George Chapman, translator of Homer, dramatist, and gnomic poet, was born in 1559, and died in 1634.  At fifteen, according to Anthony Wood, “he, being well grounded in school learning, was sent to the university” of Oxford; at thirty-five he published his first poem:  “The Shadow of Night.”  Between these dates, though no fact has been unearthed concerning his career, it is not improbable that he may have travelled in Germany.  At thirty-nine he was reckoned “among the best of our tragic writers for the stage”; but his only play published at that age was a crude and formless attempt at romantic comedy, which had been acted three years before it passed from the stage to the press; and his first tragedy now extant in print, without name of author, did not solicit the suffrage of a reader till the poet was forty-eight.  At thirty-nine he had also published the first instalment of his celebrated translation of the “Iliad,” in a form afterward much remodelled; at sixty-five he crowned the lofty structure of his labor by the issue of an English version of the “Hymns” and other minor Homeric poems.  The former he dedicated to Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, the hapless favorite of Elizabeth; the latter to Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, the infamous minion of James.  Six years earlier he had inscribed to Bacon, then Lord Chancellor, a translation of Hesiod’s “Works and Days.”  His only other versions of classic poems are from the fifth satire of Juvenal and the “Hero and Leander” which goes under the name of Musaeus, the latter dedicated to Inigo Jones.  His revised and completed version of the “Iliad” had been inscribed in a noble and memorable poem of dedication to Henry Prince of Wales, after whose death he and his “Odyssey” fell under the patronage of Carr.  Of the manner of his death at seventy-five we know nothing more than may be gathered from the note appended to a manuscript fragment, which intimates that the remainder of the poem, a lame and awkward piece of satire on his old friend Jonson, had been “lost in his sickness.”  Chapman, his first biographer is careful to let us know, “was a person of most reverend aspect, religious and temperate, qualities rarely meeting in a poet”; he had also certain other merits at least as necessary to the exercise of that profession.  He had a singular force and solidity of thought, an admirable ardor of ambitious devotion to the service of poetry, a deep and burning sense at once of the duty implied and of the dignity inherent in his office; a vigor, opulence, and loftiness of phrase, remarkable even in that age of spiritual strength, wealth, and exaltation of thought and style; a robust eloquence, touched not unfrequently with flashes of fancy, and kindled at times into heat of imagination.  The main fault of his style is one more commonly found in the prose than in the verse of his time—­a quaint and florid obscurity, rigid with elaborate rhetoric and tortuous with labyrinthine illustration; not dark only to the rapid reader through