altogether
outweighed in volume, though decidedly not in value, by the existing
mass of his undramatic work. We know also, if we have eyes to see, that
the very hastiest and slightest of them does credit to the author, and
that the best of them are to be counted among the genuine and
imperishable treasures of English literature. Such amazing fecundity and
such astonishing industry would be memorable even in a far inferior
writer; but, though I certainly cannot pretend to anything like an
exhaustive or even an adequate acquaintance with all or any of his
folios, I can at least affirm that they contain enough delightfully
readable matter to establish a more than creditable reputation. His
prose, if never to be called masterly, may generally be called good and
pure: its occasional pedantries and pretentions are rather signs of the
century than faults of the author; and he can tell a story, especially a
short story, as well as if not better than many a better-known writer.
I fear, however, that it is not the poetical quality of his undramatic
verse which can ever be said to make it worth reading: it is, as far as
I know, of the very homeliest homespun ever turned out by the very
humblest of workmen. His poetry, it would be pretty safe to wager, must
be looked for exclusively in his plays: but there, if not remarkable for
depth or height of imagination or of passion, it will be found memorable
for unsurpassed excellence of unpretentious elevation in treatment of
character. The unity (or, to borrow from Coleridge a barbaric word, the
triunity) of noble and gentle and simple in the finest quality of the
English character at its best--of the English character as revealed in
our Sidneys and Nelsons and Collingwoods and Franklins--is almost as
apparent in the best scenes of his best plays as in the lives of our
chosen and best-beloved heroes: and this, I venture to believe, would
have been rightly regarded by Thomas Heywood as a more desirable and
valuable success than the achievement of a noisier triumph or the
attainment of a more conspicuous place among the poets of his country.

GEORGE CHAPMAN

George Chapman, translator of Homer, dramatist, and gnomic poet, was
born in 1559, and died in 1634. At fifteen, according to Anthony Wood,
"he, being well grounded in school learning, was sent to the university"
of Oxford; at thirty-five he published his first poem: "The Shadow of
Night." Between these dates, though no fact has