1C5 



CHAPMAN, GEORGE. 



CHAPPE, CLAUDE. 



166 



Lady Cbantrey presented the original models of the entire series of 

 Sir Francis Chantrey's busts, the greater part of his monumental figures, 

 and his studies from the antique, to Oxford University, " on condition 

 that a permanent place be assigned to them in the Western Sculpture 

 Gallery " of the Taylor Buildings, where they now are, and form a 

 singularly interesting, and in some respects unique, series of the por- 

 traits of many of the most eminent among Chantrey's contemporaries. 



CHAPMAN, GEORGE, the earliest English translator of Homer, 

 and known also as a prolific writer of dramas, was born in the year 

 1557. His birth-place is uncertain. Some have supposed him to have 

 been a native of Hertfordshire, in which county, at Hitching-hill, he 

 is known to have for some time resided. Wood believes him to have 

 been of a Kentish family. The same writer asserts that he studied at 

 Oxford, and that, although eminent in classics, he neglected philosophy, 

 a fact which has been referred to as accounting for his want of an 

 academical degree. Coming to London, he entered the ranks of the 

 professional authors, and became an esteemed member of the best 

 literary society, associating with Spenser, with Daniel, and with Shaks- 

 pere, who was six or seven years his junior. He was patronised by 

 Sir Thomas Walsingbara and his son, by Henry Prince of Wales, and 

 by Somerset the royal favourite. The death of the prince, and the fall 

 of the minion, may be supposed to have had an unfavourable influence 

 on his position ; and even before these events Chapman, with Ben 

 Jonson and Mnrston, had narrowly escaped severe punishment for 

 satirical reflections on the Scotch, contained in their comedy of 

 ' Eastward Ho ! ' But, although the particulars of Chapman's history 

 are little known, it is understood that he held some place about court; 

 and there is no evidence of his having ever laboured under those 

 pecuniary distresses which mark so painfully the biography of some 

 of his literary contemporaries. His personal character appears to have 

 been both respectable and amiable. Jonson declared to Drummond 

 that he loved Chapman ; and Anthony Wood asserts him to have been 

 " a person of most reverend aspect, religious and temperate, qualities 

 rarely meeting in a poet." He attained to a ripe old age, and died in 

 London on the 12th of May 1834. He was buried in the church-yard 

 of St. Giles-in-the-field, where his friend Inigo Jones erected a 

 monument to his memory. 



Chapman's published writings are very numerous. Among his 

 non-dramatic productions, the most valuable, as well as ambitious, 

 was his famous translation of Homer into English fourteen-syllable 

 verse. Seven books of his 'Iliad' appeared in 1598; twelve books 

 appeared in folio about 1600 ; and, after the accession of King James 

 in 16"3, there was published in folio the complete translation : 'The 

 Iliads of Homer, Prince of Poets, never before iu any language truly 

 translated, with a comment upon some of his chief places, done 

 according to the Greek by George Chapman.' This work was reprinted, 

 with introduction and notes by Dr. W. Cooke Taylor, London, 1843, 

 2 vols. 12mo. The 'Odyssey,' similarly translated, appeared in 1614, 

 and was followed in the same year by the 'Battle of the Frogs and 

 Mice,' and the Homeric Hymns and Epigrams. The following were 

 Chapman's other non-dramatic works, original and translated : 1, 

 'The Shadow of Night, containing two Poeticall Hymnes," 1594, 4to. 

