judge of "high and hearty invention expressed in most significant and unaffected phrase." The poems that follow are offered as a specimen of his "high and hearty invention." Every line, indeed, of Chapman's preface is a direct assertion that he is offering to a public which is difficult to please the ripe fruits of his own individual, original, and profound genius.

Five sonnets follow the author's prefatory dedication. Of these the first is ascribed to Richard Stapleton, the second to Tho. Williams of the Inner Temple, and the fourth to I. D. of the Middle Temple (i. e. Sir John Davies), while the other two are anonymous. The general burden of the commendatory verse is that Chapman is an original English poet of an excellence which gives him a literary rank only second to that allowed to Ovid.

A close examination of the volume puts a strange and mysterious complexion on the author's declared pretensions to originality, which his friends accepted without qualification. An appreciable part of the volume, at any rate, curiously confutes the printer's motto on the title-page, "Sibi conscia recti." My research seems to illustrate more pertinently a second printer's motto at the extreme end of the volume: "Tempore patet occulta veritas.'

991

Four separate poems are included in the rare little book. The first, which bears the title of "Ouids Banquet of Sence," is a somewhat licentious description of the poet Ovid's emotions on witnessing the emperor Augustus' daughter Julia (otherwise called Corinna) in the bath, and of his endeavors to gratify each sense in turn as he surveys the seductive scene. The second poem is a sequence of ten sonnets entitled "A Coronet for his Mistresse Philosophie," in which the poet condemns the habitual celebration by contemporary sonnetteers of "love's sensual empery." On these two poems I do not propose to dwell at present. The third poem, "The Amorous Zodiacke," is more familiar than any of the others to students of Elizabethan literature, and that alone I examine here in detail.

1 The device at the end of the volume shows the figure of Time, with his scythe and hourglass, dragging by the hand a naked woman from a rocky cave. The picture is encircled by a scroll bearing the motto, "Tempore patet occulta veritas," together with the initials of the printer, R. S. (Richard Smith), at the bottom.

With regard to the fourth and last poem in the volume doubt is justifiable as to Chapman's authorship. It is avowedly no original composition, but a translation from the Latin. The title runs "The Amorous Contention of Phillis and Flora translated out of a Latine coppie, written by a Fryer, Anno. 1400." The English verse is followed by ninety-five verses, the opening lines of a Latin poem entitled "Certamen inter Phillidem & Floram." The English writer is here translating with some literalness a mediæval Latin poem, which was at one time wrongly attributed to Walter Mapes. The original probably dates from the twelfth century;' it is far earlier than the year 1400, to which the superscription assigns it. The rhyming metre of the Latin is carefully followed in the English. With regard to the authorship of the English rendering, it is curious to note that in 1598 it was separately reissued, and was then assigned to another's pen-to the pen of "R. S. Esquire." R. S. may very probably be Richard Stapleton, who prefixed commendatory verse to Chapman's volume of 1594. The title of the reissue of 1598 ran:

Phillis and Flora. The sweete and ciuill contention of two amorous Ladyes. Translated out of Latine, by R. S. Esquire. Aut Marte vel Mercurio. Imprinted at London by W. W. for Richarde Johnes. 1598.

It is likely enough that Chapman had no hand at all in the translation of "Phillis and Flora," but civilly rendered his friend Stapleton, whose work it was, the service of including it in his volume.

III

Whatever doubts attach to Chapman's relation with the fourth and concluding section of his Ouids Banquet of Sence, it is quite clear that the third section, containing the poem entitled "The Amorous Zodiacke," in thirty six-lined stanzas, is his own handiwork. He led his readers to believe that the verses were his original composition. There is no truth in this pretension. As

1 The Latin poem, "De Phillide et Flora," seems to have been first printed in the Beyträge zur Geschichte und Literatur, etc., von J. Christoph Freyherrn von Aretin, Part IX, pp. 301-9, Munich, September, 1806. There is a thirteenth-century copy of the Latin poem in the British Museum, MS Harleian 978, fol. 115 vo f. This was printed in 1841 in the Latin poems commonly attributed to Walter Mapes, edited by Thomas Wright for the Camden Society, pp. 258-67.

a matter of fact, "The Amorous Zodiacke" is a translation, contrived with singular exactness, of a French poem entitled "Le zodiac amoureux," by a living French author, who first published his work anonymously in Paris in 1587, reprinted it again anonymously in 1588, and published it for a third time, and then under his own name, in 1594, the year preceding the appearance of Chapman's English version.

