that anodyne which most availed him in his contest with life, are already evident. Learning is already beginning to soothe his spirit with its spell. To Learning, as we shall see, he ascribed all the excellences which a modern critic assigns to culture. Learning, in a wide and non-natural sense, is his stay, support, and comfort. In the Banquet of Sense, too, he shows that patriotic pride in England, that enjoyment of her beauty, which dignify the Carmen Epicum, de Guiana, and appear strangely enough in the sequel of Hero and Leander. There are exquisite lines in the Banquet of Sense, like these, for example, which suggest one of Giorgione's glowing figures :

She lay at length like an immortal soul,

At endless rest in blest Elysium.'

But Chapman's interest in natural science breaks in unseasonably— 'Betwixt mine eye and object, certain lines

Move in the figure of a pyramis,

Whose chapter in mine eyes gray apple shines,

The base within my sacred object is;'

-singular reflections of a lover by his lady's bower!

Chapman could not well have done a rasher thing than 'suppose himself executor to the unhappily deceased author of' Hero and Leander. A poet naturally didactic, Chapman dwelt on the impropriety of Leander's conduct, and confronted him with the indignant goddess of Ceremony. In a passage which ought to interest modern investigators of Ceremonial Government, the poet makes all the hearts of deities' hurry to Ceremony's feet :

'She led Religion, all her body was

Clear and transparent as the purest glass;
Devotion, Order, State, and Reverence,

Her shadows were; Society, Memory;

All which her sight made live, her absence die.'

The allegory is philosophical enough, but strangely out of place. The poem contains at least one image worthy of Marlowe

'His most kind sister all his secrets knew,

And to her, singing like a shower, he flew,'

This too, of Hero, might have been written by the master of

verse:

Her fresh heat blood cast figures in her eyes,

And she supposed she saw in Neptune's skies
How her star wander'd, washed in smarting brine,
For her love's sake, that with immortal wine

Should be embathed, and swim in more heart's ease,
Than there was water in the Sestian seas.'

It is in The Tears of Peace (1609), an allegory addressed to Chapman's patron, the short-lived Henry, Prince of Wales, that the poet does his best to set forth his theory of life and morality. He sat to it,' he says, to his criticism of life,' and he was guided in his thoughts by his good genius, Homer. Inspired by Homer, he rises above himself, his peevishness, his controversies, his angry contempt of popular opinion, and he beholds the beauty of renunciation, and acquiesces in a lofty stoicism :—

Free suffering for the truth makes sorrow sing,
And mourning far more sweet than banquetting.'

He comforts himself with the belief that Learning, rightly underderstood, is the remedy against discontent and restlessness :—

'For Learning's truth makes all life's vain war cease.'

It is Learning that

Turns blood to soul, and makes both one calm man.'

By Learning man reaches a deep knowledge of himself, and of
his relations to the world, and 'Learning the art is of good life':—
Let all men judge, who is it can deny
That the rich crown of old Humanity

Is still your birthright? and was ne'er let down

From heaven for rule of beasts' lives, but your own?'

These noble words still answer the feverish debates of the day, for, whatever our descent,

Still, at the worst, we are the sons of men!'

In this persuasion, Chapman can consecrate his life to his work, can cast behind him fear and doubt,

This glass of air, broken with less than breath,
This slave bound face to face to death till death.'

His work was that which the spirit of Homer put upon him, in the green fields of Hitchin.

There did shine,

A beam of Homer's freër soul in mine,'

he says, and by virtue of that beam, and of his devotion to Homer, George Chapman still lives. When he had completed his translations he could say,

The work that I was born to do, is done.'

Learning and work had been his staff through life, and had won him immortality. But for his Homer, Chapman would only be remembered by professional students. His occasional inspired lines would not win for him many readers. But his translations of the Iliad and Odyssey are masterpieces, and cannot die.

