partly because Italians lent themselves best to romantic treatment. When the classic and romantic schools came into conflict the romantic cause proved the winning one. One might almost say that Italy dominated the Elizabethan drama as much as it did the opera in England between 1750 and 1850. The finest specimens of verse translations blossomed simultaneously with what was best in Elizabethan poetry and drama during the last few years of Elizabeth's reign. Then were seen the first-fruits of Chapman's ever-memorable Homer, Fairfax's Tasso, and Sylvester's Du Bartas. George Chapman, "the learned shepherd of fair Hitchin Hill," was born some five years before Shakespeare, and has been claimed as an alumnus by both of our old universities on very insufficient grounds.. In scholarship he stands as the rival of Jonson, Donne, and Bacon in the Upper House of letters; and his patrons and friends were the most distinguished that the age afforded. As a poet he made his first appearance at the age of thirty-five, when he produced his dignified and somewhat obscure and laboured Shadow of Night (1594). The two Hymns to Night and to Cynthia are written in heroic couplets, the same measure which he subsequently adopted for his Odyssey. Chapman was forty when he published the first specimen of his great translation as Seven Books of the Iliads of Homer, Prince of Poets, in fourteen-syllabled rhyming couplets. The twenty-four books of the Iliad were printed and published by 1611. The twenty-four books of the Odyssey followed, and were completed in ten-syllable couplets in 1615. The two qualities in which Chapman's translation excels are primitive strength and an untrammelled vigour in the coining of compounds (cloud-compelling, low-grown tamarisks, triple-feathered helm, mortal-man-made wound, scourge-obeying horse, high-deed-daring man, for instance). Keats's appreciation of Chapman's Homer is a notable testimony to its vitality as a poem; as a scholarly criticism its value, of course, is nil; for in exactitude Chapman, who makes no attempt to reproduce the minuter shades of the original, is wholly lacking. The rapid directness of Homer, the plainness and naturalness of his thought, could obviously find no exact counterpart in the inveterate quaintness and lingering fancifulness of an Elizabethan. In those parts of the Iliad where the savagery of Homer is most conspicuous, however, Chapman is perhaps at his best, and is certainly unsurpassed by any subsequent rival. Then gript acides his heel, and to the lofty flood Flung, swinging, his unpitied corse, to see it swim and toss Upon the rough waves, and said: "Go, feed fat the fish with loss Of thy left blood, they clean will suck thy green wounds, and this saves Thy mother tears upon thy bed. Deep Xanthus on his waves With thy white fat, and on the waves dance at thy wedding fate, Clad in black horror, keeping close inaccessible state." Such poetry as this, rough and unmistakable in its strength, makes it no great exaggeration to say that in Chapman the Iliad is best read as an English book, or that the generation which produced Shakespeare knew best how to translate Homer. "Since Amyot in France had, as Montaigne said, made Plutarch himself speak French, endeavours to bring into home fellowship the most famous of the ancients had spread from France to England; but in England, among all such labours, the most arduous and successful was that of George Chapman upon Homer." Chapman completed his work as a translator of Homer by his version of the Hymns and The Battle of Frogs and Mice in 1624. He was then sixty-five, and wrote proudly at the end of his volume, "The work is done that I was born to do." Chapman died ten years later, "a poet of most reverent aspect," in 1634. Anticipating the modest vein of Lily-white, Ben Jonson was apt to say that there were only three men who could make a masque: he was one, Chapman an indifferent second, and Fletcher a poor third. But there is much more vitality in Chapman's Homer than in any of his other poetic or dramatic work. Another truly poetic version was the Godfrey of Bollogne; or, The Recoverie of Hierusalem, from the Italian of Tasso, which appeared in octave stanza from the pen of Edward Fairfax in 1600. In musical sweetness it far surpassed the previous version (1594) of the Cornish scholar and antiquary, Richard Carew, or the unconventional' rendering (also in ottava rima) of the Orlando Furioso, by Elizabeth's saucy godson, Sir John Harrington. Fairfax owed a good deal to the poetic vocabulary and the scholarly taste of Spenser; but he paid back the loan to his poetical posterity, bequeathing much to delight the nicer spirits of the seventeenth century, such as Crashaw, Milton, Browne, Dryden, and pre-eminently Waller. Fairfax has great beauties, which have found their most ardent eulogist in old Isaac d'Israeli. If he roughened the music of Tasso a little, he still kept it music, and beautiful music; some of his stanzas, indeed, "give the sweetness of the original with the still softer sweetness of an echo; and he blew into the rest some noble, organ-like notes, which perhaps the original is too deficient in. He can be also quite as stately and solemn in feeling; he is as fervid in his devotion, as earnest and full of ghastly apprehension in his supernatural agency, as wrapt up in leafiness in his sylvan haunts, as luxuriant and alive to tangible shapes in his voluptuousness. He feels the ele ments and varieties of his nature, like a true poet; and his translation has consequently this special mark of all true poetry, translated or original-that when the circumstances in the story or description alter, it gives us a proper and pervading sense of the alteration. The surfaces are not all coloured alike as in a bad, monotonous picture. We have no silken armour, as in Pope's eternal enamel; nor iron silks, as in Chapman (who is perhaps the only other various translator, nevertheless); nor an everlasting taste of chip instead of succulence, as in the Ariosto of Harrington." The charming pastoral scene in his version of Tasso (vi. and vii.) in which Erminia in disguise seeks refuge with a shepherd and his sons must have given a special delight to the author of Cymbeline and creator of Imogen. One of the most admired European poems of the Elizabethan era was the Divine Weeks of Du Bartas, an enormous epic upon the Creation (Paris, 1578 and 1584) by a very pedestrian Huguenot Milton. Numerous translators sprang up, but the only one to reap the harvest of a complete version was Joshua Sylvester, the son of a Medway clothier, who was educated above his rank, and conceived extravagant ambitions as a poet. He succeeded in developing a remarkable ingenuity as a weaver of quaint metrical patterns; his religious zeal inspired some respect; and he was not content until he had enlisted Prince Henry as a patron. On Prince Henry's death a post was with some difficulty obtained for him as secretary to the merchant adventurers in Middleburg, in Holland, and there he died on December 28th, 1618, at the age of fifty-five. His Du Bartas was begun in 1598 and finished in 1606; the version gained him praise from Drummond, Hall, Drayton, and others, as a "sweet-Sylvestre-nightingale," he was abundantly quoted in the anthologies, and was unquestionably one of the most popular of Jacobean poets. Together with Spenser, Sylvester formed the chief poet ical nutriment of Milton when a boy, and his influence was As a pendant to this triad of verse translators we may John Florio, son of a Florentine Protestant, was born 1 Of the minor prose translations it is needful only to men- |