Chapman

“ Chapman was by birth and parentage, and suggesting the expediency of a deputation, ostensibly for the purpose of asking him to repeat his performance, but charged with private instructions to cross-examine him as to his pedigree. The gentle Mayor kept his eyes fixed on a mighty ledger-book, pen in hand. The attitude was a rebuke on intruders, and in ordinary times would have been so considered. But mildness, however majestic, is not always effective in periods of civic commotion. ”

“ The trees were in blossom; birds were filling the air with delicious melody, but not a leaf stirred.
The Chapman family were up before the sun that morning, and the whole house was astir ere Bowling Green had fairly waked up, or the din of Broadway had broken the stillness. Chapman had spent a restless night, and seemed sad and downcast, as if some trouble he would fain conceal was weighing on his mind. He breakfasted alone that morning, and went to business an hour earlier than usual, promising to return at one o'clock. ”

“ Mr. Chapman possessed a robust constitution, and practised through life the most temperate habits; he was thus enabled to retain the full enjoyment of his faculties, and to continue employed upon various public works, in drainages, canals, and harbours, up till within a very short period of his decease, which occurred in 1832, in the eighty-third year of his age.—Life of Chapman. London, John Weale.
SIR WILLIAM CONGREVE, BART., F.R.S. Born in Middlesex, May 20, 1772. Died May 3, 1828. ”

“ Even Chapman, from whom I may be thought to have wandered somewhat far in this inquiry as to what is or is not properly definable as obscurity, has in my judgment a sounder instinct of dramatic dialogue and movement than the illustrious writer who has carved out for himself in the second period of his career a new and better way to the end appointed by nature for the exercise of his highest powers; and Chapman was certainly not remarkable among the great men of his day for the specially dramatic bent of his genius. ”

“ In the tragedy of Revenge for Honour I have already noticed the curious change of style which distinguishes it from all other works of Chapman: a change from rigidity to relaxation, from energy to fluency, from concentration to effusion of language. It has something of the manner and metre of Fletcher and his school, something of the softness and facility which lend a half effeminate grace to the best scenes of Shirley ”

“ Chapman's plays, overweighted with thoughtful and majestic eloquence, sink down and break short under the splendid burden, or wander into empty lands and among rocky places of barren declamation; as a tragic artist he must give place to lesser men. ”

“ For that poem stands out alone amid all the wide and wild poetic wealth of its teeming and turbulent age, as might a small shrine of Parian sculpture amid the rank splendour of a tropic jungle. But no metaphor can aptly express the rapture of relief with which you come upon it amid the poems of Chapman, and drink once more with your whole heart of that well of sweet water after the long draughts you have taken from such brackish and turbid springs as gush up among the sands and thickets of his verse. ”

“ JOHN CHEAP the Chapman, was a very comical short thick fellow, with a broad face and a long nose both lame and lazy, and something leacherous among the lasses: he chose rather to sit idle than work at any time, as he was a hater of hard labour. No man needed to offer him cheese and bread, after he curs'd it he would not have it ”

“ I made myself a chapman when very young, in great hopes of being rich when I became old but fortune was fickle and so was I; for I had not been a chapman above two days, until I began to consider the danger of deep ditches, midden dubs, biting dogs and bogles in barns, bangster wives and wiet sacks; And what comfort is it, to ly in a cows ouxter, the length of a cold winter night ”

“ Under no circumstances, probably, would Chapman have been always a pure and harmonious writer, capable of casting into fit and radiant form the dark hard masses of bis deep and ardent thought, of uttering the weighty and noble things he had to say in a fluent and lucid style; but as it was, he appears from first to last to have erected his natural defects into an artificial system, and cultivated his incapacities as other men cultivate their faculties. ”

“ Miss Chapman’s face straightened out from its shocked expression. “Your hat? Why do you want to change it? It’s very nice as it is.”
“My dear Miss Chapman, it’s at least six months out of date.—Ziely, you’re crying!”
“I’m not,” said Miss Zielinski weakly, caught in the act of blowing her nose.
“How on earth can you cry over a book? As if it were true!” ”

“ Even the good Dominie, led away by the temptation, had invested all his savings, and had his pockets full of Chapman's "equivalents," from which he looked for a fortune in a very short time. Finally the innocent settlers began to regard Chapman as a great genius, who had invented this new way of making their fortunes out of sheer goodness. "I want to tell you, my good friends," he would say to them, patronizingly, "you will appreciate me better as we become better acquainted. Invest your money, and there's a fortune for you all." ”

“ You like the Odyssey: did you ever read my "Adventures of Ulysses," founded on Chapman's old translation of it? For children or men. Chapman is divine, and my abridgment has not quite emptied him of his divinity. When you come to town I'll show it you. You have well described your old-fashioned grand paternal hall. Is it not odd that every one's earliest recollections are of some such place? I had my Blakesware [Blakesmoor in the "London"] . Nothing fills a child's mind like a large old mansion ”

“ The reader has not forgotten Chapman, the second officer of the Sumter, who made such a sensation in Cienfuegos, among the fair sex, and who slept in such a sweet pair of sheets at the house of his friend, that he dreamed of them for weeks afterward. Chapman finished the cruise in the Sumter, serving everybody else pretty much as he served the Cienfuegos people, whenever he chanced to get ashore. He was always as ready “to tread one measure—take one cup of wine,” with a friend, as to hurl defiance at an enemy. He carried the garrison mess at Gibraltar by storm. ”

“ John Chapman lived to be a man of some standing in the parish of Swaffham, though tradition saith that he altered but little his simple manner of living, and did not give up his bi-annual excursions until years after the necessity for carrying his pack with him had gone by. It is also supposed that he strengthened the ties that held him to the place by taking unto him a wife; and I am led to place some faith in this, from the fact that there once existed in the north aisle a seat, on which was carved the effigy of a pedlar with his pack and dog, and his wife looking over the door of a shop ”

“ Before leaving, he had put two bags of oranges in his machine to take to Balsley, who liked to suck them to relieve his terrible thirst, after the day's flying was over. There was an aërial struggle against odds, far within the German lines, and Chapman, to divert their fire from his comrades, engaged several enemy airmen at once. He sent one tumbling to earth, and had forced the others off when two more swooped down upon him. Such a fight is a matter of seconds, and one cannot clearly see what passes. Lufbery and Prince, whom Chapman had defended so gallantly, regained the French lines. ”

“ Chapman is remembered in the history of the Middle West as ‘Johnny Appleseed,’ because he thought it was his mission to distribute apple seeds among the settlers and Indians, asking only that they should be planted and the king of all fruits cultivated. With a bag thus filled and slung over his shoulder, he tramped for hundreds of miles through all sorts of weather, sometimes paddling down or up a river, sleeping wherever night overtook him, often in Indian lodges and again in the lonely cabin of some settler, or by the camp fire of a party of scouts far in the depths of the wilderness. ”

“ By the change of instrument alone a critic of the higher class may at once verify the change of object. In almost every page of Chapman's noblest work we discern the struggle and the toil of a powerful mind convulsed and distended as by throes of travail in the effort to achieve something that lies beyond the proper aim and the possible scope of that form of art within which it has set itself to work. ”

“ A man owning a church could feel himself strong in both politics and religion, and have all the quarrels he wanted. Chapman was delighted with this new idea of his; and his good wife supposed it was infinitely superior to her own. It was another proof to her that there was no greater man in the world than her dear Chapman. Once get the church going, and with a preacher of the Dogtown school, to preach out and out transcendentalism, and another ism or two, and they could get up an opposition that would be popular with the people. ”

