He was specially befriended by the Cavendishes, having once been tutor to a younger scion of that distinguished family; and so he came to pass his latest years in their princely home of Chatsworth, humored by the Duke, and treated by the Duchess as a pet bear--to be regularly fed and not provoked; climbing the Derbyshire hills of a morning, dining at mid-day, and at candle-lighting retiring to his private room to smoke his twelve pipes of tobacco (his usual allowance) and to follow through the smoke his winding trails of thought.[99] He lived to the extreme age of ninety-two, thus coming well down into the times of Charles II., who used to say of him that “he was a bear against whom the Church played her young dogs to exercise them.” He lived and died a bachelor, not relishing society in general, and liking only such shrewd acute friends as could track him in his subtleties, who had the grace to applaud him, and the wise policy of concealing their antagonisms. He is not much cited now in books, nor has his name association with any of those felicities of literature which exude perennial perfumes. He was careless of graces; he stirred multitudes into new trains of thought; he fed none of them with any of the minor and gracious delights of learning. Perhaps he is best known in literary ways proper by a close and lucid translation of the _History_ of Thucydides, which I believe is still reckoned by scholars a good rendering of the Greek.[100] He ventured, too, upon verse in praise of Derbyshire and of the valley of the Derwent, but it is not rich or beautiful. A man who keeps his emotional nature in a strait-jacket--for security or for other purpose--may make catalogues of trees, or of summer days; but he cannot paint the lilies or a sunrise. A translation of Homer which he undertook and accomplished, when over eighty, was just as far from a success, and for kindred reasons. _George Chapman._ There was, however, another translation of Homer about those times, or a little earlier, which was of much rarer quality, and which has not lost its rare flavors even now. I speak of George Chapman’s. It is not so true to the Greek as Hobbes’ Thucydides; indeed not true at all to the words, but true to the spirit; and in passages where the translator’s zeal was aflame catching more of the dash, and abounding flow, and brazen resonance of the old Greek poet than Pope, or Cowper, Derby, or Bryant.