Page:George Chapman, a critical essay (IA georgechapmancri00swin).pdf/70

 equal a share in the labour and the credit as they bore in the peril entailed on them by a comedy which, though disclaiming all unfriendly aim at rivalry with one of similar title already familiar to the stage, must probably and deservedly have eclipsed the success of two plays not published till two years later under cognate names by Decker and Webster; though the plot of Northward Ho is not wanting in humour and ingenuity, and in Westward Ho there is one scene of exquisite and incongruous beauty in which we recognize at once the tender and reckless hand which five years earlier had inserted into the yet more inappropriate framework of the Satiromastiæ as sweet an episode of seeming martyrdom and chastity secured under the shelter of a sleep like death.

In his next play Chapman reassumed the more poetical style of comedy which in Eastward Ho had been put off for the plainer garb of realism. The Gentleman Usher is distinguishable from all his other works by the serious grace and sweetness of the love-scenes, and the higher tone of feminine character and masculine regard which is sustained