much those of Jonson with a
difference. Both had the same incapacity of unlaboured and forceless art,
the same insensibility to passion, the same inability to rise above mere
humours and contemporary oddities into the region of universal poetry. Both
had the same extensive learning, the same immense energy, the same (if it
must be said) arrogance and contempt of the vulgar. In casual strokes,
though not in sustained grasp, Chapman was Jonson's superior; but unlike
Jonson he had no lyric gift, and unlike Jonson he let his learning and his
ambitious thought clog and obscure the flow of his English. Nor does he
show in any of his original work the creative force of his younger friend.
With the highest opinion reasonably possible of Chapman's dramas, we cannot
imagine him for a moment composing a _Volpone_ or an _Alchemist_--even a
_Bartholomew Fair_; while he was equally, or still more, incapable of
Jonson's triumphs in epigram and epitaph, in song and ode. A certain
shapelessness is characteristic of everything that Chapman did--an
inability, as Mr. Swinburne (to whom every one who now writes on Chapman
must acknowledge indebtedness), has said, "to clear his mouth of pebbles,
and his brow of fog." His long literary life, which must have exceeded half
a century, and his great learning, forbid our setting this down as it may
be set in the case of many of his contemporaries, and especially in the
case of those two to whom we are now coming, as due to youth, to the
imperfect state of surrounding culture, to want of time for perfecting his
work, and so forth. He is the "Begue de Vilaines," the heroic Stammerer of
English literature--a man who evidently had some congenital defect which
all his fire and force, all his care and curiosity, could not overcome. Yet
are his doings great, and it is at least probable that if he had felt less
difficulty in original work, he would not have been prompted to set about
and finish the noble work of translation which is among the best products
of an unsatisfactory kind, and which will outlive the cavils of generations
of etymologists and aorist-grinders. He has been so little read that four
specimens of his different manners--the early "tenebrous" style of _The
Shadow of Night_, the famous passage from _Bussy d'Ambois_ which excited
Lamb's enthusiasm, and a sample from both _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_--may be
given:

"In this vast thicket (whose description's task
The pens of fairies and of