Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/158

138 does so only by narrowing though intensifying each, by sacrificing some of the finest elements in the noblest Elizabethan conceptions of beauty, goodness, and country. Milton's ideal of art becomes strictly, even pedantically, classical; his Protestantism is less ethical than Spenser's, and more theological; his patriotism tends to include only those Englishmen who form the chosen people of God.

Of the Elizabethan poets who continued to produce fresh and interesting poetry in the reign of James, if we set aside Donne and Jonson as the fountain-heads of Jacobean and Caroline poetry, the two most important, Daniel and Drayton, have been included in the volume on The Later Renaissance. One veteran and rugged Elizabethan, however, deserves a word as poet as well as dramatist. Chapman's earliest volume of poems, The Shadow of Night, containing the pedantic and obscure Hymnus in Noctem and Hymnus in Cynthiam, appeared in 1594; his Ovid's Banquet of Sense—a characteristic contribution to the Venus and Adonis class of poem—with The Amorous Zodiac—a translation from the French—in 1595; and his completion of Marlowe's Hero and Leander in 1598. His great work, the translation of Homer, was begun some time before 1598, when Seaven Bookes of the Iliades of Homer, Prince of Poets, appeared with a dedication to the Earl of Essex. The complete Iliad appeared in 1611; the complete Odyssey in 1614; The Whole Works of Homer in 1616. The Battle of the Frogs was added later, as well as the Hymns.