villanizer of her faculties, is to seat Custom and Imputation, like Justice and Wisdom, on both sides of his chair, crowning him with honour. And this even of a plaguy necessity must come to pass; since all the means we have to make her excellency known to us, and to forge out of that holy knowledge darts to enamour us with her unpainted beauties, are held with too true experience of their effects, the only parasites to entangle our estates in miseries and massacres. Her substance yet, being too pure and illustrate to be discerned with ignorant and barbarous sense; and the matter whereon she works too passive and drossy to propagate her earthly residence to eternity; she hath devised, in despite of that worm-eaten idol, another fruitless, dead, and despised receptacle, to reverse her appearance with unspeakable profit, comfort, and life to all posterities; and that is this poor scribbling, this toy, this too living a preservative for the deathful tombs of nobility; being accounted in our most gentle and complimental use of it, only the droppings of an idle humour; far unworthy the serious expense of an exact gentleman's time. So is poor learning the inseparable Genius of this Homerical writing I intend; wherein notwithstanding the souls of all the recorded worthies that ever lived, become eternally embodied even upon earth; and our understanding parts making transition in that we understand, the lives of worthilytermed poets are their earthly Elysiums, wherein we walk with survival of all the deceased worthies we read of; every conceit, sentence, figure, and word being a most beautiful lineament of their souls' infinite bodies; and could a beauty be objected to sense, composed of as many divine members, and that we had senses responsible for their full apprehension, they should impress no more pleasure to such a body, than is sweetly enjoyed in this true manner of communication and combination of souls. But as it is not possible such a beauty and such organs of apprehension should be compact, no more can any sensual delight compare with the felicity of the mind. And ought not this to be so, where the incomprehensible figure of God is diffused in sacred and everlasting beams, where we have in earth society with eternity? All this walks upon the bosom of Death in the worthiest writing; and shall a man veil to a painted beggar on horseback, and go saucily by such a godlike resplendence with a wall-eye and an horned countenance? For as number, sound, and rhyme can challenge no inclusion of the soul without divine invention, judgment, and disposition, no more can the soul expect eternity on earth without such eternal writing. And to cast this with our vanities at our backs, is to bear the lives of beasts in our bosoms; in which base porterage is ever borne contempt of fame, honour, and love of the best; which never hath accompanied any humane or less than barbarous condition.

To you then, most abundant president of true noblesse, in whose manifest actions all these sacred objects are divinely pursued, I most humbly and affectionately consecrate this president of all learning, virtue, valour, honour, and society; who with his own soul hath eternized armies of kings and princes; whose imperial muse, the great monarch of the world would say effected more of his conquests than his universal power. And therefore at Achilles' tomb, with most holy impression of fame, and the zeal of eternity, pronounced him most happy to have so firm an eternizer as Homer.

Most true Achilles, whom by sacred prophecy Homer did but prefigure in his admirable object, and in whose unmatched virtues shine the dignities of the soul, and the whole excellence of royal humanity, let not the peasant-common politics of the world, that count all things servile and simple, that pamper not their private sensualities, burying quick in their filthy sepulchres of earth the whole bodies and souls of honour, virtue, and piety, stir your divine temper from perseverance in godlike pursuit of eternity.

We must assure ourselves that the soul hath use, comfort, and benefit in her dissolution and second being, of the fame, love, and example she proposed here, since she hath general combination with blessed Eternity; and fame, love, and example being all eternal.

Now if eternity be so victorious and triumphant a goddess that with her adamantine foot, she treads upon sceptres, riches, senses, sensualities, and all the saffron-gilded pomp of ignorant braveries, only knowledge having the assentful spirit to tread upon that foot, and be lifted to the height and sweetness of her bosom, what place with the greatest doth an eternizer merit? The foot and the back parts? how to be accounted

according to his unfashionable habit of poverty, that like the poisoned mists of thawing muckpits smokes from the hoarded treasure of soulless gold-worms? If the crown of humanity be the soul, and the soul an intellectual beam of God, the essence of her substance being intellection, and intellection or understanding the strength and eminence of her faculties, the differencing of men in excellency must be directed only by their proportions of true knowledge. Homerical writing then being the native deduction, image and true heir of true knowledge, must needs in desert inherit his father's dignity.

