Page:George Chapman, a critical essay (IA georgechapmancri00swin).pdf/99

 the third among English tragic poets has applauded in the tragedies of Chapman. The height indeed is somewhat giddy, and the fullness too often tends or threatens to dilate into tumidity; sometimes the foot slips and the style stumbles heavily from its height, while for its fulness we find but the emptiness of a burst bladder; but while the writer's head remains clear and his hand sure, the high air of this poetry is fresh and buoyant, and its full cadences have in them a large echo as of mountain winds and waters. And if Webster, with the generous justice proper to a great fellow-craftsman in the highest guild of art, was able to condone the manifest abuse in Chapman's work of rhetoric and mere poetry, those may well be content to do likewise who bear duly in mind the admirable absence of any such defect from the vivid and intense veracity of his own.

If the union of active interest with superb declamation may suffice to explain the prolonged good fortune of Chapman's first tragedy on the boards, we can discover no such pretext to account for the apparent favour shown to his next venture in the