Page:George Chapman, a critical essay (IA georgechapmancri00swin).pdf/134

 the villain of the piece, who repudiates conscience as

"a weak and fond remembrance Which men should shun, as elephants clear springs, Lest they behold their own deformities And start at their grim shadows."

Even here the fall of the verse is not that of Chapman; and the tone of the verses which immediately follow is so utterly alien from the prevailing tone of his that the authenticity of the scene, as indeed of the whole play, can only be vindicated by a supposition that in his last years he may for once have taken the whim and had the power to change his style and turn his hand to the new fashion of the youngest writers then prospering on the stage. Only the silliest and shallowest of pedants and of sciolists can imagine that a question as to the date or the authorship of any poem can be determined by mere considerations of measure and mechanical computation of numbers; as though the language of a poem were divisible from the thought, or (to borrow a phrase from the Miltonic theology) the effluence were separable from the essence of a man's