Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/254

 238 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES spring. Aught more precious he could not find to name with the very darhng of his heart. Brave old big Ben ! With these generous lines we must close our excerpts, although we could glean a few others of minor importance. I can scarcely better conclude this long series of papers than with some sentences from Mr. Swinburne's very fine Introduction to the works of George Chapman (London : Chatto and Windus, 1875), which has also been reprinted separately : — " Even the Atlantean shoulders of Jonson, fit to bear the weight of mightiest monarchies, have been hardly tasked to support and transmit to our own day the fame of his great genius, overburdened as it was with the twofold load of his theories on art and his pedantries of practice.* And Chapman, though also a brother of the giant brood, had not the Herculean sinews of his younger friend and fellow-student. The weight that could but bend the back that carried the vast world of invention whose twin hemispheres are ' Volpone ' and the * Al- chemist,' was wellnigh enough to crush the staggering strength of the lesser Titan. . . . The learning of Jonson, doubtless far wider and sounder than that of Chapman, never allowed or allured him to exchange for a turbid and tortuous jargon the vigorous purity of his own English spirit and style. . . . But when on a fresh reading we skip over these blocks [the savour- less interludes of buffoonery, too common in even our best old plays, whether comedies or tragedies : gross baits for the gross has a most righteous admiration, says of the " Poetaster" : "This Roman play seems written to confute those enemies of I3en, in his own day and ours, who have said that he made a pedantical use of his learning. He has here revived the whole court of Augustus by a learned spell. We are admitted to the society of the illustrious dead. Virgil, Horace, Ovid, TibuUus converse in our own tongue more finely and poetically than they were used to express them- selves in their native Latin," &c.
 * Per contra : Lamb, for whose critical genius Mr. Swinburne