In Marlowe’s poem there is the same spendthrift fancy, although not the same subtlety.  In the first two divisions of the poem the story does, in some sort, get forward; but in the continuation, by George Chapman (who wrote the last four “sestiads"),[21] the path is utterly lost, “with woodbine and the gadding vine o’ergrown.”  One is reminded that modern poetry, if it has lost in richness, has gained in directness, when one compares any passage in Marlowe and Chapman’s Hero and Leander with Byron’s ringing lines: 

  The wind is high on Helle’s wave,
  As on that night of stormy water,
  When love, who sent, forgot to save
  The young, the beautiful, the brave,
  The lonely hope of Sestos’ daughter.

[Footnote 21:  From Sestos on the Hellespont, where Hero dwelt.]

Marlowe’s continuator, Chapman, wrote a number of plays, but he is best remembered by his royal translation of Homer, issued in parts from 1598-1615.  This was not so much a literal translation of the Greek, as a great Elizabethan poem, inspired by Homer.  It has Homer’s fire, but not his simplicity; the energy of Chapman’s fancy kindling him to run beyond his text into all manner of figures and conceits.  It was written, as has been said, as Homer would have written if he had been an Englishman of Chapman’s time.  Keats’s fine ode, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, is well known.  In his translation of the Odyssey, Chapman employed the ten-syllabled heroic line chosen by most of the standard translators; but for the Iliad he used the long “fourteener.”  Certainly all later versions—­Pope’s and Cowper’s and Lord Derby’s and Bryant’s—­seem pale against the glowing exuberance of Chapman’s English, which degenerates easily into sing-song in the hands of a feeble metrist.  In Chapman it is often harsh, but seldom tame, and in many passages it reproduces wonderfully the ocean-like roll of Homer’s hexameters.

  From his bright helm and shield did burn a most unwearied fire,
  Like rich Antumnus’ golden lamp, whose brightness men admire
  Past all the other host of stars when, with his cheerful face
  Fresh washed in lofty ocean waves, he doth the sky enchase.

The national pride in the achievements of Englishmen, by land and sea, found expression, not only in prose chronicles and in books, like Stow’s Survey of London, and Harrison’s Description of England (prefixed to Holinshed’s Chronicle), but in long historical and descriptive poems, like William Warner’s Albion’s England, 1586; Samuel Daniel’s History of the Civil Wars, 1595-1602; Michael Drayton’s Barons’ Wars, 1596, England’s Heroical Epistles, 1598, and Polyolbion, 1613.  The very plan of these works was fatal to their success.  It is not easy to digest history and geography into poetry.  Drayton was the most considerable poet of the three, but his Polyolbion was nothing more than a