CHAPMAN, GEORGE (1559-1634).—­Dramatist and translator, was b. near Hitchin, and probably ed. at Oxf. and Camb.  He wrote many plays, including The Blind Beggar of Alexandria (1596), All Fools (1599), A Humerous Daye’s Myrthe (1599), Eastward Hoe (with Jonson), The Gentleman Usher, Monsieur d’Olive, etc.  As a dramatist he has humour, and vigour, and occasional poetic fire, but is very unequal.  His great work by which he lives in literature is his translation of Homer.  The Iliad was pub. in 1611, the Odyssey in 1616, and the Hymns, etc., in 1624.  The work is full of energy and spirit, and well maintains its place among the many later translations by men of such high poetic powers as Pope and Cowper, and others:  and it had the merit of suggesting Keats’s immortal Sonnet, in which its name and memory are embalmed for many who know it in no other way.  C. also translated from Petrarch, and completed Marlowe’s unfinished Hero and Leander.

CHAPONE, HESTER (MULSO) (1727-1801).—­Miscellaneous writer, dau. of a gentleman of Northamptonshire, was m. to a solicitor, who d. a few months afterwards.  She was one of the learned ladies who gathered round Mrs. Montague (q.v.), and was the author of Letters on the Improvement of the Mind and Miscellanies.

CHARLETON, WALTER (1619-1707).—­Miscellaneous writer, ed. at Oxf., was titular physician to Charles I. He was a copious writer on theology, natural history, and antiquities, and pub. Chorea Gigantum (1663) to prove that Stonehenge was built by the Danes.  He was also one of the “character” writers, and in this kind of literature wrote A Brief Discourse concerning the Different Wits of Men (1675).

CHATTERTON, THOMAS (1752-1770).—­Poet, b. at Bristol, posthumous s. of a schoolmaster, who had been a man of some reading and antiquarian tastes, after whose death his mother maintained herself and her boy and girl by teaching and needlework.  A black-letter Bible and an illuminated music-book belonging to her were the first things to give his mind the impulse which led to such mingled glory and disaster.  Living under the shadow of the great church of St. Mary Redcliffe, his mind was impressed from infancy with the beauty of antiquity, he obtained access to the charters deposited there, and he read every scrap of ancient literature that came in his way.  At 14 he was apprenticed to a solicitor named Lambert, with whom he lived in sordid circumstances, eating in the kitchen and sleeping with the foot-boy, but continuing his favourite studies in every spare moment.  In 1768 a new bridge was opened, and C. contributed to a local newspaper what purported to be a contemporary account of the old one which it superseded.  This attracted a good deal of attention.  Previously to this he had been writing verses and imitating