unlikeness. Considered apart and judged by its own merits, we shall certainly find it, like Alphonsus, animated and amusing, noticeable for a close and clear sequence of varying incident and interest, and for a quick light touch in the sketching of superficial character. These being its chief qualities, we may fairly pronounce that whether or not it be the work of Chapman it belongs less to his school than to the school of Shirley; yet being as it is altogether too robust and masculine for a work of the latter school, it seems most reasonable to admit it as the child of an older father, the last-born of a more vigorous generation, with less of strength and sap than its brothers, but with something in return of the younger and lighter graces of its fellows in age. The hero and his father are figures well invented and well sustained; the villains are not distorted or overdrawn, and the action is full of change and vivacity.

Of the poems published by Chapman after the first of his plays was given to the press, we may say generally that they show some signs of advance and none of retrogression from the standard of his earlier work. Out of many lovely lines embedded in much thick and turbid matter I choose one couplet from The Tears of Peace as an example of their best beauties :

"Free sufferance for the truth makes sorrow sing,

And mourning far more sweet than banqueting."

In this poem, with much wearisome confusion and iteration of thought and imagery, reprobation and complaint, there are several noble interludes of gnomic and symbolic verse. The allegory is of course clouded and confounded by all manner of perversities and obscurities worth no man's while to elucidate or to rectify; the verse hoarse and stiff, the style dense and convulsive, inaccurate and violent; yet ever and anon the sense becomes clear, the style pure, the imagery luminous and tender, the verse gracious and majestic; transformed for a moment and redeemed by great brief touches of high and profound harmony; of which better mood let us take in proof a single instance, and that the most sustained and exquisite we shall find:

"Before her flew Affliction, girt in storms,

Gash'd all with gushing wounds, and all the forms

Of bane and misery frowning in her face;
Whom Tyranny and Injustice had in chase ;
Grim Persecution, Poverty, and Shame;
Detraction, Envy, foul Mishap and lame
Scruple of Conscience; Fear, Deceit, Despair;
Slander and Clamour, that rent all the air;
Hate, War, and Massacre; uncrowned Toil
And Sickness, t' all the rest the base and foil,
Crept after; and his deadly weight trod down
Wealth, Beauty, and the glory of a crown.
These usher'd her far off; as figures given

To show, these crosses borne make peace with heaver.
But now, made free from them, next her before,
Peaceful and young, Herculean silence bore

His craggy club; which up aloft he hild;

With which and his fore-finger's charm he still'd

All sounds in air; and left so free mine ears,
That I might hear the music of the spheres,
And all the angels singing out of heaven;
Whose tunes were solemn, as to passion given;
For now, that Justice was the happiness there
For all the wrongs to Right inflicted here.
Such was the passion that Peace now put on ;
And on all went; when suddenly was gone
All light of heaven before us; from a wood,
Whose sight foreseen now lost, amazed we stood,
The sun still gracing us; when now, the air
Inflamed with meteors, we discover'd fair
The skipping goat; the horse's flaming mane;
Bearded and trainèd comets; stars in wane
The burning sword; the firebrand-flying snake;
The lance; the torch; the licking fire; the drake;
And all else meteors that did ill abode

The thunder chid; the lightning leapt abroad;
And yet when Peace came in all heaven was clear;
And then did all the horrid wood appear,
Where mortal dangers more than leaves did grow;
In which we could not one free step bestow,
For treading on some murder'd passenger
Who thither was by witchcraft forced to err:

Whose face the bird hid that loves humans best,
That hath the bugle eyes and rosy breast,
And is the yellow autumn's nightingale."

This is Chapman at his best; and few then can better him. The language hardly holds lovelier lines, of more perfect colour and more happy cadence, than some few of these which I have given to shew how this poet could speak when for a change he was content to empty his mouth of pebbles and clear his forehead of fog. The vision of Homer which serves as overture to this poem is not the only other noble feature which relieves a landscape in too great part made up of rocks and brambles, of mire and morass; and for the sake of these hidden green places and sunny moments some yet may care to risk an hour or so of toil along the muddy and thorny lanes that run between.