The author of "Le zodiac amoureux was Gilles Durant, sieur de la Bergerie. He was born at Clermont in the Auvergne, about 1550, and died at Paris in 1615, after a long and successful career at the Paris bar. Durant's leisure was devoted to

poetry, mostly of an amorous kind. His verse was not always free from licentious coarseness, but some of his lyrics have grace and charm. A long sequence of sonnets which he addressed to an imaginary mistress, whom he called Charlote, abounds in conventional conceits. His best-known work was a spirited translation into French of Pancharis, a series of Latin love-poems by his fellow-townsman and close friend, Jean Bonnefons (1554– 1614). To the first edition of Bonnefons' Latin Pancharis (1587) Durant appended a second part, which bore the title, "Imitations tirées du Latin de Jean Bonnefons, avec autres amours et meslanges poétiques, de l'invention de l'Autheur" (i. e. Gilles Durant); and among these "amours et meslanges poétiques" "Le zodiac amoureux" first appeared. This volume was reissued in 1588 without change. In 1594 Durant's contributions reappeared separately under the title of Les Œuvres poétiques du sieur de la Bergerie, avec les imitations tirées du Latin de J. Bonnefons.

Chapman does not seem to have been the earliest English Elizabethan poet to have studied Durant's "Le zodiac amoureux." Barnabe Barnes in his swollen miscellany of verse entitled Parthenophil and Parthenophe, which was published as early as May, 1593, has twelve sonnets, xxxii-xliii, in which he likens the progress of his amorous passion to the journey of the sun through the twelve signs of the zodiac. Barnes does not translate Durant's verse literally, but he closely reflects the Frenchman's sentiment and imagery. Chapman, on the other hand, is wholly dependent

on Durant. "Le zodiac amoureux" is not free from impropriety, and Chapman is no more squeamish than his French master. It will be seen from the reprint of the French and English poems, which is given below, that Chapman's "Amorous Zodiacke" owes nothing whatever to his own invention. Not only is Durant's language accurately, and indeed servilely, reproduced, but his meter is borrowed, and many of his rhymes are anglicized with curiously halting effect. Chapman omits five of Durant's stanzas toward the end of the poem, but he scarcely gives any other indication of striving after originality. He does not reproduce the name of Durant's imaginary mistress, "Charlote"; he contents himself with addresses to "Deare Mistres" or "Gracious Loue."

Chapman's slavish endeavors to anglicize the French epithets of Durant often cause him grotesque embarrassment. Durant's "les neiges Riphées (stanza 21, 1. 4) is a clear reference to the snows of the Riphæan mountains in Scythia, which are familiar to classical students. But Chapman's reproduction of this expression of Durant in the English words, "the white riphees,' is a linguistic offense which it is difficult to pardon. Most of Chapman's English is clear and intelligible, but "the white riphees" has parallels, of which the following are examples (I italicize in both the French and English the words mainly concerned):

Stanza 7.

Stanza 8.

Stanza 15.

Stanza 23.

M'empestrant parmy l'or de tes beaux crepillons.
And fetter me in gold, thy crisps implies.
La Terre encore triste, & feroit ouverture.
The earth (yet sad) and ouverture confer.
S'eschaufferoit encor' dans la signe suyuant.
Should still incense mee in the following sign.
Au sortir de ce lieu si brave et magnifique.
To sort from this most braue and pompous signe.

IV

A comparison of the French original of Durant with the English rendering of Chapman will sufficiently attest the justice of my conclusions. In the following reprint the spelling and punctuation of the originals have been carefully respected: