there are other victims of intolerance on whom I look with unmixed sorrow. They are those who, spell-bound by early prejudice or by intimidations from the pulpit and the press, dare not think; who anxiously stifle every doubt or misgiving in regard to their opinions, as if to doubt were a crime; who shrink from the seekers after truth as from infection; who deny all virtue which does not wear the livery of their own sect; who, surrendering to others their best powers, receive unresistingly a teaching which wars against reason and conscience; and who think it a merit to impose on such as live within their influence, the grievous bondage which they bear themselves. How much to be deplored is it, that religion, the very principle which is designed to raise men above the judgment and power of man, should become the chief instrument of usurpation over the soul! GEORGE CHAPMAN (1559?-1634) [Illustration: GEORGE CHAPMAN] George Chapman, the translator of Homer, is of all the Elizabethan dramatists the most undramatic. He is akin to Marlowe in being more of an epic poet than a playwright; but unlike his young compeer "of the mighty line," who in his successive plays learnt how to subdue an essentially epic genius to the demands of the stage, Chapman never got near the true secret of dramatic composition. Yet he witnessed the growth of the glorious Elizabethan drama, from its feeble beginning in 'Gorbodue' and 'Gammer Gurton's Needle' through its very flowering in the immortal masterpieces. He was born about 1559, five years before Marlowe, the "morning star" of the English drama, and he died in 1634, surviving Shakespeare, in whom it reached its maturity, and Beaumont, Middleton, and Fletcher, whose works foreshadow decay. From his native town Hitchin he passed on to Oxford, where he distinguished himself as a classical scholar. Then for sixteen years nothing definite is known about him. His life has been called one of the great blanks of English literature. He is sometimes sent traveling on the Continent, as a convenient means of accounting for this gap, and also to explain the intimate acquaintance with German manners and customs and the language displayed in his tragedy 'Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany,' which argues at least for a trip to that country. In 1594 he published the two hymns in the 'Shadow of Night'; and soon after he must have begun writing for the stage, for his first extant comedy, 'The Blind Beggar of Alexandria,' was acted in 1596, and two years later he appears in Francis Meres's famous enumeration of the poets and wits of the time. Hereafter his life is to be dated by his publications.