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