Keats’s sonnet--we have just read that--which Mr. Saintsbury says, testifies to the influence of Chapman for a long time on Englishmen who could not read Greek, really does nothing of the sort. It testifies only that Keats met Chapman, and the momentous meeting took place, in point of fact, at a time when the interest in Elizabethan poetry was reviving after a century that preferred Pope’s “Iliad” to Chapman’s. Handbook makers sometimes go to sleep and make statements like that, and it is just as well that they do, for their noddings tumble them from their Olympian elevations to our level and help to make them intelligible to the common run of mortals. The mention of Swinburne’s essay is an interesting clue to follow. His recent death (1909) has occasioned much talk about him, and at least his name is familiar, and the fact that he was a great poet. It is interesting to discover that he was also a critic of Elizabethan poetry. We are thus led to an important modern critic and poet as a result of having struck from a side path into a history of Elizabethan literature. Mr. Minto’s conjecture that Chapman was the “rival poet” of Shakespeare’s sonnets is valuable because it will take us to those sonnets, and will give us our first taste of the great hodge-podge of conjectures and ingenious guesses which constitute a large part of the “study of literature” and are so delightful and stimulating to lose oneself in. After you have read Shakespeare’s sonnets and a biography of Shakespeare and the whole of Mr. Saintsbury’s book, you can pick out some other Elizabethan poet and conjecture that _he_ is the rival to whom Shakespeare enigmatically alludes. Neither you nor anyone else will ever be sure who has guessed right. But that matters little. The value of the game, whatever its foolish aspects, is that interest in a problem of literature or literary biography cultivates your mind, keeps you reading, so entangles you in books and the things relating to books that, like Mr. Kipling’s hero, you can’t drop it if you tried. The rewards of such an interest are lifelong and satisfying, even if the solution is unattainable or not really worth attaining. The literary problem is a changeful wind that keeps one forever sailing the sea of books.