gainst this play, as to resolve to burn one
annually to the memory of Ben Jonson: but I know very well
that there are some who allow it a just commendation; and
others that since have taken the liberty to promise a solemn
annual sacrifice of _The Hind and Panther_ to the memory of
Mr. Quarles and John Bunyan."

But neither D'Urfey nor Langbaine could secure for _Bussy D'Ambois_ a
renewal of its earlier popularity. During the eighteenth century it fell
into complete oblivion, and though (as the Bibliography testifies)
nineteenth-century critics and commentators have sought to atone for the
neglect of their predecessors, the faults of the play, obvious at a
glance, have hitherto impaired the full recognition of its distinctive
merits of design and thought. To bring these into clearer relief, and
trace the relation of its plot to the recorded episodes of Bussy's
career, has been the aim of the preceding pages. It must always count to
Chapman's credit that he, an Englishman, realized to the full the
fascination of the brilliant Renaissance figure, who had to wait till
the nineteenth century to be rediscovered for literary purposes by the
greatest romance-writer among his own countrymen. In Bussy, the man of
action, there was a Titanic strain that appealed to Chapman's
intractable and rough-hewn genius. To the dramatist he was the classical
Hercules born anew, accomplishing similar feats, and lured to a similar
treacherous doom. Thus the cardinal virtue of the play is a Herculean
energy of movement and of speech which borrows something of epic quality
from the Homeric translations on which Chapman was simultaneously
engaged, and thereby links _Bussy D'Ambois_ to his most triumphant
literary achievement.

Six years after the publication of the first Quarto of _Bussy D'Ambois_
Chapman issued a sequel, _The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois_, which, as we
learn from the title-page, had been "often presented at the private
Playhouse in the White-Fryers." But in the interval he had written two
other plays based on recent French history, _Byrons Conspiracie_ and
_The Tragedie of Charles Duke of Byron_, and in certain aspects _The
Revenge_ is more closely related to these immediate forerunners than to
the piece of which it is the titular successor. The discovery which I
recently was fortunate enough to make of a common immediate source of
the two Byron plays and of _The Revenge_ accentuates the connection
between