be room for the table, and for him to sit at it; won't there now?" When we went down Mr. Grimes himself was in the little parlour. He did not seem It was a dark little room, with one small at all surprised at seeing his wife enter the window looking out under the low roof, and room from above accompanied by a stranfacing the heavy high dead wall of the brew-ger. She at once began her story, and told ery opposite. But it was clean and sweet, the arrangement which she proposed,and the furniture in it was all solid and good, which she did, as I observed, without any old-fashioned, and made of mahogany. Two actual request for his sanction. Looking at or three of Mrs. Grimes' gowns were laid Mr. Grimes's face, I thought that he did not upon the bed, and other portions of her quite like it; but he accepted it, almost dress were hung on pegs behind the doors. without a word, scratching his head and The only untidy article in the room was a raising his eyebrows. You know, John, pair of "John's" trousers, which he had he could no more do it at home than he could failed to put out of sight. She was not a fly," said Mrs. Grimes. whit abashed, but took them up and folded them, and patted them, and laid them in the capacious wardrobe. "We'll have all these things away," she said," and then he can have all his papers out upon the bed just as he pleases." We own that there was something in the proposed arrangement which dismayed us. We also were married, and what would our wife have said had we proposed that a contributor, -even a contributor not red-nosed and seething with gin,—that any best disciplined contributor should be invited to write an article within the precincts of our sanctum! We could not bring ourselves to believe that Mr. Grimes would authorize the proposition. There is something holy about the bed-room of a married couple; and there would be a special desecration in the continued presence of Mr. Julius Mackenzie. We thought it better that we should explain something of all this to her. "Do you know," we said, “this seems to be hardly prudent ?" "Why not prudent ?" she asked. "Up in your bed-room, you know! Grimes will be sure to dislike it." Mr. "What, John! Not he. I know what you're a-thinking of, Mr. -," she said. "But we're different in our ways than what you are. Things to us are only just what they are. We haven't time, nor yet money, nor perhaps edication, for seemings and thinkings as you have. If you was travelling among the wild Injeans, you'd ask any one to eat a bit in your bed-room as soon as look at 'em, if you'd got a bit for 'em to eat. We're travelling among wild Injeans all our lives, and a bed-room ain't no more to us than any other room. Mackenzie shall come up here, and I'll have the table fixed for him, just there by the window." I hadn't another word to say to her, and I could not keep myself from thinking for many an hour afterwards, whether it may not be a good thing for men, and for women also, to believe that they are always travelling among wild Indians. 66 Who said he could do it at home?" "And he couldn't do it in the tap-room; could he? If so, there ain't no other place, and so that's settled." John Grimes again scratched his head, and the matter was settled. Before we left the house Mackenzie himself came in, and was told in our presence of the accommodation which was to be prepared for him. "It's just like you, Mrs. Grimes," was all he said in the way of thanks. Then Mrs. Grimes made her bargain with him somewhat sternly. He should have the room for five hours a day- ten till three, or twelve till five; but he must settle which, and then stick to his hours. "And I won't have nothing up there in the way of drink," said John Grimes. "Who's asking to have drink there? said Mackenzie. "You're not asking now, but maybe you will. I won't have it, that's all." "That shall be all right, John," said Mrs. Grimes, nodding her head. "Women are that soft, in the way of judgment, - that they'll go and do a'most anything, good or bad, when they've got their feelings up." Such was the only rebuke which in our hearing Mr. Grimes administered to his pretty wife. Mackenzie whispered something to the publican, but Grimes only shook his head. We understood it all thoroughly. He did not like the scheme, but he would not contradict his wife in an act of real kindness. We then made an appointment with the scholar for meeting our friend and his future patron at our rooms, and took our leave of the Spotted Dog. Before we went, however, Mrs. Grimes insisted on producing some cherrybounce, as she called it, which, after sundry refusals on our part, was brought in on a small round shining tray, in a little bottle covered all over with gold sprigs, with four tiny glasses similarly ornamented. Mrs. Grimes poured out the liquor, using a very sparing hand when she came to the glass which I was intended for herself. We