notary. While a tutor in the family of the grand provost of France, he attracted the attention of the cardinal de Richelieu, who named him a member of the academy, and gave him a pension. He subsequently found another patron in the duc de Longueville, who allowed him a pension while writing a poem, "La Pucelle." The money did not happily inspire the bard, who took over twenty years to produce a dead failure; but the patron, instead of showing vexation, doubled the annuity. Chapelain was said to have grown avaricious with age, but the charge is not supported by sufficient testimony. As he often displayed liberality, he may have indulged in some peculiarities which gave a handle to the envious. Died in 1674.—J. F. C.
CHAPELLE, Claude Emmanuel Lullier, born at La Chapelle, near St. Denis, in 1626. His intimacy with Moliere gave rise to a rumour that he aided the most famous of French comic writers in the composition of his immortal productions, which so offended the latter that he laid a trap for Chapelle by asking him to write a scene for a play in which he was engaged. Armed with this proof of inferiority, he stopped the pretended partner's tongue by threatening to show what he had written. The fact was, that Chapelle possessed ready wit and singular humour in conversation, which chilled when he took the pen in hand. It is greatly to the credit of the poet that he could exhibit, in a servile age, a personal independence which amounted to intrepidity. While travelling with the duc de Brissac, whose service he had entered, his eye lighted on a passage in a classic author to the effect that service of the great and slavery were synonymous terms, on which he threw up his employment. As he was much addicted to the bottle, his friend, the celebrated Boileau, kindly undertook to remonstrate with him; but the conversation ended in the censor being left dead drunk by his captivating companion. He was one of a wild party who, at Moliere's, in a fit of intoxication proposed to bid adieu to a wicked world by jumping into the Seine, a mad act which was prevented by the dramatist, who was a teetotaler. Moliere, with great presence of mind, proposed that so heroic a deed should have the day for witness, and the day witnessed no worse than aching heads. In conjunction with Bachaumont, Chapelle wrote the famous "Voyage en Provence." He died in September, 1686.—J. F. C.
CHAPMAN, George, a dramatist of the Elizabethan period, but better known as the translator of Homer, was born, probably in Kent, in the year 1557. He resided two years at Trinity college, Oxford, but did not take a degree, because, Anthony Wood thinks, though he excelled in Latin and Greek, he had no turn for logic or philosophy. He afterwards settled in London, and lived, it is said, in familiar intercourse with Shakspeare, Spenser, Ben Jonson, Daniel, Marlow, and other poets. He was intimate also with Inigo Jones the celebrated architect, and dedicated to him one of his plays. He found a powerful patron in the Secretary Walsingham. Wood describes him as "a person of most reverend aspect, religious and temperate, and highly esteemed by the clergy and academicians."—(Athenæ, Oxon., i. 592.) He died at an advanced age in 1634, and was buried in the churchyard of St. Giles'-in-the-Fields. Chapman's claim to literary distinction mainly rests on his translation of Homer. His version, which is in long rhyming lines of fourteen syllables, like the metre of Drayton's Poly-olbion, comprises, not only the Iliad and Odyssey, but the Homeric hymns and the Batrachomyomachia. Until of late years Pope's translation had completely driven it out of the field; but a new edition was printed some years ago and attracted much attention. Chapman renders his original rather more faithfully than Pope; but his long unwieldy lines can never vie with the spirit and verve of the more modern version. Our author wrote eighteen plays, partly tragedies and partly comedies, which are now forgotten. One of his tragedies, "Bussy d'Amboise," seems to have been a good acting play, for it was popular on the stage; but Dryden speaks of it as intrinsically the most despicable stuff. "A famous modern poet," says Dryden in the dedication to his Spanish Friar, "used to sacrifice every year a Statins to Virgil's manes; and I have indignation enough to burn a D'Amboise annually to the memory of Jonson." Warton, strangely enough, is in doubt whether this passage be meant to convey praise or censure!—(Hist. Eng. Poetry, vol. iii.) One of his comedies, "Eastward, Ho!" is said to have been the joint work of himself, Jonson, and Marston, and is remarkable as having furnished Hogarth with the idea worked out in the Idle Apprentice.—T. A.
