Page:George Chapman, a critical essay (IA georgechapmancri00swin).pdf/124

his story for no discernible reason but a desire to shift the charge of the principal villainy from the shoulders of a king to those of his brother. In either play dedicated to the memory of Bussy—who at the wildest pitch of his windy and boisterous vanity can never have anticipated that twenty-eight years after his death he would figure on the page of a foreign poet as a hero of the Homeric or Lucanian type—the youngest son of Catherine de' Medici is drawn in colours as hateful as those of truth or tradition; whereas the last king of his line is handled with such remarkable forbearance that his most notorious qualities are even less recognizable than those of his grandfather in the delicate and dignified study of Chapman. A reader indeed, if such an one were possible, who should come to the perusal of these plays with no previous knowledge of French history, would find little difference or distinction between Henri de Valois and Henri de Bourbon; and would probably carry away the somewhat inaccurate impression that the slayer of the duke of Guise and the judge of the duke of Biron were men of similar tastes