Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 5.djvu/408

396 effect; and the precise form in which the Academy mean to administer the trust still (1876) remains indefinite.  CHAPELAIN, (1595-1674), a French poet and man of letters, was the son of a notary, and was born in Paris. His father destined him for his own profession; but his mother, who had known Ronsard (she was the daughter of a certain Michel Corbière, an intimate friend of the great poet), had determined otherwise. At an early age Chapelain began to qualify himself for literature, acquiring by his own unaided efforts, not only Greek and Latin, but also Italian and Spanish, and even applying himself to medicine. Having finished his studies, he was engaged for a while in teaching Spanish to a young nobleman. He was then appointed tutor to the two sons of a M. de la Trousse, grand provost of France. Attached for the next seventeen years to the family of this gentleman, the administration of whose fortune was wholly in his hands, he seems to have published nothing during this period, yet to have acquired a great reputation as a probability. His first work given to the public was a preface for the Adone of Marini, who printed and published that notorious poem at Paris. This was followed by an excellent translation of Mateo Aleman's novel, Guzman de Alfarache, and by four extremely indifferent odes, one of them addressed to the great Richelieu, whom Chapelain had the honour of grounding in the dramatic unities. Rewarded with a pension of a thousand crowns, and appointed from the first a member of the newly-constituted Academy, Chapelain drew up the plan of the grammar and dictionary, the compilation of which was to be a principal function of the young institution, and at Richelieu's command prepared a criticism of the Cid. In 1756 he published, in a magnificent form, the first twelve cantos of his celebrated epic La Pucelle, on which he had been engaged during twenty years. His reputation at this time was so great that six editions of the poem were disposed of in eighteen months. But this was the end of Chapelain, "the legist of Parnassus." The epigrams of Montdor and Furetière, the slashing satire of Boileau (in this case fairly master of his subject), had done their work, and Chapelain ("le plus grand poète Français qu'ait jamais été et du plus solide jugement," as he is called in Colbert's list) had taken his place among the failures of modern art. The last twelve cantos of La Pucelle were never published. A complete manuscript of it exists, with corrections and a preface in the author's autograph, in the Bibliothèque Nationale; but its readers, it may be presumed, are few.

In 1662 Chapelain was employed by Colbert to draw up an account of contemporary men of letters, destined to guide the king in his distribution of pensions. In this pamphlet, as in the extracts from his letters published by Camusat in 1726 (Mélanges de Littérature tirés des Lettres manuscrites de Chapelain), he shows to far greater advantage than in his unfortunate epic. His prose is said to be incomparably better than his verse; his criticisms are remarkable for their justice and generosity; his erudition and kindliness of heart are everywhere apparent; the royal attention is directed alike towards the author's firmest friends and bitterest enemies. The man, indeed, appears to have been as excellent as the poet was worthless. He does not seem to have known jealousy; Corneille was the object of his warmest praises; and to him the young Racine was indebted not only for kindly and seasonable counsel, but also for that pension of six hundred livres which was so useful to him. Moving in the best society, polite and literary, and loaded with honours and pensions, in his old age Chapelain is reported to have become a miser of the most sordid type, the clothes he wore being so patched and clouted as to procure for him the nickname of the Chevalier de l'Araignée; while Ménage relates that, calling upon the old man after a long estrangement, he found on the hearth the same cinders that he had remarked thereon twelve years before. His avarice, moreover, is said to have been indirectly the cause of his death, which happened in his seventy-ninth year. Some 50,000 crowns, a large fortune for those days, were found in his apartments.

As a poet, Chapelain seems to occupy on the French side of Parnassus a place analogous to that one filled on the English side by Sir Richard Blackmore. La Pucelle is an enormous allegorical nightmare, towards a correct appreciation of which the satire of Boileau is said to be the best guide. As a prose-writer and critic, Chapelain seems to have had real merit; in a passage of his, concerning the legendary epic of the Middle Ages, quoted by Sainte-Beuve (who calls him "homme instruit, sinon poète"), he would appear to have anticipated much of what modern criticism has had to say on the subject.  CHAPEL-HILL, a of the, in, , 27 s north-west of. It is the seat of the, founded in 1789, and has about 2800 permanent.  CHAPMAN,, translator of Homer, dramatist, and gnomic poet, was born in 1559, and died in 1634. At fifteen, according to Anthony Wood, "he being well grounded in school learning, was sent to the university" of Oxford; at thirty-five he published his first poem, The Shadow of Night, Between these dates, though no fact has been unearthed concerning his career, it is not improbable that he may have travelled in Germany. At thirty-nine he was reckoned "among the best of our tragic writers for the stage;" but his only play published at that age was a crude and formless attempt at romantic comedy, which had been acted three years before it passed from the stage to the press; and his first tragedy now extant in print, without name of author, did not solicit the suffrage of a reader till the poet was forty-eight. At thirty-nine he had also published the first instalment of his celebrated translation of the Iliad, in a form afterwards much remodelled; at sixty-five he crowned the lofty structure of his 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 thought, an admirable ardour of ambitious devotion to the service of poetry, a deep and burning sense at once of the duty implied and of the dignity inherent in his office; a vigour, opulence, and loftiness of phrase, remarkable even in that age of spiritual strength, wealth, and exaltation of thought and style; a robust eloquence, touched not 