rcellus, and he seems to have
received patronage from a much less blameless patron, Carr, Earl of
Somerset. His literary activity was continuous and equal, but it was in his
later days that he attempted and won the crown of the greatest of English
translators. "Georgius Chapmannus, Homeri metaphrastes" the posy of his
portrait runs, and he himself seems to have quite sunk any expectation of
fame from his original work in the expectation of remembrance as a
translator of the Prince of Poets. Many other interesting traits suggest,
rather than ascertain, themselves in reference to him, such as his possible
connection with the early despatch of English troupes of players to
Germany, and his adoption of contemporary French subjects for English
tragedy. But of certain knowledge of him we have very little. What is
certain is that, like Drayton (also a friend of his), he seems to have
lived remote and afar from the miserable quarrels and jealousies of his
time; that, as has been already shown by dates, he was a kind of English
Fontenelle in his overlapping of both ends of the great school of English
poets; and that absolutely no base personal gossip tarnishes his poetical
fame. The splendid sonnet of Keats testifies to the influence which his
work long had on those Englishmen who were unable to read Homer in the
original. A fine essay of Mr. Swinburne's has done, for the first time,
justice to his general literary powers, and a very ingenious and, among
such hazardous things, unusually probable conjecture of Mr. Minto's
identifies him with the "rival poet" of Shakespere's _Sonnets_. But these
are adventitious claims to fame. What is not subject to such deduction is
the assertion that Chapman was a great Englishman who, while exemplifying
the traditional claim of great Englishmen to originality, independence,
and versatility of work, escaped at once the English tendency to lack of
scholarship, and to ignorance of contemporary continental achievements, was
entirely free from the fatal Philistinism in taste and in politics, and in
other matters, which has been the curse of our race, was a Royalist, a
lover, a scholar, and has left us at once one of the most voluminous and
peculiar collections of work that stand to the credit of any literary man
of his country. It may be that his memory has gained by escaping the danger
of such revelations or scandals as the Jonson confessions to Drummond, and
that the lack of attraction to the ordina