Help then, renowned Achilles, to prefer and defend your grave and blameless Prophet of Phoebus from the doting and vicious fury of the two Atrides, Arrogancy and Detraction; be dreadless bulwarks to bashful and fainting virtue against all those whose faces Barbarism and Fortune have congealed with standing lakes of Impudency; who being dammed up with their muddy ignorance, retain no feeling of that to which all their senses are dutifully consecrate: against our sieve-witted censors, through whose brains all things exact and refined, run to the earth in heaps; when nothing remains but stones and unserviceable rubbish. And gratulate in English extraction with free and honourable encouragement, this poor assay of Poesy's Greek Nectar which I durst not more liberally pour out, for fear of vulgar profanation; if that divine sweetness and nourishment it hath wrought in divinest tempers should for want of palate and constitution in others want his due attribution. My hope of excuse therefore may be worthily grounded, since this penury being effected with such store of labour, and so much quintessence to be drawn from so little a project, it will ask as much judgment to peruse worthily as whole volumes of more pervial inventions.

Besides this enforced breach of the commandment to live without care of tomorrow (which ever carries his confounded punishment with it, distracts invention necessary even in translation) interrupts the industry of conceit, and the discourse of the soul, and then the too true consideration, that whatsoever is laboured in this kind is esteemed but idleness and vanity, though of such sacred importance that all wholesome laws and constitutions have heretofore been exhaled, and the conceit, direction, and highest wing of most grave souls have taken strength and inspiration from it: This I say, most excellent Earl, could not as yet admit more English to this most excellent Poet and Philosopher: the flood and variety of my native language as it were with dumbness fettered in my unhappy bosom; and every comfort that might dissolve and encourage it, utterly bereft me; your bonoured countenance yet and vouchsafed reacknowledgment of one so unworthy as myself, being the great objects of all my labours in their first dedication, shall draw on the rest.

And thus wishing for the worthy expense of my future life to follow by all opportunity your honoured attempts and admired disposition, I doubt not my zeal to the truth of your rare virtues will enable me, inferior to none, to turn my paper to crystal, from whence no time shall raze the engraven figure of your graces. In the meantime, if your Lordship descend to acceptation of these few disordered Iliads, I shall recompense their defects in their next edition. Nor can it be reputed an unworthy incitement to propose the true image of all virtues and humane government, even in the heart of this tumultuous season, to your other serious affairs; especially since it contains the true portrait of ancient stratagems and disciplines of war; wherein it will be worthy little less than admiration of your apprehensive judgment to note in many things the affinity they have with your present complements of field the orations, counsels, attempts, and exploits, not to be exceeded by the freshest brains of this hotspirited time; the horror of arms endlessly thundering; piety, justice, valour, and royalty, eternally shining in his soul-infused verse. To which (honourably pardoning this tedious induction, turn and hear your divine Homer) according to Spondanus' attraction, magnificè canentem.

By him that first, and ever freely consecrates his whole faculties to the honour of your princely virtues, GEORGE CHAPMAN.

TO THE READER.

I SUPPOSE you to be no mere reader, since you intend to read Homer; and therefore wish I may walk free from their common objections that can only read. When my disorder is seen, that four books are skipped, as a man would say, and yet the poem continued according to the Greek alphabet-viz., that for Gamma which is Eta, and that for Delta which is Theta, &c.; then comes my known condemnation more grievously than charity would wish: especially with those that having no eyes to peruse and judge of the translation, and whatsoever the main matter deserves, will be glad to show they see something in finding fault with that form; and peradventure find their queasy stomachs turned at whatsoever is merited in the much-laboured work.

But to him that is more than a reader, I write; and so consequently to him that will disdain those easy objections which every speller may put together. The worth of a skilful and worthy translator, is to observe the sentences, figures, and forms of speech proposed in his author; his true sense and height, and to adorn them with figures and forms of oration fitted to the original, in the same tongue to which they are translated; and these things I would gladly have made the questions of whatsoever my labours have deserved: not slighted with the slight disorder of some books, which if I can put in as fit place hereafter without check to your due understanding and course of the Poet, then is their easy objection answered that I expect will be drowned in the foam of their eager and empty spleens. For likelihood of which ability, I have good authoritiy that the books were not set together by Homer himself; Lycurgus first bringing them out of Ionia in Greece as an entire poem; before whose time his verses were sung dissevered into many works, one called the battle fought at the fleet; another, Doloniades; another, Agamemnon's fortitude; another, the Catalogue of ships; another, Patroclus' death; another, Hector's redemption; another, the funeral games, &c. All which are the titles of several Iliads and if those were ordered by others, why may not I challenge as much authority, reserving the right of my precedent? But to omit what I can say further for reason to my present alteration, in the next edition when they come out by the dozen, I will reserve the ancient and common received form; in the meantime, do me the encouragement to confer that which I have translated with the same in Homer, and according to the worth of that, let this first edition pass; so shall ye do me but lawful favour, and make me take pains to give you this Emperor of all wisdom (for so Plato will allow him) in your own language, which will more honour it, if my part be worthily discharged, than anything else can be translated. In the meantime, peruse the pamphlet of errors in the impression, and help to point the rest with your judgment, wherein, and in purchase of the whole seven, if you be quick and acceptive, you shall in the next edition have the life of Homer, a table, a pretty comment, true printing, the due praise of your mother tongue above all others, for Poesy, and such demonstrative proof of our English wits above beyond-sea muses, if we would use them, that a proficient wit should be the better to hear it.

