LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 323 



We should be glad also to know in what part of Italy 

 he places Malfi. 



Mr. Hazlitt's General Introduction supplies us with 

 no new information, but this was hardly to be expected 

 where Mr. Dyce had already gone over the field. We 

 wish that he had been able to give us better means 

 of distinguishing the three almost contemporary John 

 Websters one from the other, for we think the internal 

 evidence is enough to show that all the plays attributed 

 to the author of the " Duchess " and " Vittoria " could 

 not have been written by the same person. On the 

 whole, he has given us a very respectable, and certainly 

 a very pretty, edition of an eminent poet. 



We could almost forgive all other shortcomings of Mr. 

 Smith's library for the great gift it brings us in the five 

 volumes of Chapman's translations. Coleridge, sending 

 Chapman's Homer to Wordsworth, writes, " What is 

 stupidly said of Shakespeare is really true and appropri- 

 ate of Chapman ; mighty faults counterpoised by mighty 



beauties It is as truly an original poem as the 



Faery Queene ; — it will give you small idea of Homer, 

 though a far truer one than Pope's epigrams, or Cowper's 

 cumbersome most anti-Homeric Miltonism. For Chap- 

 man writes and feels as a poet, — as Homer might have 

 written had he lived in England in the reign of Queen 

 Elizabeth. In short, it is an exquisite poem, in spite of 

 its frequent and perverse quaintnesses and harshnesses, 

 which are, however, amply repaid by almost unexampled 

 sweetness and beauty of language, all over spirit and 

 feeling." * From a passage of his Preface it would ap- 

 pear that Chapman had been criticised pretty sharply 

 in his own day for amplifying his author. " And this 

 one example I thought necessary to insert here to show 

 * Literary Remains, Vol- 1, pp. 259,260. 



