Page:George Chapman, a critical essay (IA georgechapmancri00swin).pdf/114

 must have disappointed, and that apparently by design and of malice prepense, the expectations appealed to by a title seemingly devised to trade upon the popularity of Bussy d'Ambois, and make its profit out of the artificial capital of a past success. The audience attracted by the promise implied in such a title may easily have been disinclined by such a disappointment to receive with toleration these freaks of dialectic ingenuity.

It is not likely that a writer who must have been old enough at the age of thirteen to feel and to remember the shock of the first tidings of the hideous twenty-fourth of August 1572—that an English poet and patriot of the stalwart type which from all that we know of Chapman we might expect to find always as nobly exemplified in his life and writings as in those of such elder and younger contemporaries as Spenser and Jonson—should have indulged any more personal sentiment in these eccentric trials of intellectual strength than a wayward pleasure in the exercise and exhibition of his powers of argument and eloquence; but there was certainly in his nature something of