TO THE MOST HONOURED EARL,

EARL MARSHAL.*
*

SPONDANUS, one of the most desertful commentors of Homer, calls all sorts of all men learned to be judicial beholders of this more than artificial and no less than divine rapture; than which nothing can be imagined more full of soul and humane extraction; for what is here prefigured by our miraculous artist, but the universal world, which being

*Prefixed to "Achilles' Shield," 1598.

so spacious and almost unmeasurable, one circlet of a shield represents and embraceth? In it heaven turns, the stars shine, the earth is enflowered, the sea swells and rageth, cities are built; one in the happiness and sweetness of peace, the other in open war and the terrors of ambush, &c. And all these so lively proposed, as not without reason many in times past have believed, that all these things have in them a kind of voluntary motion; even as those tripods of Vulcan, and that Dedalian Venus auтokinτos; nor can I be resolved that their opinions be sufficiently refuted by Aristonicus, for so are all things here described by our divinest poet, as if they consisted not of hard and solid metals, but of a truly living and moving soul. The ground of his invention he shows. out of Eustathius, intending by the orbiguity of the Shield, the roundness of the world; by the four metals, the four elements: viz., by Gold, fire; by Brass, earth for the hardness; by Tin, water, for the softness and inclination to fluxure; by Silver, air, for the grossness and obscurity of the metal before it be refined. That which he calls αντυγα Tрinλaka μapμaperw he understands the Zodiac, which is said to be triple for the latitude it contains, and shining by reason of the perpetual course of the Sun made in that circle; by apyvpeov redaμwra the Axle-tree, about which heaven hath his motion, &c. Nor do I deny, saith Spondanus, Æneas' arms to be forged with an exceeding height of wit by Virgil, but compared with those of Homer they are nothing. And this is it, most honoured, that maketh me thus suddenly translate this Shield of Achilles, for since my publication of the other seven books, comparison hath been made between Virgil and Homer; who can be compared in nothing with more decisal and cutting of all argument, than in these two Shields; and whosoever shall read Homer throughly and worthily, will know the question comes from a superficial and too unripe a reader; for Homer's poems were writ from a free fury, an absolute and full soul; Virgil's out of a courtly, laborious, and altogether imitatory spirit; not a simile he hath but is Homer's; not an invention, person, or disposition, but is wholly or originally built upon Homerical foundations, and in many places hath the very words Homer useth; besides, where Virgil hath had no more plentiful and liberal a wit, than to frame twelve imperfect books of the troubles and travails of Æneas, Homer hath of as little subject finished eight and forty perfect; and that the trivial objection may be answered, that not the number of books, but the nature and excellence of the work commends it; all Homer's books are such as have been precedents ever since of all sorts of poems; imitating none, nor ever worthily imitated of any; yet would I not be thought so ill created as to be a malicious detractor of so admired a poet as Virgil, but a true justifier of Homer, who must not be read 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. The majesty he enthrones, and the spirit he infuseth into the scope of his work, so far outshining Virgil, that his skirmishes are but mere scramblings of boys to Homer's; the silken body of Virgil's muse curiously dressed in gilt and embroidered silver, but Homer's in plain, massy, and unvalued gold; not only all learning, government, and wisdom being deduced as from a bottomless fountain from him; but all wit, elegancy, disposition and judgment. Oppos pros didaσkados kai ŋyeuwv, &c. Homer, saith Plato, was the prince and master of all praises and virtues; the emperor of wise men; an host of men against any depraver in any principle he held. All the ancient and lately learned have had him in equal estimation. And for any to be now contrarily affected, it must needs proceed from a mere wantonness of wit; an idle, unthrifty spirit; wilful because they may choose whether they will think otherwise or not, and have power and fortune enough to live like true men without truth; or else they must presume of puritanical inspiration, to have that with delicacy and squeamishness which others with as good means, ten times more time, and ten thousand times more labour could never conceive. But some will convey their imperfections under his Greek Shield, and from thence bestow bitter arrows against the traduction, affirming their want of admiration grows from defect of our language, not able to express the copy and elegancy of the original; but this easy and traditional pretext hides them not enough; for how full of height and roundness soever Greek be above English, yet is there no depth of conceit triumphing in it, but as in a mere admirer it may be imagined, so in a sufficient translator it may be expressed. And Homer that hath his chief holiness of estimation, for matter and instruction, would scorn to have his supreme worthiness glosing in