find it, as a 66 The pagings, and the margins, and the paraphernalia of authorship, were perfect. "A life-time, my friend; just a life-time!" the Doctor had said to us, speaking of his own work while we were waiting for the man to whose hands was to be entrusted the result of so much labour and scholarship. We wished at that moment that we had never been called on to interfere in the matter. rule, easier to talk with the Grimeses of the world than to eat with them or to drink with chapterings, and all the complementary them. When the glass was handed to us we did not know whether or no we were expected to say something. We waited, however, till Mr. Grimes and Mackenzie had been provided with their glasses. Proud to see you at the Spotted Dog, Mr. ," said Grimes. That we are," said Mrs. Grimes, smiling at us over her almost imperceptible drop of drink. Julius Mackenzie just bobbed his head, and swallowed the cordial at a gulp, as a dog does a lump of meat; leaving the impression on his friends around him that he has not got from it half the enjoyment which it might have given him had he been a little more patient in the process. I could not but think that had Mackenzie allowed the cherry-bounce to trickle a little in his palate, as I did myself, it would have gratified him more than it did in being chucked down his throat with all the impetus which his elbow could give to the glass. "That's tidy tipple," said Mr. Grimes, winking his eye. We acknowledged that it was tidy. My mother made it, as used to keep the Pig and Magpie, at Colchester," said Mrs. Grimes. In this way we learned a good deal of Mrs. Grimes' history. Her very earliest years had been passed among wild Indians. 66 Then came the interview between the Doctor and Mr. Mackenzie. We must confess that we greatly feared the impression which our younger friend might make on the elder. We had of course told the Doctor of the red nose, and he had accepted the information with a smile. But he was a man who would feel the contamination of contact with a drunkard, and who would shrink from an unpleasant association. There are vices of which we habitually take altogether different views in accordance with the manner in which they are brought under our notice. This vice of drunkenness is often a joke in the mouths of those to whom the thing itself is a horror. Even before our boys we talk of it as being rather funny, though to see one of them funny himself would almost break our hearts. The learned commentator had accepted our account of the red nose as though it were simply a part of the undeserved misery of the wretched man; but should he find the wretched man to be actually redolent of gin his feelings might be changed. The Doctor was with us first, and the volumes of the MS. were displayed upon the table. The compiler of them, as he lifted here a page and there a page, handled them with the gentleness of a lover. They had been exquisitely arranged, and were very fair. Mackenzie came, and the introduction was made. The Doctor was a gentleman of the old school, very neat in his attire, — dressed in perfect black, with knee-breeches and black gaiters, with a closely shorn chin, and an exquisitely white cravat. Though he was in truth simply the rector of his parish, his parish was one which entitled him to call himself a dean, and he wore a clerical rosette on his hat. He was a wellmade, tall, portly gentleman, with whom to take the slightest liberty would have been impossible. His well-formed full face was singularly expressive of benevolence, but there was in it too an air of command which created an involuntary respect. He was a man whose means were ample, and who could afford to keep two curates, so that the appanages of a Church dignitary did in some sort belong to him. We doubt whether he really understood what work meant, even when he spoke with so much pathos of the labour of his life: but he was a man not at all exacting in regard to the work of others, and who was anxious to make the world as smooth and rosy to those around him as it had been to himself. He came forward, paused a moment, and then shook hands with Mackenzie. Our work had been done, and we remained in the back-ground during the interview. It was now for the Doctor to satisfy himself with the scholarship, — and, if he chose to take cognizance of the matter, with the morals of his proposed assistant. Mackenzie himself was more subdued in his manner than he had been when talking with ourselves. The Doctor made a little speech, standing at the table with one hand on one volume and the other on another. He told of all his work, with a mixture of modesty as to the thing done, and selfassertion as to his interest in doing it, which was charming. He acknowledged that the sum proposed for the aid which he required was inconsiderable; but it had been fixed by the proposed publisher. Should Mr. Mackenzie find that the labour was long he would willingly increase it. Then he com menced a conversation respecting the Greek dramatists, which had none of the air o it seemed that he did know his into the kenzie hesitated, and we suggested that it From Blackwood's Magazine. CHATTERTON.