning, rather than apprehend it. The imagery has the indefiniteness of distant objects seen by moonlight. There are whole passages in his works in which he seems engaged in expressing Chapman to Chapman, like the deaf egotist who only placed his trumpet to his ear when he himself talked.

  George Chapman is conspicuous among the mob of easy and precocious writers in his generation for his late entrance into the service of the Muses, and his loudly proclaimed enthusiasm and strenuous labours in that service. He made no secret of the effort that it cost him to climb Parnassus, or of his fiery resolution to reach the top; he rather exaggerated his struggles and the vehemence of his ambition. He refrained from publication till he was thirty-five years old, and then burst upon the world like a repressed and accumulated volcano. The swelling arrogance and lofty expectations with which he had restrained his secret labours display themselves without reserve in the “Shadow of Night”—his first contribution to print…. Chapman’s designs were always ambitious; but he was guided more like a pedant by authoritative models than like a genuine artist by a clear judgment and sure instinct of his own. He had, undoubtedly, immense power; but his sail was a great deal prouder and fuller than his ship.

  Although destitute of a knowledge of dramatic effect neither in the tragic nor in the comic branch of the playwright’s art, it would almost seem as if Chapman had lacked the power, when working alone, of fully developing a character by means of dramatic action; certainly none of the comedies or tragedies written by him alone are as stage-plays comparable to “Eastward Hoe” and “Chabot” respectively. But though falling short of this power, he is happy in the invention of character in both tragedy and comedy,—in the latter more particularly, as his Monsieur d’Olive would alone suffice to prove…. The strength of Chapman lies in particular passages rather than in his plays as a whole…. Like Shakspere, he is able at times to reveal by these sudden flashes of poetic power depths of true feeling as well as of true wisdom. His observation is strikingly original as well as apt, and there is often something proverbial or gnomic about these passages, in which the physical as well as the moral world is called into play, and of which (if there be any profit in anthologies) it would be well worth while to attempt a complete list…. Chapman’s style is unmistakably influenced by his classical learning; but he cannot be pronounced pedantically fond of displaying it.

  He enters the serene temples and handles the holy vessels of Hellenic art with the stride and the grasp of a high-handed and high-minded barbarian…. The name of Chapman should always be held great; yet must it always at first recall the names of greater men. For one who thinks of him as the author of his best play or his loftiest lines of gnomic verse, a score will at once remember him as the translator of Homer or the continuator of Marlowe.

  Few writers were more culpably Alexandrian than George Chapman. The spirit of Callimachus or of Lycophron seems at times to have come upon him, as the lutin was supposed to whisper ideas extraordinarily good or evil, to Corneille. When under the influence of this possession, Chapman displayed the very qualities and unconsciously translated the language of Callimachus. He vowed that he detested popularity, and all that can please “the commune reader.” He inveighed against the “invidious detractor” who became a spectre that dogged him in every enterprise. He hid his meaning in a mist of verbiage, within a labyrinth of conceits, and himself said, only too truly, about the “sweet Leander” of Marlowe,

	“I in floods of ink
	Must drown thy graces.”

It is scarcely necessary to justify these remarks by illustrations from Chapman’s works. Every reader of the poems and the prefaces finds barbarism, churlish temper, and pedantry in profusion. In spite of unpopularity, Chapman “rested as resolute as Seneca, satisfying himself if but a few, if one, or if none like” his verses. Why then is Chapman, as it were in his own despite, a poet still worthy of the regard of lovers of poetry? The answer is partly to be found in his courageous and ardent spirit, a spirit bitterly at odds with life, but still true to its nobility, still capable, in happier moments, of divining life’s real significance, and of asserting lofty truths in pregnant words. In his poems we find him moving from an exaggerated pessimism, a pessimism worthy of a Romanticist of 1830, to more dignified acquiesence in human destiny.

  Ponderous Chapman, smouldering into flame by flashes.

  It is rash to differ from Lamb, but I am bound in mere sincerity to admit that I find nothing even remotely Shakespearian in plays that seem bombastic, loose, and incoherent to the last extreme, and in which the errors of the primitive Elizabethans, due mainly to inexperience, are complacently repeated and continued through the noblest years of perfected art, in which Shakespeare, Jonson, and Fletcher held the stage. Chapman was an admirable and sometimes even a great poet, but it is hard to admit that he was ever a tolerable playwright.

  George Chapman, despite the genuine force and genius that must always secure him a high place among the great names of his age, discloses in his works, to a surprising degree, the confusion of imagery, the prolixity of thought and the tedious diffuseness, if beauty, of expression which characterized the poetic school of his youth and the later, lesser Spenserians.

  A remarkable dramatist, a poet of merit, and an altogether admirable translator.

  In general Chapman is characterized by abundant and highly conscious and literary use of metaphor and simile. He loves to amplify and pursue his tropes. This tendency, however, does not prevent frequent obscurity in the illustration, due to his theory of style in part, and partly also to the naturally involved and abstract character of his genius. Hardly any writer has a manner so personal to himself and so unmistakable as Chapman in his original tragedy style. His range is very wide and miscellaneous but he is also remarkable for a certain stock of favorite illustrations and metaphors which are repeated from play to play, often with only slight variations.

  He illuminated the age of Elizabeth by the first part of his translation of Homer; he lived on into the reign of Charles I. His poems (of which the best are his continuation of Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander,” and “The Tears of Peace”) are extreme examples of the gnarled, sensuous, formless, and obscure poetry of which Dryden cured our literature. His plays are of a finer quality, especially the five tragedies taken from French history. They are weighty with thought, but the thought devours their action, and they are difficult and sensational. Inequality pervades them. His mingling of intellectual violence with intellectual imagination, of obscurity with a noble exultation and clearness of poetry, is a strange compound of the earlier and later Elizabethans. He, like Marlowe, but with less of beauty, “hurled instructive fire about the world.”

  There is little doubt that Shakespeare found Chapman personally antipathetic. His style was unequalled for arrogance and pedantry; he was insufferably vain of his learning, and not a whit less conceited of the divine inspiration he, as poet, must necessarily possess. Even the most ardent of his modern admirers admits that his own poems are both grotesque and wearisome, and Shakespeare must certainly have suffered under the miserable conclusion Chapman added to Marlowe’s beautiful “Hero and Leander,” a poem that Shakespeare himself so greatly admired. Take only the fragment of introductory prose which prefaces his translation of Homer, and try to wade through it. Short as it is, it is impossible. Read but the confused garrulity and impossible imagery of the dedication in 1598, and could a more shocking collection of mediæval philology be found outside the two pages he writes about Homer?