his courtship and privilege of tongue. And if Italian, French, and Spanish have not made it dainty, nor thought it any presumption to turn him into their languages, but a fit and honourable labour, and, in respect of their country's profit and their poesy's credit, almost necessary, what curious, proud, poor shamefacedness should let an English muse to traduce him, when the language she works withal is more conformable, fluent, and expressive; which I would your Lordship would command me to prove against all our whippers of their own compliment in their country's dialect.

O what peevish ingratitude and most unreasonable scorn of ourselves we commit, to be so extravagant and foreignly witted, to honour and imitate that in a strange tongue, which we condemn and contemn in our native! for if the substance of the Poet's will be expressed, and his sentence and sense rendered with truth and elocution, he that takes judicial pleasure in him in Greek, cannot bear so rough a brow to him in English to entomb his acceptance in austerity.

But thou, soul-blind Scaliger, that never hadst anything but place, time, and terms, to paint thy proficiency in learning, nor ever writest anything of thine own impotent brain, but thy only impalsied diminution of Homer (which I may swear was the absolute inspiration of thine own ridiculous genius); never didst thou more palpably dam thy drossy spirit in all thy all-countries'-exploded filcheries, which are so grossly illiterate, that no man will vouchsafe their refutation, than in thy senseless reprehensions of Homer; whose spirit flew as much above thy grovelling capacity as heaven moves above Barathrum : but as none will vouchsafe repetition nor answer of thy other unmanly fooleries, no more will I of these; my Epistle being too tedious to your Lordship, besides, and no man's judgment serving better (if your high affairs could admit their diligent perusal), than your Lordship's, to refute and reject him. But alas, Homer is not now to be lift up by my weak arm, more than he is now depressed by more feeble oppositions, if any feel not their conceits so ravished with the eminent beauties of his ascential muse, as the greatest men of all sorts and of all ages have been. Their most modest course is, unless they will be powerfully insolent, to ascribe the defect to their apprehension, because they read him but slightly, not in his surmised frugality of object, that most really and most feastfully pours out himself in right divine occasion. But the chief and unanswerable mean to his general and just acceptance must be your Lordship's high and of all men expected precedent, without which he must, like a poor snail, pull in his English horns, that out of all other languages (in regard of the country's affection and royalties of his patrons) hath appeared like an angel from a cloud, or the world out of chaos. When no language can make comparison of him with ours, if he be worthily converted; wherein before he should have been born so lame and defective, as the French midwife hath brought him forth, he had never made question how your Lordship would accept him; and yet have two of their kings embraced him as a wealthy ornament to their studies, and the main battle of their armies.

If then your bounty would do me but the grace to confer my unhappy labours with theirs so successful and commended, (your judgment serving you much better than your leisure, and yet your leisure in things honourable being to be enforced by your judgment), no malicious and dishonourable whisperer, that comes armed with an army of authority and state against harmless and armless virtue, could wrest your wonted impression so much from itself to reject, with imitation of tyrannous contempt, any affection so zealous and able in this kind to honour your estate as mine. Only kings and princes have been Homer's patrons, amongst whom, Ptolemy would say, he that had slight hands to entertain Homer, had as slight brains to rule his commonwealth. And an usual severity he used, but a most rational (how precise and ridiculous soever it may seem to men made of ridiculous matter) that in reverence of the piety and perfect humanity he taught; whosoever writ or committed any proud detraction against Homer (as even such a man wanted not his malicious depravers), he put him with torments to extremest death. O high and magically raised prospect, from whence a true eye may see means to the absolute redress, or much to be wished extenuation, of all the unmanly degeneracies now tyrannizing amongst us; for if that which teacheth happiness and hath unpainful corrosives in it (being entertained and observed), to eat out the heart of that raging ulcer, which, like a Lernean Fen of corruption furnaceth the universal sighs and complaints of this transposed world, were