The blunder about Chapman is of a kind into which his
hasty temperament often betrayed him. He remembered that Chapman's
"Iliad" was in a long measure, concluded without looking that it was
alexandrine, and then attributes it generally to his "Homer." Chapman's
"Iliad" is done in fourteen-syllable verse, and his "Odyssee" in the very
metre that Dryden himself used in his own version,[35] I remark also what
he says of the couplet, that it was easy because the second verse
concludes the labor of the poet. And yet it was Dryden who found it hard
for that very reason. His vehement abundance refused those narrow banks,
first running over into a triplet, and, even then uncontainable, rising
to an alexandrine in the concluding verse. And I have little doubt that
it was the roominess, rather than the dignity, of the quatrain which led
him to choose it. As apposite to this, I may quote what he elsewhere says
of octosyllabic verse: "The thought can turn itself with greater ease in
a larger compass. When the rhyme comes too thick upon us, it straightens
the expression: we are thinking of the close, when we should be employed
in adorning the thought. It makes a poet giddy with turning in a space
too narrow for his imagination."[36]
Dryden himself, as was not always the case with him, was well satisfied
with his work.
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