, said that, when he went into the street after
reading it, men seemed ten feet high. Pope averred that the translation
of the Iliad might be supposed to have been written by Homer before he
arrived at years of discretion; and Coleridge declares the version of
the Odyssey to be as truly an original poem as the Faery Queen. Chapman
himself evidently thought that he was the first translator who had been
admitted into intimate relations with Homer's soul, and caught by direct
contact the sacred fury of his inspiration. He says finely of those who
had attempted his work in other languages:

"They failed to search his deep and treasures heart.
The cause was, since they wanted the fit key
Of Nature, in their downright strength of art,
With Poesy to open Poesy."

Chapman was also a voluminous dramatist, and of his many comedies and
tragedies some sixteen were printed. It is to be feared that the last
twenty years of his long and honorable life were passed in a desperate
struggle for the means of subsistence. But his ideas of the dignity of
his art were so inwoven into his character that he probably met calamity
bravely. Poesy he early professed to prefer above all worldly wisdom,
being composed, in his own words, of the "sinews and souls of all
learning, wisdom, and truth." "We have example sacred enough," he said,
"that true Poesy's humility, poverty, and contempt are badges of
divinity, not vanity. Bray then, and bark against it, ye wolf-faced
worldlings, that nothing but riches, honors, and magistracy" can content
"I (for my part) shall ever esteem it much more manly and sacred, in
this harmless and pious study, to sit until I sink into my grave, than
shine in your vainglorious bubbles and impieties; all your poor
policies, wisdoms, and their trappings, at no more valuing than a musty
nut." These sentiments were probably fresh in his heart when, in 1634,
friendless and poor, at the age of seventy-five, he died. Anthony Wood
describes him as "a person of most reverend aspect, religious and
temperate; qualities," he spitefully adds, "rarely meeting in a poet."

Chapman was a man with great elements in his nature, which were so
imperfectly harmonized that what he was found but a stuttering
expression in what he wrote and did. There were gaps in his mind; or, to
use Victor Hugo's image, "his intellect was a book with some leaves torn
out." His force, great as it was, was that of an Ajax, rather than tha