* tone of an examination, but which still served the purpose of enabling Mackenzie to show his scholarship. In that respect In the middle of last century, in the there was no doubt that the ragged, rednosed, disreputable man, who stood there year 1752, there was born, in the old town of Bristol, a child, perhaps the most relonging for his job, was the greater profi-markable of his entire generation, called cient of the two. We never discovered Thomas Chatterton. He was a posthumous that he had had access to books in later child, brought into the world with all that years; but his memory of the old things natural sadness which attends the birth of seemed to be perfect. When it was sug- an infant deprived, from the very beginning gested that references would be required, of its days, of one-half of the succour, love and protection to which every child has a right. The father might not be much to brag of might not have done much for his boy; but still there is nothing so forlorn as such an entrance into the world. And it was a hard world into which the boy came, full of the bitter conditions of poverty, with little to soften his lot. His mother was poor, and had to work hard for her living and his. She had no time to spare for him, to understand what kind of a soul it was which she had brought into the world. If nature even had given her capacity to understand it, the chatter of her little pupils, the weary toil of her needlework, absorbed the homely woman. The family to which she belonged was of the lowest class, and When money had passed, of course the thing was settled; but in truth the bank-yet possessed a certain quaint antiquity and As ancient as flavour of ancient birth. note had been given, not from judgment in many a great family of squires or nobles settling the matter, but from the generous were the Chattertons. The only difference impulse of the moment. There was, how to speak of between them and the Howards ever, no receding. The Doctor expressed was, that while the representative of the one by no hint a doubt as to the safety of his held the hereditary office of Earl Marshal manuscript. He was by far too fine a gen of England, the other held only that of tleman to give the man whom he employed gravedigger of St. Mary Redcliffe- but with pain in that direction. If there were risk, a hereditary succession as rigid and unhe would now run the risk. And so the broken. For a hundred and twenty years thing was settled. which could be clearly reckoned, and no one could tell how many more which had escaped in the darkness of time, Thomas had succeeded William, and William Thomas, in that lugubrious office. pedigree, such as it was, was complete. They had buried all Bristol, generation after generation. The race, however, was perhaps beginning to break up in preparation for that final bloom which was to give it a name among men, for Chatterton's father had not held the hereditary place. It had passed in the female line to a brotherin-law, and he had made a little rise in the social scale, first as usher, and then as master of a free school close to the hereditary church of St. Mary Redcliffe. Such a position implies some education, though probably it was neither profound nor extensive. He held the office of sub-chanter in the We did not, however, give the manuscript on that occasion into Mackenzie's hands, but took it down afterwards, locked in an old despatch-box of our own, to the Spotted Dog, and left the box with the key of it in the hands of Mrs. Grimes. Again we went up into that lady's bed-room, and saw that the big table had been placed by the window for Mackenzie's accommodation. It so nearly filled the room, that, as we observed, John Grimes could not get round at all to his side of the bed. It was arranged that Mackenzie was to begin on the morrow. It is now definitely announced by the German papers that "Janus" is not the work of Dr. Doillinger, but of Prof. Huber, who has been long known in Munich as a strong opponent of Papal claims. The Chatterton: a Biographical Study. By Daniel Wilson, LL.D. Macmillan, London. 1870. 