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 sincere 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 license, 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 sublime or beautiful
interludes than in crabbed and bombastic passages. His rarest jewels of
thought and verse detachable from the cont