“ Chapman could dress of an evening in silk, wear kid gloves that came from France, and had plenty of real French lace on her caps. Few persons in Nyack at that day could do such things and pass for honest people.
"My dear," said Mrs. Chapman, addressing herself to her small, but intellectually great, Mr. Chapman; "my dear." She paused for a moment, as her face assumed an air of seriousness. "We must turn our backs entirely on Dogtown. Dogtown won't do to elevate the family on. We never can rise in the world with Dogtown on our shoulders. ”

“ Chapman a wider field for the exercise of her love of display. There was now little chance of making any more money out of Nyack, either by getting up quarrels between neighbors or inventing new religions. So the Chapmans resolved to go into the city and set up for very respectable people. As nobody wanted the big house for a church Chapman rented it to Titus Bright for an inn, and as nothing was said about moral restrictions, that worthy friend of the thirsty and weary traveller kept it in the good old-fashioned way of giving [Pg 168] customers what they wanted and asking no questions. ”

“ The inscription of Chapman's Iliad to Prince Henry is one of his highest and purest examples of moral verse: the august praise and grave exaltation of his own great art give dignity to the words of admonition as much as of appeal with which he commends it to the acceptance and reverence of kings. We may well believe that the prince's death gave to the high heart of his old Homeric teacher and counsellor of royal and heroic things a sharper pain than the mere sense of a patron lost and of personal as well as of national hopes cut off. ”

“ Chapman, in his other pieces, where he lays aside the gravity of the philosopher and poet, discovers an unexpected comic vein, distinguished by equal truth of nature and lively good humour. ”

“ One at least, and not he who had drunk deepest of the divine and dangerous spring, seems at times under its influence to move and speak as under some Circean transformation, The learning of Jonson, doubtless far wider and sounder than that of Chapman, never allowed or allured him to exchange for a turbid and tortious jargon the vigorous purity of his own English spirit and style. ”

“ In 1880 Chapman turned his business into a limited company, at the head of which he remained until the time of his death. He died on 1 March 1895, at his house, 10 Ovington Square, London. He was twice married. ”

“ This version, which was highly prized by his contemporaries, is executed in rhymed couplets, each line containing fourteen syllables; a species of versification singularly cumbrous and void of harmony; and, notwithstanding this protracted metre, fidelity is, by no means, the characteristic of Chapman. He is not only often very paraphrastic, but takes the liberty of omitting, without notice, what he could not comprehend. ”

“ If only well nursed they could be all made profitable. Woman was the great pillar of Chapman's hopes. He had always regarded her as the great foundation of any church. She could make it popular if she pleased, and she could make it profitable, too. This, in a measure, accounted for the unlimited admiration Mrs. Chapman had for this great progressive clergyman. His great progressive religion was just exactly the thing needed in Nyack. He must next [Pg 52] attack the Dominie, and drive him out of his pulpit, for it would not do to have men preaching in an unknown tongue at this enlightened day. ”

“ His rarest jewels of thought and verse detachable from the context lie embedded in the tragedy of Caesar and Pompey, whence the finest of them were first extracted by the unerring and unequalled critical genius of Charles Lamb. In most of his tragedies the lofty and labouring spirit of Chapman may be said rather to shine fitfully through parts than steadily to pervade the whole; they show nobly altogether as they stand, but even better by help of excerpts and selections. ”

“ Chapman answered, and fell once more to zero in the opinion of his charmer. With all the contempt that can be expressed by silence, when speech is expected, she kept on so briskly towards Bonny’s castle, that her suitor (who, in spite of all martial bearing, walked in the manner of a pigeon) became hard set to keep up with her.
“The view from this spot is so lovely,” he said, “I must really beg you to sit down a little. Surely we need not be in such a hurry.” ”

“ Parted her waves; swift flew the bounding steeds,
Nor was the brazen axle wet with spray.”
Chapman here is truer to his master, and the motion is in the verse itself. Lord Derby’s is description, and not picture. “Monsters of the deep” is an example of the hackneyed periphrases in which he abounds, like all men to whom language is a literary tradition, and not a living gift of the Muses. “Lash” is precisely the wrong word. Chapman is always great at sea. ”