66 cathedral at the same time; and was a the poor young woman. Probably it was member, it would appear, of the jovial her hope and longing from his birth that he society of tradesmen, deriving a certain should be educated as became the son of taste for music from the choral services of a scholar; and it broke her heart to find the cathedral, which probably many of them that " he was dull in learning, not knowing had taken part in, in their boyhood as many letters at four years old." These choristers, which assembled in those days were the days of infant prodigies - for this in certain well-known taverns. The most stupidity on the part of the little Chatternoticeable fact in his life, however, so far as ton does not strike us with the same dishis son is concerned, is his share in a kind may as it struck his mother. There were, of general robbery perpetrated by the com- however, other puzzling peculiarities about munity upon the muniment-room of St. the child. "Until he was six years and a Mary Redcliffe, where a number of old half old, they thought he was an absolute papers had been preserved for centuries in fool," says his mother's most intimate friend certain ancient oak chests. These chests who lived in the house. He was sent back were broken open in order to find some upon her hands by his father's successor in deeds wanted by the vestry, and were left, the free school, somewhere about that early with all their antique contents, at the mercy age, as an incorrigible dunce. Poor little of the gravedigger's family, or any other bothered melancholy boy! he would sit that could gain access to them. The parch-alone crying for hours, nobody knew why ments were carried off in boxfuls, to answer and the sense of disappointment so natall kinds of sordid uses. It was the usage ural to a female household finding out to its of the eighteenth century. No doubt if dismay that the little male creature belongany accident had befallen St. Mary's itself, ing to it was not (as it hoped) a creature the citizens would have carted off the stones of overwhelming ability, does not seem to to repair their garden-walls with. Chatter- to have been concealed from the child. ton the schoolmaster carried off the old 'When will this stupidity cease?" his parchments, covered copy-books with them, mother cried when he was in one of his and kept the records of medieval life like silent moods." She had little pupils of her waste paper about his house, ready to serve own, brisk little girls, learning their lessons, any small emergency. It was no such no doubt, with all the vivacity of town dreadful sin after all, to have been followed children kept alert by the tide of ordinary by so strange and solemn a punishment. life going on around them; and the contrast Was it that the ghosts of citizens whom must have been very galling to the young Thomas Chatterton had buried, came mother. At seven years old, we are told, clustering up, a crowd of angry spirits, to avenge the liberty thus taken with the yellow forgotten records of their wishes and hopes? The schoolmaster, thinking little of the ghosts or their vengeance, left his house full of those stolen documents, and thus left behind him, without knowing it, the fate of his unborn boy. The widow was young not more than one-and-twenty- when this child of tears was born. She was left, as is all but inevitable in such circumstances, penniless, to struggle for herself as best she could. When such a necessity happens to a poor lady, our hearts bleed over the helpless creature; but it is common, too common, to demand This dullness, however, lasted but a short any particular comment among the poor. time. With a certain curious, wasteful Mrs. Chatterton took up a little school, and Vandalism which seems to have been pecutook in needlework. She had a little daugh- liar to the age in small things as well as ter older than her boy; she had women-great, Mrs. Chatterton, who made threadfriends about her working with her, helping her to keep her head above water, and probably, after all, was not so very much to be pitied for the loss of her jovial husband, who, according to the record, kept his good-humour for his cronies out of doors. But her boy was a wonder and a trouble to 66 he would frequently sit musing in a seeming stupor; at length the tears would steal one by one down his cheeks for which his mother, thinking to rouse him, sometimes gave him a gentle slap, and told him he was foolish." No doubt it must have been very trying to the poor soul: her only boy, the son of a great scholard, and nothing more than this coming of him! One can forgive Mrs. Chatterton for giving that gentle slap to the weeping child over the fire. It is hard upon a widow to be driven to confess to herself that there is nothing more than ordinary nay, perhaps something less than ordinary about her fatherless boy. papers of the old parchments out of St. Mary's, tore up for waste paper an old music-book of her husband's. The moody child, sitting by, was suddenly attracted by the capital letters, which were illuminated, the story goes; so that it must have been a valuable book which his mother was thus de stroying. This was the first step in his ed- | pital. Bristol had already a grammarucation. He learned to read thereafter school, and the supplementary institution from a black-letter Bible, and never could was for poor children, and not by any means bear to read in