Page:George Chapman, a critical essay (IA georgechapmancri00swin).pdf/151

dignified appeal and compliment to 'the truly Greek inspiration and absolutely Attic elocution' of no less a patron than Bacon; 'whose all-acknowledged faculty hath banished flattery therein even from the court; much more from my country and more than upland simplicity.' But for his Odyssey and Hymns of Homer, as well as for his plea addressed to the country on behalf of the beleaguered handful of troops serving with Sir Horace Vere, he sought or found no patronage but that of Carr; and that this should not have failed him gives evidence of some not ignoble quality in one whom we are accustomed only to regard as the unloveliest of the Ganymedes whose Jupiter was James. In the dedication of the Hymns he refers to the retired life of his disgraced patron in a tone which might not unworthily have saluted the more honourable seclusion of a better man. To these as to others of Chapman's moral verses Coleridge has paid a tribute of thoughtful and memorable praise, deserved no less by the fragments of ethical poetry printed some years earlier with a metrical version, after that of Petrarca, of the penitential Psalms, Among these there are