Chapman's dramas, although works of much significance in the history of our old literature, are not the most valuable of his works. They are among the many productions of his time which were written by men tempted, through the fashion of the day, into a walk of com position for which they were but indifferently qualified. In comedy, which had been formed into a native school more completely than tragedy, Chapman adapts himself readily, and not without success, to the teaching of his juniors, especially Janson and Fletcher ; whilo he gives to the tone of his works not unfreqnently an elevation of thought and a fulness of descriptive imagery which make some arneuds for the pervading stiffness of his portraiture of character and the forced and artificial turn of his incidents. In his tragic dramas he is, in point of plan and form, a semi-classic. He attempts at once to gratify the taste of his age and nation for the direct and vivid representation of dramatic horrors, and to maintain that tone of narrative declamation and of didactic reflection which Seneca had taught him, and to which his cast of mind made him naturally prone. The latter part of his 'Byron' is, as we venture to think, the best of his tragedies, and might better have deserved reprinting than the extravagant 'Busily d'Ambois.' But Chapman's memory is best preserved, and his repu tation as a poetical imaginer and thinker most fully vindicated, by his free translations from the Greek, and especially by his spirited and vigorous version of the Wad. The republication of this fine old
poem IS a judicious tribute to tho improved taste of our time in poetical literature. His Iliad, like his plays, is deformed by many faults. It is as unequal as careless. Indeed, he himself, on completing the work, re-wrote the first book entirely, and altered very much the other eleven that had previously been published. But his patience was not sufficient, either for correcting adequately what he had already written, or for carrying him carefully through the remainder of his task : the last twelve books were translated by him in less thau fifteen weeks. And again, indolence and strong imagination concurred in tempting him to desert, in many places, the sense of his author, and to paint elaborately pictures for which Homer hardly gave him even the sketch. Yet for vigour of fancy, for a loose kind of faithfulness to the spirit of the original, for constant strength and frequent felicity of diction, the work is one of the finest poems which our language possesses. When Pope, who carefully read it, described it as a work which Homer might have written before arriving at years of discretion, his fastidious taste led him to do the old poet less justice than that which had been rendered by Waller, who confessed that he could never read Chapman's Iliad without a degree of rapture.