With
Shakespeare we should never have guessed that he had come at all in
contact, had not the intelligence of Mr. Minto divined or rather
discerned him to be the rival poet referred to in Shakespeare's sonnets
with a grave note of passionate satire, hitherto as enigmatic as almost
all questions connected with those divine and dangerous poems. This
conjecture the critic has fortified by such apt collocation and
confrontation of passages that we may now reasonably accept it as an
ascertained and memorable fact.
The objections which a just and adequate judgment may bring against
Chapman's master-work, his translation of Homer, may be summed up in
three epithets: it is romantic, laborious, Elizabethan. The qualities
implied by these epithets are the reverse of those which should
distinguish a translator of Homer; but setting this apart, and
considering the poems as in the main original works, the superstructure
of a romantic poet on the submerged foundations of Greek verse, no
praise can be too warm or high for the power, the freshness, the
indefatigable strength and inextinguishable fire which animate this
exalted work, and secure for all time that shall take cognizance of
English poetry an honored place in its highest annals for the memory of
Chapman.
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