CHAPMAN, John, an English divine, born 1704, died 1784. He became domestic chaplain to Archbishop Potter, and archdeacon of Sudbury. His first book was against Collins the infidel, and in his "Eusebius" he answered the objections of Morgan and Tindal. He wrote also several short pieces on classical matters, in one of which he maintained that Cicero published two editions of his Academics. As executor to Potter, he presented himself to the precentorship of Lincoln; but by a decision of the house of lords was deprived of the office.—R. M., A.
* CHAPMAN, Maria Weston, an American lady, one of the earliest and most zealous abolitionists in the United States, was born in 1806 at Weymouth, near Boston, Massachusetts, and was educated first at Weymouth public schools, and afterwards in England. She became in 1829 the associate of Ebenezer Bailey, Esq., of Boston, in his undertaking of the collegiate education of young ladies. In 1830 she married Henry Grafton Chapman, Esq., of Boston, and both became ardent supporters of the antislavery cause. It is perhaps not easy now to understand all that was involved in this early adherence to the cause of antislavery in America. Every inducement of a social and worldly nature tended in the strongest manner to dissuade one in Mrs. Chapman's position from giving it the least support. But in her case there was neither doubt nor hesitation. She saw the justice, righteousness, and necessity of the movement, and cheerfully undertook to bear her share of the opprobrium heaped upon its promoters. Mrs. Chapman was one of the women of Boston and vicinity who, in 1835, formed the "Female Antislavery Society." In 1836 an attempt was made by the abolitionists to reach the judiciary and law of the state of Massachusetts. The decision of the supreme court, in the "Med" case, placed the Massachusetts judiciary on the old level of the English "Somerset" case; while the "Latimer" law, forbidding the prisons and jails of the state to be used for the detention of fugitive slaves, and all state-officers from taking part in their arrest, raised the state-legislation to nearly as high a point as it can be brought, while remaining in a common union with slaveholders. Another undertaking in 1837 was the reform of the church by influences from without—a movement which secured the co-operation of all the abolitionists, and has ever since been successfully continued. In all these movements, Mrs. Chapman was a leading spirit both in the design and the execution. It was on the petition of herself and others of Weymouth, sustained by 30,000 other women of Massachusetts, for the abolition of slavery in the district of Columbia (in which Washington, the seat of the national government, is situated), that the hon. John Quincy Adams encountered on the floor of congress the southern threat of assassination, and, "persisting in reading the petition, was compelled to take his seat amid uproar and confusion." During all these years it was Mrs. Chapman's effort to connect the antislavery cause in America with the earlier opponents of slavery in both hemispheres; and Clarkson, John Quincy Adams, and others, gave her their cordial co-operation. She was at one time co-editor of the National Antislavery Standard, which she had largely assisted in establishing in 1840, as the organ of the American Antislavery Society; and she published historical statements of the several undertakings above-mentioned in four little works, entitled "Right and Wrong in Boston and Massachusetts." The series of annual volumes, entitled "The Liberty Bell," composed of original contributions from the ablest and most distinguished friends of freedom both in the Old world and the New, is owing mainly to her labours. In 1841, Mr. Chapman being ordered to a milder climate in search of health, his wife accompanied him to Hayti. Taking letters from the Antislavery Society, they travelled both in the French and the Spanish parts, and gathered such information as enabled them on their return to put in motion, through the Massachusetts Antislavery Society, the first popular effort by petition for the recognition of Haytian independence. In 1848, after the death of her husband, Mrs. Chapman took her family to France, and resided on the continent until 1855, continuing unweariedly her exertions in the cause of antislavery.
CHAPONE, Hester, a literary lady, known as the authoress of "Letters on the Improvement of the Mind," and as the friend and correspondent of some of the most eminent of her day, was born in 1727. She was the daughter of Thomas Mulso, Esq., of Twywell, Northamptonshire. She early displayed her literary tastes, and it is said at the age of nine composed a romance entitled "The Loves of Amoret and Melissa." Through her
