George Chapman’s name has not received due prominence in the modern hand-books of English literature, but he was a bright torch and numbered by his own generation, among the greatest of its poets. He, whom Webster calls the “Prince’s Sweet Homer” and “My Friend,” was not unduly honored by the “full and heightened style” which Webster makes characteristic of him. “Our Homer-Lucan,” as he was gracefully termed by Daniel, is a poet much admired by great men. Edmund Waller never could read Chapman’s Homer without a degree of transport. Barry is reputed to have said that when he went into the street after reading it, men seemed ten feet high; Coleridge declares Chapman’s version of the Odyssey to be as truly an original poem as the “Faerie Queene.” He also declares that Chapman in his moral heroic verse stands above Ben Jonson. “There is more dignity, more lustre, and equal strength.” Translation was in those times a new force in literature. By the indomitable force and fire of genius Chapman has made Homer himself speak English by translating the genius, and by having chosen that which prefers the spirit to the letter. It is in his translation that the “Iliad” is best read as an English book. Out of it there comes a whiff of the breath of Homer. It is as massive and majestic as Homer himself would have written in the land of the virgin queen. “He has added,” says Swinburne, “a monument to the temple which contains the glories of his native language, the godlike images, and the costly relics of the past.” “The earnestness and passion,” says Charles Lamb, “which he has put into every part of these poems would be incredible to a reader of mere modern translations. His almost Greek zeal for the honor of his heroes is only paralleled by that fierce spirit of Hebrew bigotry with which Milton, as if personating one of the zealots of the old law, clothed himself when he sat down to paint the acts of Samson against the uncircumcised.” It was the reflected Hellenic radiance of the grand old Chapman version to the lifted eyes of Keats flooded with the “light which never was on sea or shore.” This younger poet sang: “Much have I traveled in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen, Round many western islands have I been, Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold; Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold.”