part in a military campaign; but those were days when scholars and men of letters were not uncommonly found apt for employment in matters of war and policy, and gave good proof of a right to claim their place among other servants of the state for the performance of high patriotic duty; nor, unless we please, need we imagine Chapman to have served personally as a volunteer in the English ranks; but it is reasonable to conceive that either in person or by proxy he may have had special opportunities of studying the incidents of war in the Netherlands, which he would evidently have been mindful to make the most of and quick to put to use. It is also possible that his relations with the stage may have begun at an earlier date than has yet been traced; and as we know that in 1585, when Chapman was twenty-six years old, Leicester brought over to Holland a company of actors in his train when he set sail as commander of the forces despatched from England to the support of the States-General, and that others followed suit on their own score in succeeding years, those who are unwilling to allow him a chance of service as a soldier may prefer to conjecture that he was drawn to the seat of war by the more probable force of some poetic or theatrical connection with either the general's first troop of players or that which followed in its track five years later. That these earlier adventurers were succeeded by fresh companies in 1604 and 1605, and again forty years later, at an unpropitious date for actors in England, eleven years after the death of Chapman, I further learn from an article in the Athenæum (Sept. 5th, 1874) on Herr von Hellwald's 'History of the Stage in Holland ;' and eight years later than the venture of the second company of players in 1590 we find Chapman classed by Meres among the best of our tragic writers for the stage, and repeatedly entered on Henslowe's books as debtor to the manager for some small advance of money on future dramatic work to be supplied to his company.

In any case it is remarkable that his first play should not have been brought on the stage till the poet was thirty-six, or published till he was rising forty; an age at which most men, who might have written such a play at sixteen, would have been unwilling to expose it to the light. It is even a more crude and graceless piece of work, if we consider it as designed for the stage, than his first venture of the preceding year if we regard it as intended for the study. The plot is more childish, though the language may be purer, than we find in the rudest sketches of Greene or Peele, whose day was now well over; and even for the firstfruits of a person of most reverend aspect, religious and temperate, qualities rarely meeting in a poet,' it will be admitted that the moral tone of Chapman's two earliest comedies is not remarkably high. The first deals solely with the impossible frauds, preposterous adulteries, and farcical murders committed by a disguised hero who assumes the mask of as many pseudonyms to perpetrate his crimes as ever were assumed in Old or New Grub-street by a prudent member of the libellous order of rascally rhymesters to vent his villainies in shameful safety. The story is beneath the credulity of a nursery, and but for some detached passages of clear and vigorous writing the whole work might plausibly have been

signed by any of the names under which a dunce of the order above-mentioned might think it wisest to put forth his lyrics or his lies. In the better passages, and noticeably in a description of jewels engraved with figures of the gods, we catch a faint echo of the "mighty line" in which Marlowe would lavish on such descriptions the wealth and strength, the majesty and the fancy, of his full imperial style.

The frank folly and reckless extravagance of incident which appear to have won for Chapman's first play the favour of an audience not remarkable, it should seem, for captious nicety of critical taste and judgment, are less perceptible in his second venture; but this also is a crude and coarse sample of workmanship. The characters are a confused crowd of rough sketches, whose thin outlines and faint colours are huddled together on a ragged canvass without order or proportion. There is some promise of humour in the part of a Puritan adulteress, but it comes to little or nothing; and the comedy rather collapses than concludes in a tangle of incongruous imbecilities and incoherent indecencies. The text is seemingly more corrupt than we find in Chapman's other plays, which are generally exempt from such gross and multitudinous misprints as deform the early editions of many Elizabethan dramatists; their chief defect is the confusion and the paucity of stage directions. In the opening speech of An Humorous Day's Mirth, from the fourteenth to the sixteenth verse, we must supply with some such reading as this the evident hiatus of sense and metre in the fifteenth :

"But pure religion being but mental stuff,

And sense, indeed, [being] all* [but] for itself
'Tis to be doubted," etc.

The text and arrangement of the scenes throughout this comedy require a more careful revision than has yet been given; since if the crudest work of a man of genius is not to be rejected from the list of his writings in which it has once found place, it claims at least so much of editorial care as may leave it in a reasonably legible form.

