labour by the issue of an English version of the 'Hymns' and other minor Homeric poems. The former he dedicated to Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, the hapless favourite of Elizabeth; the latter to Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, the infamous minion of James. Six years earlier he had inscribed to Bacon, then Lord Chancellor, a translation of Hesiod's 'Works and Days.' His only other versions of classic poems are from the fifth satire of Juvenal and the 'Hero and Leander' which goes under the name of Musæus, the latter dedicated to Inigo Jones. His revised and completed version of the 'Iliad' had been inscribed in a noble and memorable poem of dedication to Henry Prince of Wales, after whose death he and his 'Odyssey' fell under the patronage of Carr. Of the manner of his death at seventy-five we know nothing more than may be gathered from the note appended to a manuscript fragment, which intimates that the remainder of the poem, a lame and awkward piece of satire on his old friend Jonson, had been 'lost in his sickness.'
Chapman, his first biographer is careful to let us know, 'was a person of most reverend aspect, religious and temperate, qualities rarely meeting in a poet'; he had also certain other merits at least as necessary to the exercise of that profession. He had a singular force and solidity of
