Of every shadow and of every breath,

And would change firmness with an aspen leaf;
So confident a spotless conscience is,

So weak a guilty."

Ibid.

Chapman's self-reliant nature is continually peeping forth from under every mask it puts on :

"When men fly the natural clime of truth,
And turn themselves loose out of all the bounds
Of justice and the straight way to their ends,
Forsaking all the sure force in themselves,
To seek without them that which is not theirs,
The forms of all their comforts are distracted."

Byron's Tragedy.

He thus gives us his notion of what a man should be:

"Give me a spirit that on life's rough sea

Loves to have his sails filled with a lusty wind,
Even till his sail-yards tremble, his masts crack,
And his rapt ship run on her side so low,
That she drinks water, and her keel ploughs air.
There is no danger to a man who knows
What life and death are; there's not any law
Exceeds his knowledge; neither is it lawful
That he should stoop to any other law :

He goes before them and commands them all,
Who to himself is a law rational."

Byron's Conspiracy.

JOHN.

Altogether noble! The first few verses illustrate well the natural impetuosity which so much distinguished Chapman's character, as I gather it from what you have read; and the last six exhibit

the philosophic gravity and wisdom to which habits of reflection and the life of a scholar had tempered it. He must have been one of those incongruities we sometimes meet with; a man, calm and lofty in his theory, but vehement and fiery to excess in action, whose very stillness, like the sleep of the top, seems the result of intense motion.

PHILIP.

The same indomitable spirit shows itself in all Chapman's characters. Even their humility is a kind of repressed and concentrated pride. He makes the Duke de Byron say:

"To fear a violent good abuseth goodness;
'Tis immortality to die aspiring,

As if a man were taken quick to heaven :

What will not hold perfection, let it burst:
What force hath any cannon, not being charged,
Or being not discharged? To have stuff and form,
And to lie idle, fearful, and unused,

Nor form nor stuff shows. Happy Semele,
That died, compressed with glory! Happiness
Denies comparison of less or more,

And, not at most, is nothing. — Like the shaft,

Shot at the sun by angry Hercules,

And into shivers by the thunder broken,

Will I be, if I burst; and in my heart

This shall be written: 'Yet 't was high and right!'

JOHN.

Chapman's pride has at least all the grandeur in it that pride can ever have; but, at best, pride and

A tyranny devising but to plague,

And make man long in dying, rack his death, -
And death is nothing: what can you say more?
I, being
a little earth,

Am seated, like earth, betwixt both the heavens,
That, if I rise, to heaven I rise; if fall,

I likewise fall to heaven: what stronger faith
Hath any of your souls? What say you more?

Why lose I time in these things? Talk of knowledge,
It serves for inward use. I will not die

Like to a clergyman, but like the captain

That prayed on horseback, and, with sword in hand,
Threatened the sun."

JOHN.

Byron's Tragedy.

That is not unlike Byron; but there is a finer and more untrammelled enthusiasm about it than he could rise to without effort. The melody of some verses in it is enchanting. What an airiness, as of the blue, unbounded sky, there is in that passage about the falcon! One feels as if it could not have been spoken but on a lofty scaffold with only the arch of heaven overhead. The whole is very grand, but there is too much defiance in it. It is not so grand as would be the death of one who had learned, with Leigh Hunt, to know that

"Patience and gentleness are power."

The great spirit does not fling down the gantlet to Death, but welcomes him as a brother-angel, who, knowing the way better, is to be his guide to his new working-place, and who, perchance, also

Such boundless empire over other men,

Had all maintained the spirit and state of D'Ambois;
Nor had the full, impartial hand of Nature,
That all things gave in their original,

Without these definite terms of mine and thine,
Been turned unjustly to the hand of Fortune,
Had all preserved her in her prime like D'Ambois.
No envy, no disjunction, had dissolved

Or plucked one stick out of the golden fagot
In which the world of Saturn bound our lives,
Had all been held together by the nerves,

The genius, and the ingenious soul of D'Ambois."

You have by this time got a very good idea of Chapman's more prominent and worthy characteristics. His comedies show him to have been not altogether devoid of humor, though he does not possess the faculty in that exuberance without which it has too much apparent machination to be interesting. "Monsieur D'Olive " is an amusing character, but his fun is chiefly traditional. There is one interesting point in Chapman's comedies, and that is, a trace, discernible here and there, of his admiration for Shakspeare, showing itself in a word or turn of expression suggested by him. There are several examples in his tragedies, too, some of which are remarkable. I confess I love Chapman the better for it. I must give you one

more example of his fine poetic instinct. Just before a ghost appears to D'Ambois, he says:

"What violent heat is this? Methinks the fire

Of twenty lives doth, on a sudden, flash
Through all my faculties: the air goes high

In this close chamber, and the frighted earth
Trembles and shrinks beneath me.”

This is excellent. It would be unfair not to show you the enthusiastic love which Chapman felt for our native language, hallowed, as it has been, by the use of the noblest poets that ever dignified the earth. In his address to the reader, prefatory to his translation of the Iliad, he says:

"And, for our tongue, that still is so impaired

By travelling linguists, I can prove it clear
That no tongue hath the Muse's utterance heired -
For verse, and that sweet music to the ear,
Struck out of rhyme so naturally as this;
Our monosyllables so kindly fall,

And meet, opposed in rhyme, as they did kiss."

So in his "Hymnus in Cynthiam":

"Sweet Poesy

Will not be clad in her supremacy

With these strange garments (Rome's hexameters),

As she is English; but in right prefers

Our native robes, put on with skilful hands."

Chapman's vigor of thought and expression may

be seen in every page of his writing.

Here is a fragment of his prose; he is speaking of critics.

"How, then, may a man stay his marvelling to see passiondriven men, reading but to curtail a tedious hour, and altogether hidebound with affection to great men's fancies, take upon them as killing censures as if they were judgment's butchers, or as if the life of truth lay tottering in their verdicts?

"Now what a supererogation in wit this is, to think skill so mightily pierced with their loves that she should prostitutely show them her secrets, when she will scarcely be looked upon