Dryden taxes Chapman with “incorrect English.” This is altogether wrong. His English is of the best, and far less licentious than Dryden’s own, which was also the best of its kind. Chapman himself says (or makes Montsurry in “Bussy d’Ambois” say for him):-- “Worthiest poets Shun common and plebeian forms of speech, Every illiberal and affected phrase, To clothe their matter, and together tie Matter and form with art and decency.” And yet I should say that if Chapman’s English had any fault, it comes of his fondness for homespun words, and for images which, if not essentially vulgar, become awkwardly so by being forced into company where they feel themselves out of place. For example, in the poem which prefaces his Homer, full of fine thought, fitly uttered in his large way, he suddenly compares the worldlings he is denouncing to “an itching horse leaning to a block or a May-pole.” He would have justified himself, I suppose, by Homer’s having compared Ajax to an ass, for I think he really half believed that the spirit of Homer had entered into him and replaced his own. So in “Bussy,”-- “Love is a razor cleansing if well used, But fetcheth blood still being the least abused.” But I think the incongruity is to be explained as an unconscious reaction (just as we see men of weak character fond of strong language) against a partiality he felt in himself for costly phrases. His fault is not the purple patch upon frieze, but the patch of frieze upon purple. In general, one would say that his style was impetuous like the man himself, and wants the calm which is the most convincing evidence of great power that has no misgivings of itself. I think Chapman figured forth his own ideal in his “Byron:”-- “Give me a spirit that on this 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 that knows What life and death is; there’s not any law Exceeds his knowledge; neither is it lawful That he should stoop to any other law.” Professor Minto thinks that the rival poet of whom Shakespeare speaks in his eighty-sixth sonnet was Chapman, and enough confirmation of this theory may be racked out of dates and other circumstances to give it at least some probability. However this may be, the opening line of the sonnet contains as good a characterization of Chapman’s style as if it had been meant for him:-- “Was it the proud full sail of his great verse?”