From his occasional poems an expert and
careful hand might easily gather a noble anthology of excerpts, chiefly
gnomic or meditative, allegoric or descriptive. The most notable
examples of his tragic work are comprised in the series of plays taken,
and adapted sometimes with singular license, from the records of such
part of French history as lies between the reign of Francis I. and the
reign of Henry IV., ranging in date of subject from the trial and death
of Admiral Chabot to the treason and execution of Marshal Biron. The
two plays bearing as epigraph the name of that famous soldier and
conspirator are a storehouse of lofty thought and splendid verse, with
scarcely a flash or sparkle of dramatic action. The one play of
Chapman's whose popularity on the stage survived the Restoration is
"Bussy d'Ambois" (d'Amboise)--a tragedy not lacking in violence of
action or emotion, and abounding even more in sublime or beautiful
interludes than in crabbed and bombastic passages. His rarest jewels of
thought and verse detachable from the context lie embedded in the
tragedy of "Caesar and Pompey," whence the finest of them were first
extracted by the unerring and unequalled critical genius of Charles
Lamb.
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