Thanks mainly to the perfect sonnet of Keats, Chapman's Homer is the work by which his memory is kept green except among special students of the Elizabethan drama. To have made Homer "common coin" was a great benefit to the English public, that had known only the mediaeval romances based on Ionian (700 B.C.), Athenian, and Roman perversions of the poet. The "Iliad" he did into "fourteeners," a jigging old measure,--[1] "a splendid swinging metre," says Saintsbury, "better able than any other English metre to cope with the body as well as the rhythm of the English hexameter". Tastes differ! Here are four lines ("Iliad" XV, 596-600). The poet speaks of Zeus, For Hector's glory still he stood, and ever went about To make him cast the fleet such fire as never should go out; Heard Thetis' foul petition, and wished in any wise The splendour of the burning ships might satiate his eyes. "The last line alone would suffice to exhibit Chapman's own splendour at his best," says a critic, and this may be the best of Chapman. But it does not express the meaning of Homer, who says nothing about the "foulness" of the prayer of Thetis, and whose Zeus does not desire to satiate his eyes with "the splendour of the burning ships," but to see _one_ ship set on fire; as, on that signal, he intends to cause the instant rout of the Trojans. It will be observed that Chapman here compresses four Greek hexameters into four English "fourteeners"; and that the movement of his verse is as rapid as the nature of the "fourteener" permits. He is, however, rugged and obscure and overloads the simplicity of Homer with Elizabethan conceits of his own invention. The "Odyssey" he rendered into heroic couplets with a free movement, and, had he been more sparing of his own conceits, the version would be more satisfactory. Unhappily no English measure represents the Homeric hexameter. In 1604-5, Chapman with Marston was imprisoned for a very faint piece of satire on the Scots, in "Eastward Ho"; and Ben Jonson, who had been no partner to the passage, as a collaborator in tie play magnanimously insisted on sharing the punishment. Chapman's comedy, "All Fools" opens with an imitation of a play of Terence (followed by Molière in "L'École des Pères"). We have the sensible and indulgent, and the severe and deceived father. But the plot becomes painfully involved, and jokes on cuckolds are no longer so delightful as they were for two centuries to English taste. His other comedies are not below the level of his contemporaries, excluding Shakespeare and Jonson.