 2, ' Ovid's Banquet of Sence,' 1595, 4to. 3, ' Hero and Leander, begun 

 . Marlow, and finished by George Chapman,' 1606, 4to. 4, 

 ' Ku'hymia Raptus, or the Tears of Peace,' 1609, 4to. 5, 'An Epicede, 

 or Funeral Song, on the most disastrous Death of the Highborn 

 Prince of Men, Henry Prince of Wales,' 1612, 4to. 6, 'Andromeda 

 Liberata, or the Nuptialls of Perseus and Andromeda," 1614, 4to. 7, 

 'The Georgicks of Hesiod, by George Chapman, translated elaborately 

 out of the Greek,' 1618, 4to. 8, ' Pro Vere Autumni Lacrymie, to the 

 Memorie of Sir Horatio Vere,' 1622, 4to. 9, 'A Justification of a 

 strange action of Nero, &e. ; al?o a Just Reproof of a Roman Smell- 

 Feast, being the Fifth Satyre of Juvenall,' 1629, 4to. 



The following are the titles of Chapman's plays, with the dates of 

 their printing : 1, 'The Blind Beggar of Alexandria,' a comedy, 1598. 

 2, 'An Humourous Day's Mirth,' a comedy, 1599. 3, 'All Fools,' a 

 come ly ; and 4, ' Eastward Ho," a comedy, 1605 (by Chapman, Jonson, 

 and Marston) ; both reprinted in Dodsley's collection. 5, ' The 

 Qentk-man Usher,' a comedy, 1606; 6, 'Monsieur d'Olive,' a comedy, 

 1606; and 7, ' Bussy d'Ambois,' a tragedy, 1607; all three reprinted 

 in 1 'ilke's ' Old English Plays.' 8, ' Caesar and Pompey,' a tragedy, 

 9, and 10, 'The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Byron,' two tragedies, 

 1608. 11, ' May Day,' a comedy, 1611 ; reprinted in Dilke's collection. 

 12, 'The Widow's Tears," a comedy, 1612; reprinted in Dodsley's col- 

 lection. 13, 'The Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois,' a tragedy, 1613, in 

 Dilke's collection. 14, 'The Masque of the Inns of Court,' 1613. 15, 

 'Two Wise Men and all the rest Fools,' a comedy, 1619. 16, 'The 

 Tragedy of Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany,' 1654. 17, 'Revenge 

 for Honour,' a tragedy, 1654. 18 and 19, 'The Ball,' a comedy, and 

 ' Chabot, Admiral of France,' a tragedy, both printed in 1639 as works 

 of Chapman and Shirley, and reprinted in the modern edition of 

 Shirley's works by Gifford, who pronounces Chapman to have plainly 

 ha<l the principal share in their composition. Among the many specu- 

 lations as to the authorship of the drama called 'The Two Noble 

 Kirnmen,' in which Shaksperc has been asserted to have assisted 

 Fletcher, Mr. Knight, in his editions of the great poet's works, has 

 conjectured that the parts attributod to him may really have been 

 composed by Chapman. 



Chapman's dramas, although works of much significance in the 

 history of our old literature, are not the most valuable of his works. 

