Page:George Chapman, a critical essay (IA georgechapmancri00swin).pdf/48

 patches to be sewn on at intervals to the common texture of their style.

lt is with a singular sense of jarring admiration and invitation that we find couplets and quatrains of the most noble and delicate beauty embedded in the cumbrous ore of crude pedantic jargon: but those who will may find throughout the two earliest publications of Chapman a profusion of good verses thickly scattered among an overgrowth of bad. The first poem however which leaves us on the whole with a general and equable impression of content is the small "epic song" or copy of verses on the second expedition to Guiana, Here the poet has got clear of those erotic subtleties and sensual metaphysics which were served up at his "banquet" in such clumsy vessels of the coarsest ware by the awkward and unwashed hands of an amorous pedant, soiling with the ink of the schools the lifted hem of the garment of love; he has found instead a fit argument for his genius in the ambition and adventure of his boldest countrymen, and applied himself to cheer and celebrate them "in no ignoble verse," The first brief paragraph alone is crabbed