* * * * * O what a treasure is a virtuous wife, Discreet and loving! not one gift on earth Makes a man’s life so highly bound to heaven; She gives him double forces, to endure And to enjoy, by being one with him.” Then, after comparing her with power, wealth, music, and delicate diet, which delight but imperfectly,-- “But a true wife both sense and soul delights, And mixeth not her good with any ill. All store without her leaves a man but poor, And with her poverty is exceeding store.” Chapman himself, in a passage of his “Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois,” condemns the very kind of comedy he wrote as a concession to public taste:-- “Nay, we must now have nothing brought on stages But puppetry, and pied ridiculous antics; Men thither come to laugh and feed fool-fat, Check at all goodness there as being profaned; When wheresoever goodness comes, she makes The place still sacred, though with other feet Never so much ’t is scandaled and polluted. Let me learn anything that fits a man, In any stables shown, as well as stages.” Of his tragedies, the general judgment has pronounced “Byron’s Conspiracy” and “Byron’s Tragedy” to be the finest, though they have less genuine poetical ecstasy than his “d’Ambois.” The “Tragedy of Chabot, Admiral of France,” is almost wholly from his hand, as all its editors agree, and as is plain from internal evidence, for Chapman has some marked peculiarities of thought and style which are unmistakable. Because Shirley had some obscure share in it, it is printed with his works, and omitted by the latest editor of Chapman. Yet it is far more characteristic of him than “Alphonsus,” or “Cæsar and Pompey.” The character of Chabot has a nobility less prompt to vaunt itself, less conscious of itself, less obstreperous, I am tempted to say, than is common with Chapman. There is one passage in the play which I will quote, because of the plain allusion in it to the then comparatively recent fate of Lord Bacon. I am not sure whether it has been before remarked or not. The Lord Chancellor of France is impeached of the same crimes with Bacon. He is accused also of treacherous cruelty to Chabot, as Bacon was reproached for ingratitude to Essex. He is sentenced like him to degradation of rank, to a heavy fine, and to imprisonment at the King’s pleasure. Like Bacon, again, he twice confesses his guilt before sentence is passed on him, and throws himself on the King’s mercy:--