Whether Homer or not, his translation is at least not Milton, as those in blank verse strive without much success to be. If the Greek original had been lost, and we had only Chapman, would it not enable us to divine some of the chief qualities of that original? I think it would; and I think this perhaps the fairest test. Commonly we open a translation as it were the door of a house of mourning. It is the burial-service of our poet that is going on there. But Chapman’s poem makes us feel as if Homer late in life had married an English wife, and we were invited to celebrate the coming of age of their only son. The boy, as our country people say, and as Chapman would have said, favors his mother; there is very little Greek in him; and yet a trick of the gait now and then, and certain tones of voice, recall the father. If not so tall as he, and without his dignity, he is a fine stalwart fellow, and looks quite able to make his own way in the world. Yes, in Chapman’s poem there is life, there is energy, and the consciousness of them. Did not Dryden say admirably well that it was such a poem as we might fancy Homer to have written before he arrived at years of discretion? Its defect is, I should say, that in it Homer is translated into Chapman rather than into English. Chapman is a poet for intermittent rather than for consecutive reading. He talks too loud and is too emphatic for continuous society. But when you leave him, you feel that you have been in the company of an original, and hardly know why you should not say a great man. From his works, one may infer an individuality of character in him such as we can attribute to scarce any other of his contemporaries, though originality was far cheaper then than now. A lofty, impetuous man, ready to go off without warning into what he called a “holy fury,” but capable of inspiring an almost passionate liking. Had only the best parts of what he wrote come down to us, we should have reckoned him a far greater poet than we can fairly call him. His fragments are truly Cyclopean. V BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER The names of Beaumont and Fletcher are as inseparably linked together as those of Castor and Pollux. They are the double stars of our poetical firmament, and their beams are so indissolubly mingled that it is in vain to attempt any division of them that shall assign to each his rightful share. So long as they worked in partnership, Jasper Mayne says truly that they are “both so knit That no man knows where to divide their wit, Much less their praise.” William Cartwright says of Fletcher:-- “That ’t was his happy fault to do too much; Who therefore wisely did submit each birth To knowing Beaumont, ere it did come forth, And made him the sobriety of his wit.” And Richard Brome also alludes to the copious ease of Fletcher, whom he had known:--