ext 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 laboring 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 crudity, finds in "All
Fools," "Monsieur d'Olive," "The Gentleman Usher," and "The Widow's
Tears" a wealth and vigor 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 our heroic age.

The severest critic of his shortcomings or his errors, if not
incompetent to appreciate his achievements and his merits, must
recognize in Chapman an original poet, one who held of no man and
acknowledged no master, but throughout the whole generation of our
greatest men, from the birth of Marlowe wellnigh to the death of Jonson,
held on his own hard and haughty way of austere and sublime ambition,
not without an occasional pause for kindly and graceful salutation of
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 intelligence of Mr. 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 the critic has 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