It appears that in the same year which gave to the press this loose and slipshod effort at a comedy, the most perfect of Chapman's plays, though not published till six years later, was completed for the stage. The admirable comedy of All Fools is the first work which bears full evidence of the vigorous and masculine versatility, the force and freshness of his free and natural genius. The dedication, which seems to have been cancelled almost as soon as issued, gives one of the most singular proofs on record of a poet's proverbial inability to discern between his worse and better work. The writer who ten years before was so loud in his complaint of men's neglect and so haughty in his claim on their attention for his crudest and faultiest work now assures the friend to whom he inscribes a poem of real excellence,

* Perhaps an adjective has here dropped out, and we might read the hemistich thus: 'all covetous for itself,' or 'careful,' 'curious,' 'gluttonous,' any of which words would fit the metre, and suit the sense of the passage.

"I am most loth to pass your sight

With any such-like mark of vanity,

Being marked with age for aims of greater weight

And drowned in dark death-ushering melancholy:"

but for fear of piratical publishers who might print 'by stealth' an unauthorized and interpolated edition, 'without my passport, patched with other's wit,' he consents to expose to every common eye' what he calls

"The least allowed birth of my shaken brain,"

alleging as his excuse that 'of two enforced ills I elect the least;' and with this most superfluous apology he ushers in one of the most faultless examples of high comedy to be found in the whole rich field of our Elizabethan drama. The style is limpid and luminous as running water, the verse pure, simple, smooth and strong, the dialogue always bright, fluent, lively, and at times relieved with delicate touches of high moral and intellectual beauty; the plot and the characters excellently fitted to each other, with just enough intricacy and fullness of incident to sustain without relaxation or confusion the ready interest of readers or spectators. The play and counterplay of action by which all the chief persons of the comedy trick and are tricked by each other in turn might easily have become perplexed or excessive in less careful and skilful hands; but the lightness and dexterity of handling which the poet has here for once manifested throughout the whole development of his dramatic scheme suffice to keep the course of the story clear and the attention of the reader alert without involution or fatigue: and over all the dialogue and action there plays a fresh and radiant air of mirth and light swift buoyancy of life which breathes rather of joyous strength and high-spirited health than of the fumes of 'dark death-ushering melancholy;' and as in matter of fact death was not ushered by melancholy or any other evil spirit into the stout presence of the old poet till full thirty-five years after the appearance and twenty-nine years after the dedication of this play, we may hopefully set down this malcontent phrase to some untimely fit of spleen from which, having thus given it vent, he soon shook himself clear and struck his pen through the record of it. I find but one slight and characteristic blemish worth noting in a comedy in which the proudest among his great compeers might have permissibly taken fresh pride; it is that the final scene of discovery which winds up the main thread and reconciles the chief agents of the intrigue is somewhat hurriedly despatched, with too rapid a change of character and readjustment of relations, to make room for a thin-spun and wiredrawn sample of that tedious burlesque declamation with which the author was too prone to indulge a taste not likely to be shared or relished by his readers for the minute dissection of a dead jest, so dry that it crumbles into dust under the scalpel of the anatomist. All the rest of the comedy is so light, bright, and easy in all its paces that we are the less disposed to tolerate the stiffness and elaboration of this oratorical interlude. But this is really the only spot or patch I can discover on the jocund face of a delightful comic poem.

It is not impossible that the merit of pure and lucid style which distinguishes the

best comedies of Chapman from the bulk of his other writings may in part be owing to the slighter value set by the author on the workmanship of these. By temperament and inclination he was rather an epic or tragic than a comic poet; and in writing verse of a tragic or epic quality he evidently felt it incumbent on him to assert the dignity of his office, to inflate and exált his style with all helps of metaphor and hyperbole, to stiffen the march of his metre and harden the structure of his language; and hence he is but too prone to rely at need on false props of adventitious and barbaric dignity, to strut on stilts or to swim on bladders: whereas in writing for the comic stage he was content to forget, or at least to forego, this imaginary dignity and duty; he felt himself no longer bound to talk big or to stalk stiffly, and in consequence was not too high-minded to move easily and speak gracefully. It is clear that he set no great store by his comic talent as compared with the other gifts of his genius; of all his comedies two only, All Fools and The Widow's Tears, have dedications prefixed to them, and in both cases the tone of the dedication is almost apologetic in its slighting reference to the slight worth of the work presented; a tone by no means to be ascribed in this case to a general and genuine humility, since the dedications prefixed to his various poems, and to two among his tragedies published under his own eye, are remarkable for their lofty and dignified self-assertion. The fact that of these two tragedies, one, The Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois, was apparently unsuccessful on the stage, and the other, Cæsar and Pompey, seems never to have obtained a chance of appearing on the boards at all, may naturally have moved the author to assert their right to respect and acceptance with more studied emphasis than usual; in the earlier instance at least he is emphatic enough in his appeal from the verdict of the 'maligners' with whom he complains that it met 'in the scenical representation,' to the 'approbation of more worthy judgments' which 'even therein' it did not fail to obtain ; and in the second case, though he appears to apologize for the lack of 'novelty and fashion' in a play 'written so long since' that it had not the timely ripeness of that age' (seventy-two) 'that, I thank God, I yet find no fault withal for any such defects,' yet he is apparently and reasonably confident that the offering of his 'martial history' is one honourable alike to poet and to patron. Both plays are rich in rhetorical passages of noble eloquence; but in all points of workmanlike construction and dramatic harmony they are incomparably inferior to the better sort of his comedies.

