Paris_, or what other cause begat
them, cannot now be asserted or even guessed without lost labour. A famous
criticism of Dryden's attests his attention to them, but does not, perhaps,
to those who have studied Dryden deeply, quite express the influence which
Chapman had on the leader of post-Restoration tragedy. As plays, the whole
five are models of what plays should not be; in parts, they are models of
what plays should be. Then Chapman returned to the humour-comedy and
produced two capital specimens of it in _May-Day_ and _The Widow's Tears_.
_Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany_, which contains long passages of German,
and _Revenge for Honour_, two tragedies which were not published till long
after Chapman's death, are to my mind very dubiously his. Mr. Swinburne, in
dealing with them, availed himself of the hypothesis of a mellowing, but at
the same time weakening of power by age. It may be so, and I have not the
slightest intention of pronouncing decidedly on the subject. They bear to
my mind much more mark of the decadent period of Charles I., when the
secret of blank verse was for a time lost, and when even men who had lived
in personal friendship with their great predecessors lapsed into the
slipshod stuff that we find in Davenant, in his followers, and among them
even in the earlier plays of Dryden. It is, of course, true that this
loosening and slackening of the standard betrays itself even before the
death of Chapman, which happened in 1634. But I cannot believe that the
author of _Bussy d'Ambois_ (where the verse is rude enough but never lax)
and the contemporary or elder of Shakespere, Marlowe, and all the great
race, could ever have been guilty of the slovenliness which, throughout,
marks _Revenge for Honour_.

The second part of Chapman's work, his original verse, is much inferior in
bulk and in interest of matter to the first and third. Yet, is it not
perhaps inferior to either in giving evidence of the author's
peculiarities; while the very best thing he ever wrote (a magnificent
passage in _The Tears of Peace_) is contained in it. Its component parts
are, however, sufficiently odd. It opens with a strange poem called _The
Shadow of Night_, which Mr. Swinburne is not wrong in classing among the
obscurest works in English. The mischievous fashion of enigmatic writing,
already glanced at in the section on satire, was perhaps an offshoot of
euphuism; and certainly Chapman, who never exhibits much taint of euphu