wn, by all
The infantry of wit. Vain priests! that chair
Is only fit for his true son and heir.
Reach here thy laurel: Randolph, 'tis thy praise:
Thy naked skull shall well become the bays.
See, Daphne courts thy ghost; and spite of fate,
Thy poems shall be Poet Laureate.

[Footnote 1: Athen. Oxon. p. 224.]

* * * * *

GEORGE CHAPMAN

Was born in the year 1557, but of what family he is descended, Mr.
Wood has not been able to determine; he was a man in very high
reputation in his time, and added not a little to dramatic excellence.
In 1574, being well grounded in grammar learning, he was sent to the
university, but it is not clear whether to Oxford or Cambridge; it is
certain that he was sometime in Oxford, and was taken notice of for
his great skill in the Latin and Greek languages, but not in logic and
philosophy, which is the reason it may be presumed, that he took
no degree there. After this he came to London, and contracted an
acquaintance, as Wood says, with Shakespear, Johnson, Sidney, Spenser
and Daniel. He met with a very warm patronage from Sir Thomas
Walsingham, who had always had a constant friendship for him, and
after that gentleman's decease, from his son Thomas Walsingham,
esquire, whom Chapman loved from his birth. He was also respected, and
held in esteem by Prince Henry, and Robert earl of Somerset, but the
first being untimely snatched away, and the other justly disgraced
for an assassination[1], his hopes of preferment were by these means
frustrated; however, he was a servant either to King James I. or Queen
Anne his consort, through whose reign he was highly valued by all his
old friends, only there are some insinuations, that as his reputation
grew, Ben Johnson, naturally haughty and insolent, became jealous of
him, and endeavoured to suppress, as much as possible, his rising
fame[2], as Ben, after the death of Shakespear, was without a rival.

Chapman was a man of a reverend aspect, and graceful manner, religious
and temperate, qualities which seldom meet (says Wood) in a poet, and
was so highly esteemed by the clergy, that some of them have said,
"that as Musaeus, who wrote the lives of Hero and Leander, had two
excellent scholars, Thamarus and Hercules, so had he in England in the
latter end of Queen Elizabeth, two excellent imitators in the same
argument and subject, viz. Christopher Marlow, and George Chapman."
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