 They are among the many productions of his time which were writteu 

 by men tempted, through the fashion of the day, into a walk of com- 

 position for which they were but indifferently qualified. In comedy, 

 which had been formed into a native school more completely than 

 tragedy, Chapman adapts himself readily, and not without success, to 

 the teaching of his juuiors, especially Jonson and Fletcher ; while ha 

 gives to the tone of his works not unfrequently an elevation of thought 

 and a fulness of descriptive imagery which make some amends for the 

 pervading stiffuess of his portraiture of character and the forced and 

 artificial turn of his incidents. In his tragic dramas he is, in point of 

 plan and form, a semi-classic. He attempts at once to gratify the 

 taste of his age and nation for the direct and vivid representation of 

 dramatic horrors, and to maintain that tone of narrative declamation 

 and of didactic reflection which Seneca had taught him, and to which 

 his cast of mind made him naturally prone. The latter part of his 

 ' Byron ' is, as we venture to think, the best of his tragedies, and 

 might better have deserved reprinting than the extravagant 'Bussy 

 d'Ambois.' But Chapman's memory is best preserved, and his repu- 

 tation as a poetical imaginer and thinker most fully vindicated, by 

 his free translations from the Greek, and especially by his spirited 

 and vigorous version of the Iliad. The republication of this fine old 

 poem is a judicious tribute to the improved taste of our time in 

 poetical literature. His Iliad, like his plays, is deformed by many 

 faults. It is as unequal as careless. Indeed, he himself, on completing 

 the work, re-wrote the first book entirely, and altered very much the 

 other eleven that had previously been published. But his patience 

 was not sufficient, either for correcting adequately what he had already 

 written, or for carrying him carefully through the remainder of his 

 task : the last twelve books were translated by him in less than fifteen 

 weeks. And again, indolence and strong imagination concurred in 

 tempting him to desert, in many places, the sense of his author, and 

 to paint elaborately pictures for which Homer hardly gave him even 

 the sketch. Yet for vigour of fancy, for a loose kind of faithfulness 

 to the spirit of the original, for constant strength and frequent 

 felicity of diction, the work is one of the finest poems which our 

 language possesses. When Pope, who carefully read it, described it as 

 a work which Homer might have written before arriving at years of 

 discretion, his fastidious taite led him to do the old poet less justice 

 than that which had been rendered by Waller, who confessed that he 

 could never read Chapman's Iliad without a degree of rapture. 



CHAPPE, CLAUDE, a French mechanician, who, though not the 

 original inventor of ft machine for transmitting intelligence with 

 rapidity between places very distant from each other, must be con- 

 sidered as having devised the means of rendering such a machine 

 available for that purpose. He was a nephew of the Abbd Chappe 

 d'Auteroche, and was born at Brulon in Normandy, in 1763. It is 

 said by his French biographers that, happening on some occasion in 

 his youth to be separated from his friends, he conceived the idea of 

 corresponding with them by means of signals ; and that the result of 

 his efforts to obtain this end was the invention of the machine which 

 he called a telegraph (Trj\e and ypdijxa), or a semaphore (ffijjuo und 

 <f>ffia}. Whether or not he had at that time any knowledge of tho 

 discoveries of Dr. Hook iu England, or of Amontous iu his own 

 country, both of which were nearly a century earlier, is uncertain, but 

 there appears to be some resemblance between his machine and that 

 which was proposed by the former in his discourse to the Royal 

 Society in 1634. Be that as it may, no doubt can exist that M. Chappe 

 is justly entitled to the honour of having invented both a particular 

 system of signals, and the mechanism by which the operations are 

 performed. 



This machine consisted of a vertical pillar of wood fifteen or sixteen 

 feet high, at the top of which was a transverse beam eleven or twelve 

 feet long, which turned on a joint at its centre, and was capable of 

 being placid at any angle with the pillar ; and at each extremity of 

 the beam was a secondary arm, which also turned on a joint, and 

 could be placed either in the same direction as the beam or at any 

 angle with it, upwards or downwards. The various positions of the 

 beam and secondary arms were to serve as indications of the letters of 

 the alphabet, and of the ten numerals ; the sentence to be transmitted 

 was to be exhibited letter by letter from the first telegraph to the 

 next in the line ; it was to be repeated in the same manner from the 

 second to the third, and so on to the last. 



M. Chappe presented his invention to the French Legislative Assem- 

 bly in 1792, when the revolution had disposed tho minds of men for 

 the reception of any novelty which promised to be of national utility; 

 and in the following year the government decreed that an experiment 

 should ba made, in presence of certain commissioners, in order to try 

 its efficacy. For this purpose there was formed between Paris and 

 Lisle, at distances from each other equal to three or four leagues, a 

 line of stations, at each of which one of the machines was constructed; 

 and the first, which was immediately under the direction of the 

 inventor, was placed on the roof of the Louvre. The sentence to be 

 conveyed was received there from the hands of the members com- 

 posing the Committae of Public Safety, and in 13 minutes 40 seconds 

 it was delivered through all the intermediate stations to that at Lisle, 

 a distance of 48 leagues. The result of the experiment being con- 