Chapman's theory of translation allowed him great latitude. He conceived it to be 'a pedantical and absurd affectation to turn his author word for word,' and maintained that a translator, allowing for the different genius of the Greek and English tongues, 'must adorn' his original 'with words, and such a style and form of oration, as are most apt for the language into which they are converted.' This is an unlucky theory, for Chapman's idea of 'the style and form of oration most apt for' English poetry was remote indeed from the simplicity of Homer. The more he admired Homer, the more Chapman felt bound to dress him up in the height of rhetorical conceit. He excused himself by the argument, that we have not the epics as Homer imagined them, that 'the books were not set together by Homer.' He probably imagined that, if Homer had had his own way with his own works, he would have produced something much more in the Chapman manner, and he kindly added, ever and anon, a turn which he fancied Homer would approve. The English reader must be on his guard against this custom of Chapman's, and must remember, too, that the translator's erudition was exceedingly fantastic. Thus Chapman derives the difficult word αλφηστὴς from the letter Αλφα, the first in the Greek alphabet, and decides that the men whom Homer calls apnorai, are what modern slang calls 'A 1 men.' Again, he names the Phoenician who seduced the nurse of Eumaeus, a great-wench-net-layer,' a word derived by him from #odumainados, thus, nadevw, pertraho in retia, et mais, puella? He is full of these strange philological theories, and he boldly

515

lets them loose in his translations. Chapman has another great fault, allied indeed to a great excellence. rapidity of the movement of his lines, he is Homeric. The last In his speed, in the twelve books of the Iliad were struck out at a white heat, in fifteen weeks. Chapman was carried away by the current of the Homeric verse, and this is his great saving merit. however uncouth his utterance, as Apollo inspired the Pythoness. Homer inspires him, He 'speaks out loud and bold,' but not clear. hurry, Chapman flies at any rhyme to end his line, and then his In the heat of his rhyme has to be tagged on by the introduction of some utterly un-Homeric mode of expression. Thus, in Chapman, the majestic purity of Homer is tormented, the bright and equable speed of the river of verse leaps brawling over rocks and down narrow ravines. What can be more like Chapman, and less like Homer, than these lines in the description of the storm,

'How all the tops he bottoms with the deeps,
And in the bottoms all the tops he steeps'?

Here the Greek only says 'Zeus hath troubled the deep.' It is thus that Chapman adorns his original.' Faults of this kind are perhaps more frequent in the Iliad than in the Odyssey. ridge's taste was in harmony with general opinion when he preColeferred the latter version, with its manageable metre, to the ruder strain of the Iliad, of which the verse is capable of degenerating into an amble, or dropping into a trot. appropriate quaintnesses of Chapman's Homer, are visible enough, The crudities, the inwhen we read only a page or two, here and there, in the work. Neither Homer, nor any version of Homer, should be studied piece-meal. 'He must not be read,' as Chapman truly says, 'for a few lines with leaves turned over capriciously in dismembered fractions, but throughout; the whole drift, weight, and height of his works set before the apprehensive eyes of his judge.' Thus read, the blots on Chapman's Homer almost disappear, and you see 'the massive and majestic memorial, where for all the flaws and roughnesses of the weather-beaten work the great workmen of days unborn would gather to give honour to his name.'

A. LANG.

THE THAMES.

[From Ovid's Banquet of Sense.]

Forward and back and forward went he thus,
Like wanton Thamysis that hastes to greet
The brackish court of old Oceanus ;

And as by London's bosom she doth fleet,

Casts herself proudly through the bridge's twists, Where, as she takes again her crystal feet,

She curls her silver hair like amourists,
Smooths her bright cheeks, adorns her brow with ships,
And, empress-like, along the coast she trips.
Till coming near the sea, she hears him roar,
Tumbling her churlish billows in her face,
Then, more dismay'd than insolent before,
Charged to rough battle for his smooth embrace,
She croucheth close within her winding banks,
And creeps retreat into her peaceful palace;

Yet straight high-flowing in her female pranks
Again she will be wanton, and again,
By no means staid, nor able to contain.

[From The Tears of Peace.]

THE SPIRIT OF HOMER.

'I am,' said he, 'that spirit Elysian,
That in thy native air, and on the hill

Next Hitchin's left hand, did thy bosom fill
With such a flood of soul, that thou wert fain,
With exclamations of her rapture then,

To vent it to the echoes of the vale;
When, meditating of me, a sweet gale
Brought me upon thee; and thou didst inherit
My true sense, for the time then, in my spirit ;