small, and said so. “I beg your pardon for asking the question,” said the dealer, “but business is business. You are not, I understand, a direct descendant of this lady. Was her name ever connected with any scandal? If so, I could double my offer.” Somewhere in our in-human nature there must be an appetite for these unsavory personalities, but they are degrading in a double sense--degrading to him whose secret is betrayed, and to him who consents to share in the illicit knowledge of it. These things are none of our business, and yet it is remarkable how scrupulously exact even those most neglectful in their own affairs are in attending to the business of other people. I think, on the whole, that it is fortunate for us that our judgment of what the old dramatists did should be so little disturbed by any misinformation as to what they were, for to be imperfectly informed is to be misinformed, and even to look through contemporary eyes is to look through very crooked glass. Sometimes we may draw a pretty infallible inference as to a man’s temperament, though not as to his character, from his writings. And this, I think, is the case with Chapman. George Chapman was born at Hitchin, in Hertfordshire, in 1559 probably, though Anthony Wood makes him two years older, and died in London on the 12th of May, 1634. He was buried in the church-yard of St. Giles in the Fields, where the monument put up over him by Inigo Jones is still standing. He was five years older than Shakespeare, whom he survived for nearly twenty years, and fifteen years older than Ben Jonson, who out-lived him three years. There is good ground for believing that he studied at both Universities, though he took a degree at neither. While there he is said to have devoted himself to the classics, and to have despised philosophy. This contempt, however, seems to me somewhat doubtful, for he is certainly the most obtrusively metaphysical of all our dramatists. After leaving the University, he is supposed to have travelled, which is as convenient a way as any other to fill up the gap of sixteen years between 1578, when he ended his academic studies, and 1594, when we first have notice of him in London, during which period he vanishes altogether. Whether he travelled in France and Italy or not, he seems to have become in some way familiar with the languages of those countries, and there is some reason for thinking that he understood German also. We have two glimpses of him during his life in London. In 1605 he, with Jonson and Marston, produced a play called “Eastward Ho!” Some “injurious reflections” on the Scottish nation in it angered King James, and the authors were imprisoned for a few days in the Fleet. Again, in 1606, the French ambassador, Beaumont, writes to his master: “I caused certain players to be forbid from acting ‘The History of the Duke of Biron;’ when, however, they saw that the whole court had left town, they persisted in acting it; nay, they brought