ndled
at times into heat of imagination. The main fault of his style is one
more commonly found in the prose than in the verse of his time,--a
quaint and florid obscurity, rigid with elaborate rhetoric and tortuous
with labyrinthine illustration; not dark only to the rapid reader
through closeness and subtlety of thought, like Donne, whose miscalled
obscurity is so often "all glorious within," but thick and slab as a
witch's gruel with forced and barbarous eccentricities of articulation.
As his language in the higher forms of comedy is always pure and clear,
and sometimes exquisite in the simplicity of its earnest and natural
grace, the stiffness and density of his more ambitious style may perhaps
be attributed to some pernicious theory or conceit of the dignity proper
to a moral and philosophic poet. Nevertheless, many of the gnomic
passages in his tragedies and allegoric poems are of singular weight and
beauty; the best of these, indeed, would not discredit the fame of the
very greatest poets for sublimity of equal thought and expression:
witness the lines chosen by Shelley as the motto for a poem, and fit to
have been chosen as the motto for his life.

The romantic and sometimes barbaric grandeur of Chapman's _Homer_
remains attested by the praise of Keats, of Coleridge and of Lamb; it is
written at a pitch of strenuous and laborious exaltation, which never
flags or breaks down, but never flies with the ease and smoothness of an
eagle native to Homeric air. From his occasional poems an expert and
careful hand might easily gather a noble anthology of excerpts, chiefly
gnomic or meditative, allegoric or descriptive. The most notable
examples of his tragic work are comprised in the series of plays taken,
and adapted sometimes with singular licence, from the records of such
part of French history as lies between the reign of Francis I. and the
reign of Henry IV., ranging in date of subject from the trial and death
of Admiral Chabot to the treason and execution of Marshal Biron. The two
plays bearing as epigraph the name of that famous soldier and
conspirator are a storehouse of lofty thought and splendid verse, with
scarcely a flash or sparkle of dramatic action. The one play of
Chapman's whose popularity on the stage survived the Restoration is
_Bussy d'Ambois_ (d'Amboise),--a tragedy not lacking in violence of
action or emotion, and abounding even more in sweet and sublime
interludes than in crabbed and bombastic passa