Webster's reference, however, to "the full and heightened style of Master Chapman" is more appropriate; for no writer of that age impresses us more by a certain rude heroic height of character than George Chapman. Born in 1559, and educated at the University of Oxford, he seems, on his first entrance into London life, to have acquired the patronage of the noble, and the friendship of all who valued genius and scholarship. He was among the few men whom Ben Jonson said he loved. His greatest performance, and it was a gigantic one, was his translation of Homer, which, in spite of obvious faults, excels all other translations in the power to rouse and lift and inflame the mind. Some eminent painter, we believe Barry, 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."