In general he seems to have been led to the choice of his heroes (and these sustain nearly the whole weight of the play in which they figure) by some half-conscious sympathy of temperament. They are impetuous, have an overweening self-confidence, and an orotund way of expressing it that fitted them perfectly to be the mouth-pieces for an eloquence always vehement and impassioned, sometimes rising to a sublimity of self-assertion. Where it is fine, it is nobly fine, but too often it raves itself into a kind of fury recalling Hamlet’s word “robustious,” and seems to be shouted through a speaking-trumpet in a gale of wind. He is especially fond of describing battles, and the rush of his narration is then like a charge of cavalry. Of his first tragedy, “Bussy d’Ambois,” Dryden says, with that mixture of sure instinct and hasty judgment which makes his prose so refreshing: “I have sometimes wondered in the reading what has become of those glaring colors which amazed me in ‘Bussy d’Ambois’ upon the theatre; but when I had taken up what I supposed a falling star, I found I had been cozened with a jelly, nothing but a cold dull mass, which glittered no longer than it was shooting; a dwarfish thought dressed up in gigantic words, repetition in abundance, looseness of expression, and gross hyperbole; the sense of one line expanded prodigiously into ten; and, to sum up all, incorrect English, and a hideous mingle of false poetry and true nonsense; or, at best, a scantling of wit which lay gasping for life and groaning beneath a heap of rubbish.” There _is_ hyperbole in Chapman, and perhaps Dryden saw it the more readily and disliked it the more that his own tragedies are full of it. But Dryden was always hasty, not for the first time in speaking of Chapman. I am pretty safe in saying that he had probably only run his eye over “Bussy d’Ambois,” and that it did not happen to fall on any of those finely inspired passages which are not only more frequent in it than in any other of Chapman’s plays, but of a more purely poetical quality. Dryden was irritated by a consciousness of his own former barbarity of taste, which had led him to prefer Sylvester’s translation of Du Bartas. What he says as to the success of “Bussy d’Ambois” on the stage is interesting.