a small book. In this quaint intended as a ladder to help them to asway the first difficulties were got over. cend. They had the blue gown and yellow One would think that to acquire modern stockings, and funny little round cap, called, English afterwards would have been almost apparently, a tonsure, in the Bristol school; as difficult as learning a new language; and but they had not the liberal education which the reader is tempted to wonder how any has made the London Bluecoat School so one in that homely, ignorant sempstress-famous. The children were to be "inhousehold should have been sufficiently at home in the black-letter to make a primer of it. Such, however, are the recorded facts. And what with the illuminated capitals and the black-letter book, the little fellow left off mooning, and woke up into the light of common day. "At seven he visibly improved, to her joy and surprise; and at eight years of age was so eager for books that he read from the moment he waked, which was early, until he went to bed, if they would let him." structed in the principles of the Christian religion as they are laid down in the Church Catechism," and not demoralized by Latin and Greek. Twice a-week this grand epitome of doctrine was to be expounded and brought down "to the meanest capacity according to the rules of the Hospital: poor fare enough for the little genius whom poverty shut out from any better training. The child, we are told, was elated at his election, “thinking," says his foster-mother, "he should there get all the learning he So early, it would appear, as this age, wanted; but soon he seemed much hurt, the child had appropriated to himself a as he said he could not learn so much there lumber room in which, among other rubbish, as at home." Thus curiously came the first were the boxes into which his father's spoils check upon his precocious hopes. No of old parchment had been turned; and doubt the vague fame of his father's learning here he was accustomed to shut himself up had been long held up before the boy, and with such treasures as pleased him most. it is equally certain that many of the old He had a turn for drawing, not unusual in documents with which he had surrounded children; and, instead of more ordinary himself must have been in Latin, puzzling playthings, he had collected "a great piece and tantalizing him in his childish eagerof ochre in a brown pan, pounce-bags fullness. Perhaps, with a child's confidence in of charcoal-dust, which he had from a Miss his own powers, he had felt equal to the Sanger, a neighbour; also a bottle of black- task of puzzling out the dead old solemn lead powder, which they once took to clean language by himself amid his ochre and his the stoves with, making him very angry." ." charcoal in the lumber-attic; and to come With these materials, and the unceasing to nothing but the Catechism was hard. supply of parchments to daub them on, what To be sure a certain amount of reading and delicious begrimings the little artist must writing must have accompanied the theolhave made! Here, for the first time, the ogy, and the life does not seem to have child becomes intelligible-perhaps an been a particularly hard one. Every Satinfant poet already, as some assert; but, urday he had holiday, and came home rewhat is better, an eager little boy, blacked joicing at noon to rush up to his attic and all over with his hideous pigments, and lose himself in his old dreams. When he making, no doubt, horrible pictures upon came down to tea he was all over stains his parchments and his walls and his floor. of black and yellow. There, at least, he They could not get him out of the room in must have been happy enough—though it which abode all this precious dirt. Some- was hard to get him to meals; and even times the key was carried off, out of anxiety | tea-time, fond as he was of tea, was not so for his health, and his clothes, and his little attractive as his parchments and his ochre. grimy face; but then the little man fell to Yet the boy apparently was at this time, kissing and coaxing till he got it back again. to all spectators, an ordinary enough boy, So long as he remained in Bristol this garret with nothing moody or abstracted about was the refuge and comfort of his life. him. He is described as a round-faced, When Chatterton was nearly eight years rosy child, with bright grey eyes, light hair, old he became a scholar of the Bluecoat and dimples in his cheeks; very frank and School of Bristol, an institution called Col- friendly, making acquaintances with a natuston's Hospital, founded by a merchant of ral ease scarcely to be expected from his Queen Anne's time, and therefore still in its other peculiarities, very affectionate at youth. The dress, but unfortunately nothing home, though impatient by moments, a charelse, was copied from that of Christ's Hos-acteristic not unusual in a schoolboy; and |