ism
proper, here out-Herods Herod and out-Tourneurs Tourneur. It was followed
by an equally singular attempt at the luscious school of which _Venus and
Adonis_ is the most famous. _Ovid's Banquet of Sense_ has received high
praise from critics whom I esteem. For my own part I should say that it is
the most curious instance of a radically unpassionate nature, trying to
lash itself into passion, that our language contains. Then Chapman tried an
even bolder flight in the same dialect--the continuation of Marlowe's
unfinished _Hero and Leander_. In this attempt, either by sheer force of
his sinewy athletics, or by some inspiration derived from the "Dead
Shepherd," his predecessor, he did not fail, curious as is the contrast of
the two parts. _The Tears of Peace_, which contains his finest work, is in
honour of Prince Henry--a worthy work on a worthy subject, which was
followed up later by an epicedium on the prince's lamented death. Besides
some epigrams and sonnets, the chief other piece of this division is the
disastrous _Andromeda Liberata_, which unluckily celebrates the
nuptials--stained with murder, adultery, and crime of all sorts--of Frances
Howard and Robert Carr. It is in Chapman's most allusive and thorniest
style, but is less interesting intrinsically than as having given occasion
to an indignant prose vindication by the poet, which, considering his
self-evident honesty, is the most valuable document in existence for
explaining the apparently grovelling panegyric of the sixteenth and
seventeenth century. It makes clear (what indeed an intelligent reader
might gather for himself) that the traditional respect for rank and
station, uniting with the tendency to look for patterns and precedents in
the classics for almost everything, made of these panegyrics a kind of
school exercise, in which the excellence of the subject was taken for
granted, and the utmost hyperbole of praise was only a "common form" of
composition, to which the poet imparted or added what grace of style or
fancy he could, with hardly a notion of his ascriptions being taken
literally.

But if Chapman's dramas have been greatly undervalued, and if his original
poems are an invaluable help to the study of the time, there is no doubt
that it is as a translator that he made and kept the strongest hold on the
English mind. He himself spoke of his Homeric translations (which he began
as early as 1598, doing also Hesiod, some Juvenal, and some minor
frag