From the opening verses of The Tears of Peace we get one of the few glimpses allowed us into the poet's personal life, his birthplace, the manner and the spirit of his work, and his hopes in his 'retired age' for 'heaven's blessing in a free and harmless life;' the passage has beauty as well as interest far beyond those too frequent utterances of querulous anger at the neglect and poverty to which he could not resign himself without resentment. It would have been well for himself as for us, who cannot now read such reiterated complaints without a sense of weariness and irritation, if he had really laid once for all to heart the noble verses in which he supposes himself to be admonished by the 'spirit Elysian' of his divine patron Homer, who told him, as he says, 'that he was angel to me, star, and fate.'

"Thou must not undervalue what thou hast,
In weighing it with that which more is graced;
The worth that weigheth inward should not long

For outward prices. This should make thee strong
In thy close value; Nought so good can be
As that which lasts good between God and thee.

Remember thine own verse-Should Heaven turn Hell
For deeds well done, I would do ever well."

The dignity and serenity of spirit here inculcated are not compatible with the tone of fierce remonstrance and repining defiance which alternates with such higher tones of meditation and self-reliance as constantly exalt and dignify the praises of those patrons to whom he appeals for recognition as for a right not to be withheld without discredit to them and danger of future loss of that glory which he had to give. In all dedicatory verse known to me I find nothing that resembles the high self-respect and haughty gratitude of a poet who never forgets that for every benefit of patronage conferred he gives fully as much as he may receive. Men usually hurry over the dedications of poet to patron with a keen angry sense of shame and sorrow, of pity and repulsion and regret; but it may be justly claimed for Chapman that his verses of dedication can give no reader such pain as those of others. His first and best patron in the court of James was that youth on whose coffin so many crowns of mourning verse were showered, and who does by all report seem to have well deserved that other than official regrets should go with him to his grave. A boy dying at eighteen after three years' proof of interest in the higher culture of his time, three years during which he had shown himself as far as we can see sincere and ardent in his love of noble things only, and only of noble men, of poetry and of heroes--champion of Raleigh in his prison and patron of Chapman in his need-must certainly have been one worthy of notice in higher places than a court; one who, even if born in a loftier atmosphere and likelier to bring forth seed of enduring honour, would assuredly have earned remark and remembrance as a most exceptional figure, of truly rare and admirable promise. The inscription of Chapman's Iliad to Prince Henry is one of his highest and purest examples of moral verse: the august praise and grave exaltation of his own great art give dignity to the words of admonition as much as of appeal with which he commends it to the acceptance and reverence of kings. We may well believe that the prince's death gave to the high heart of his old Homeric teacher and counsellor of royal and heroic things a sharper pain than the mere sense of a patron lost and of personal as well as of national hopes cut off. Yet in his special case there was good reason for special regret. The latter instalments

of his lofty labour on the translation of Homer were inscribed to the ignoblest among the minions, as the former had been inscribed to the noblest among the children of the king. An austere and stately moralist like Chapman could hardly have sought a stranger patron than Carr; and when we find him officiating as paranymph at those nuptials which recall the darkest and foulest history in all the annals of that reign, the poisonous and adulterous secrets of blood and shame in whose darkness nothing is discernible but the two masked and muffled figures of treachery and murder, we cannot but remember and apply the parallel drawn by Macaulay from the court of Nero; nor can it be with simple surprise that we listen

to the sermon or the song composed by Seneca or by Lucan for the epithalamium of Sporus and Locusta.

