If, for example, Swinburne’s interest was in poetry, why devote an essay to Brome? “The opening scene of the _Sparagus Garden_,” says Swinburne, “is as happily humorous and as vividly natural as that of any more famous comedy.” The scene is both humorous and natural. Brome deserves to be more read than he is, and first of all to be more accessible than he is. But Swinburne ought to suggest or imply (I do not say impose) a reason for reading the _Sparagus Garden_ or the _Antipodes_, more sufficient than any he has provided. No doubt such reason could be found.
When it is a matter of pronouncing judgment between two poets, Swinburne is almost unerring. He is certainly right in putting Webster above Tourneur, Tourneur above Ford, and Ford above Shirley. He weighs accurately the good and evil in Fletcher: he perceives the essential theatricality, but his comparison of the _Faithful Shepherdess_ with _Comus_ is a judgment no word of which can be improved upon:
The difference between this poem [_i.e._ the _Faithful Shepherdess_] and Milton’s exquisitely imitative _Comus_ is the difference between a rose with a leaf or two faded or falling, but still fragrant and radiant, and the faultless but scentless reproduction of a rose in academic wax for the admiration and imitation of such craftsmen as must confine their ambition to the laurels of a college or the plaudits of a school.
In the longest and most important essay in the _Contemporaries of Shakespeare_, the essay on Chapman, there are many such sentences of sound judgment forcibly expressed. The essay is the best we have on that great poet. It communicates the sense of dignity and mass which we receive from Chapman. But it also illustrates Swinburne’s infirmities. Swinburne was not tormented by the restless desire to penetrate to the heart and marrow of a poet, any more than he was tormented by the desire to render the finest shades of difference and resemblance between several poets. Chapman is a difficult author, as Swinburne says; he is far more difficult than Jonson, to whom he bears only a superficial likeness. He is difficult beyond his obscurity. He is difficult partly through his possession of a quality comparatively deficient in Jonson, but which was nevertheless a quality of the age. It is strange that Swinburne should have hinted at a similarity to Jonson and not mentioned a far more striking affinity of Chapman’s—that is, Donne. The man who wrote