ges. His rarest jewels of
thought and verse detachable from the context lie embedded in the
tragedy of _Caesar and Pompey_, whence the finest of them were first
extracted by the unerring and unequalled critical genius of Charles
Lamb. In most of his tragedies the lofty and labouring spirit of Chapman
may be said rather to shine fitfully through parts than steadily to
pervade the whole; they show nobly altogether as they stand, but even
better by help of excerpts and selections. But the excellence of his
best comedies can only be appreciated by a student who reads them fairly
and fearlessly through, and, having made some small deductions on the
score of occasional pedantry and occasional indecency, finds in _All
Fools_, _Monsieur d'Olive_, _The Gentleman Usher_, and _The Widow's
Tears_ a wealth and vigour of humorous invention, a tender and earnest
grace of romantic poetry, which may atone alike for these passing
blemishes and for the lack of such clear-cut perfection of character and
such dramatic progression of interest as we find only in the yet higher
poets of the English heroic age.

So much it may suffice to say of Chapman as an original poet, one who
held of no man and acknowledged no master, but from the birth of Marlowe
well-nigh to the death of Jonson held on his own hard and haughty way of
austere and sublime ambition, not without kindly and graceful
inclination of his high grey head to salute such younger and still
nobler compeers as Jonson and Fletcher. With Shakespeare we should never
have guessed that he had come at all in contact, had not the keen
intelligence of William Minto divined or rather discerned him to be the
rival poet referred to in Shakespeare's sonnets with a grave note of
passionate satire, hitherto as enigmatic as almost all questions
connected with those divine and dangerous poems. This conjecture
Professor Minto fortified by such apt collocation and confrontation of
passages that we may now reasonably accept it as an ascertained and
memorable fact.

The objections which a just and adequate judgment may bring against
Chapman's master-work, his translation of Homer, may be summed up in
three epithets: it is romantic, laborious, Elizabethan. The qualities
implied by these epithets are the reverse of those which should
distinguish a translator of Homer; but setting this apart, and
considering the poems as in the main original works, the superstructure
of a romantic poet on the submerged fou