The celebration of that monstrous marriage in ethic and allegoric verse brought nothing to Chapman but disquiet and discredit. Neither Andromeda Lady Essex nor Perseus Earl of Somerset had reason to thank or to reward the solitary singer whose voice was raised to call down blessings on the bridal bed which gave such a Julia to the arms of such a Manlius. The enormous absurdity of Chapman's ever unfortunate allegory was on this auspicious occasion so much more than absurd that Carr himself would seem to have taken such offence as his luckless panegyrist had undoubtedly no suspicion that he might give. And yet this innocence of intention affords one of the oddest instances on record of the marvellous want of common sense and common tact which has sometimes been so notable in men of genius. It is hardly credible that a grave poetic moralist of fifty-five should have written without afterthought this thrice unhappy poem of Andromeda Liberata. Its appearance did for once succeed in attracting attention; but the comment it drew down was of such a nature as at once to elicit from the author'a free and offenceless justification of a lately published and most maliciously misinterpreted poem ;' a defence almost as amazing as the offence, and decidedly more amusing. The poet could never imagine till now so far-fetched a thought in malice ('such was my simplicity,' he adds with some reason) as would induce any reader to regard as otherwise than harmlessly and gracefully applicable to the occasion'-these are his actual words—the representation of an innocent and spotless virgin (sic) rescued from the polluted throat of a monster, which I in this place applied to the savage multitude.' Such is the perversity of man, that on perusing this most apt and judicious allegory 'the base, ignoble, barbarous, giddy multitude' of readers actually thought fit to inquire from what 'barren rock' the new Perseus might be said to have unbound his fettered virgin; and in answer to this not unnatural inquiry Chapman had the audacious innocence to affirm—and I doubt not in all truth and simplicity—that the inevitable application of this happy and appropriate symbol had never so much as crossed his innocent mind. As if, he exclaims indignantly, the word 'barren' could be applied to a man !—was it ever said a man was barren? or was the burden of bearing fruit ever laid on man? Whether this vindication was likely under the circumstances to mend matters much the prejudicate and peremptory reader' will judge for himself. One rumour however the poet repudiates in passing with some violence of language; to the effect, we may gather, that he had been waylaid and assaulted as was Dryden by Rochester's ruffians, but at whose instigation we can only conjecture. He will omit, he says, 'as struck dumb with the disdain of it, their most unmanly lie both of my baffling and wounding, saying "Take this for your Andromeda ;” not being so much as touched, I witness God, nor one syllable suffering.' The rumour is singular enough, and it would be curious to know if at least any such threat or attempt were actually made. From Carr at all events we can hardly believe that it would have come; for it must be set down to his credit

that in the days of obscurity which followed on his disgrace and retirement he seems to have befriended the poet whose humbler chances of court favour had presumably fallen with his own. It was unlikely that any man ever so slightly associated with the recollection of a matter which the king was probably of all men least desirous to keep in mind should again be summoned by two of the Inns of Court, as Chapman had been summoned the year before, to compose the marriage masque for a royal wedding. More inauspicious by far though far more innocent than those of Somerset were the nuptials he had then been chosen to celebrate; the nuptials of Elizabeth, called the Queen of Hearts, with Frederick, one day to be surnamed the Winter-King. For that fatal marriage-feast of 'Goody Palsgrave' and her hapless bridegroom he had been bidden to provide due decorations of pageantry and verse; and had produced at least some bright graceful couplets and stanzas, among others hardly so definable. But to such a task he was now not likely to be called again; the turning-point of his fortunes as far as they hung upon the chance of patronage at court was the wedding-day of Carr. As a favourite of the dead prince to whom his Homer had been inscribed in weighty and worthy verses, he may have been thought fit the year before to assist as the laureate of a day at the marriage which had been postponed by the death of the bride's brother in the preceding autumn; and some remembrance of the favour shown him by the noble youth for whom the country if not the court had good reason to mourn may have kept his name for awhile before the eyes of the better part of the courtiers, if a better part there were : but if ever, as we may conjecture, his fortune had passed through its hour of rise and its day of progress, we must infer that its decline was sudden and its fall irremediable.

In the same year which witnessed the unlucky venture of his Andromeda Chapman put forth a poem on the death of Lord Russell of Thornhaugh, a patron, it should seem, of a far other kind than Carr; distinguished as a soldier in the field now only memorable to us for the death of Sir Philip Sidney, where if report may be trusted his romantic or Homeric valour was worthy to have employed the pen of a translator of the Iliad; and yet more remarkable for the comparative justice and mercy displayed in his military administration of Ireland. This epicede, longer and more ornate than that issued two years before on Prince Henry, is neither much worse nor much better in substance and in style. Each may boast of some fine and vigorous verses, and both are notable as examples of the poet's somewhat troubled and confused elevation of thought and language. In Eugenia especially the same high note of moral passion alternates with the same sharp tone of contemptuous complaint that we find in The Tears of Peace and in the very last verses affixed by way of epilogue to his translation of the Hymns and other Homeric fragments. This bitterness of insinuation or invective against meaner scholars or artists we should set down rather to a genuine hatred of bad work, a genuine abhorrence of base ambition and false pretence, than to any unjust or malevolent instinct of mere jealousy; which yet might perhaps be found par