The year of the publication of All Fools was memorable to Chapman for a more hazardous misadventure on a more serious stage than the failure of a comedy on the boards, for which he had to thank the merited success of a play whose strange fortune it was to prove as tragical in its sequence as merry in itself, thus combining in a new fashion the two main qualities of Bottom's immortal interlude. All readers will remember the base offence taken and the base revenge threatened by the son of Darnley or of Rizzio for a passing jest aimed at those among his countrymen who had anticipated Dr. Johnson's discovery of the finest prospect ever seen by a native of Scotland; none can forget the gallantry with which Ben Jonson, a Scot by

descent of whom it might have been said as truly as of the greatest in the generation before him that he never feared the face of man,' approved himself the like-minded son of a Roman-spirited mother by coming forward to share the certainty of imprisonment and the probability of mutilation with the two comrades who without his knowledge had inserted such perilous matter into their common work; and many will wish with me that he had never borne a nearer and less honourable relation to a king who combined with the northern virulence and pedantry which he may have derived from his tutor Buchanan a savour of the worst qualities of the worst Italians of the worst period of Italian decadence. It was worthier of the great spirit and the masterful genius of Jonson to be the subject of his tyranny than the laureate of his court. Far more fitly, had such an one then been born, would. that office have been filled by any scribbling Scot of the excremental school of letters who might have sought and found in his natural prince a congenial patron with whom to bathe his sympathetic spirit in the pure morality, while swimming with somewhat short strokes in "the deep delicious stream of the Latinity," of Petronius Arbiter. Such a Crispinulus or Crispinaccio would have found his proper element in an atmosphere whose fumes should never have been inhaled by the haughty and high-souled author of the Poetaster; and from behind his master's chair, with no need to seek for fear if not for shame the dastardly and lying shelter of a pseudonym which might at a pinch have been abjured, and the responsibility for its use shifted from his own shoulders to those of a well-meaning but invisible friend, the laurelled lackey of King James might as securely have launched his libels against the highest heads of poets to whom in that age all eyes looked up which would have looked down on him, as ever did the illustrious Latinist Buchanan against the mother of the worthy patron whose countenance would probably have sufficed to protect the meanest and obscurest creature of his common and unclean favour against all recrimination on the part of Shakespeare or of Jonson, of Beaumont or of Webster, of Fletcher or of Chapman.

The comedy thus celebrated for the peril it brought upon the ears and noses of its authors has of itself merit enough to have won for writers of less previous note a sufficient share of more enviable celebrity. It is one of the most spirited and brilliant plays belonging to that class of which the two most famous examples are the Merry Wives of Windsor and Every Man in his Humour; and for life and movement, interest and gaiety, it may challenge a comparison even with these. All the actors in Eastward Ho, down to the very slightest, such as the drawer, the butcher's man, and the keeper of the prison, have some quality and character of their own which gives them a place in the comic action; and in no play of the time do we get such a true taste of the old city life so often turned to mere ridicule and caricature by playwrights of less good humour, or feel about us such a familiar air of ancient London as blows through every scene; the homely household of the rich tradesman, the shop with its stall in front, the usurer's lodging, the waterside tavern, the Thames wharfs, stand out as sharply as if etched by the pen of Dickens or the needle of Whistler. The London of Hogarth, as set before us in that