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treasures at a moment's notice; but it does | been on one of the summer days intervening not seem to have affected the minds of his that the two first met. Mr. Catcott was school-fellows, who dabbled in small verses walking with a friend in Redcliffe Church themselves, and were, each boy to his own when he was informed of the fact that sevconsciousness, as good men as he. It is eral ancient pieces of poetry had been curious to find that none of the admiring found there, and were in the possession of devotion with which every gifted schoolboy a young person" known to his informant. in a higher class is regarded by some at This news prompted him to seek Chatterton, least of his comrades, seems to have attended perhaps to call him in as he went past, into Chatterton. Probably this is explained by the shop already so well known to him, the lower range of breeding and training, which contained such à monument of his and that strange insensibility to personal skill. The boy showed not the least relucinfluence, and high esteem for self, which tance to speak of his discoveries; and, make the tradesman-class everywhere the according to Catcott's statement, gave him one least subject to any generous weakness at once The Bristowe Tragedie; or the of enthusiasm. The Bristol men who were Deth of Sir Charles Bawdin," and several boys with Chatterton were all indignant at of the smaller poems. Probably they were the mere suggestion that Rowley and he but submitted to his criticism and approbawere one. They were affronted by the idea. tion. He was a man with a library, and It was a personal injustice to them that their every possibility of getting at books was schoolfellow should be made out a genius. precious to the boy; and this was the comThey had no objection to his acknowledged mencement of a curious kind of friendship, writings, which they considered no better in which there seems to have been little than their own. But Rowley's poems, they regard on the one side or the other, but a were sure, with an indignation which had a considerable attempt at mutual profit. In touch of bitterness in it, were no more his Catcott's hands many of the MSS. remained writing than theirs. He had friends, but after Chatterton's death, and he does not he had nobody who believed in him-a seem to have made a generous use of them; curious distinction of the class in which he nor did any gleam of insight into the strange was born. Had he been a gentleman's son, story occur to the eyes of the self-occupied no doubt a young guard of honour, school- shopkeeper. He too received Rowley with fellows, college friends, half of the youth he undoubting faith. The boy was but a came across in his career, would have been charity-boy- one of the many blue-coated ready to risk their life in proof of his genius. urchins that swarmed past the shop-windows And the chances are, that in these circum- all the year round, and broke the panes, stances the lad himself would never have and got in everybody's way. Genius! Mr. been tempted to the fierce satire and bit- Catcott would have laughed at the idea. ter scorn of many of his youthful produc- The boy was old Chatterton's grandson, the tions. But it is necessary for us to accept gravedigger, and no doubt had got at the him as he is, a poor charity-boy among a set poems exactly as he said. Not the remotof young apprentices, Bristol tradesmen in est suspicion of a hoax seems to have disthe bud, all confident of being as good as turbed the composure or self-conceit of he or as any one, and capable of no worship these shallow men. And thus the boy of the greater spirit in their midst. went and came to Barrett, who probably gave him an occasional half-crown for the bits of curious information about old Bristol which he brought him from time to time, and who liked to see the light flash up in his great grey shining eyes; to Catcott, who received his MSS. with pompous pretended knowledge; and by-and-by to Catcott's clergyman brother, and other worthies of their set, no doubt with a wonder grow ing in his mind that no one divined the real source of all these marvels. One can imagine the lad's half-trouble, half-delight, in thus bewildering so many-and at the same time the wistful sense of uncomprehended power which must have grown upon him and driven him back to his visionary associates. We are told even that he tried more than once to confide in Barrett,

After the era of the pedigree, Chatterton seems to have gone on with a still stronger flight. He cannot have been more than fifteen, for he still wore the dress of his school, when he met with the other partner in the pewterer's firm. No doubt Burgum had exhibited proudly to his partner the proofs of his own splendid descent, and pointed out the passing schoolboy to whom he owed it; and Chatterton probably was attracted towards Catcott by the achievement above recorded, his crossing of the half-built bridge upon planks laid from pier to pier, with a daring-do worthy of any knight of romance. This event took place in June 1767; and in July of the same year the lad left school, and put off his yellow stockings and tonsure-cap; so it must have

faltering forth an admission that the fine | Twelve hours in the solitude of the office,

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where now and then the footboy or a maid from Mr. Lambert's would come on some pretended errand to make sure that he was there, for the attorney himself was almost always absent; two hours in the evening spent with his mother among her shreds and patches, or in the beloved lumber-room. Never did monk observe a severer routine of duty; and yet the poor boy was called a profligate: no imputation was ever more unjust or untrue.

and vigorous poem called the "Battle of Hastings," which he presented to the antiquary in his own handwriting, was actually his own composition, and done for a friend." Barrett, wise man of the world, not to be taken in by such fictions, laughed at the boy. He pressed him to produce the rest of the poem, which was accordingly done at intervals, in fragments, as they could be composed; and pressed him still further for the original MS., which the lad - amazed, disappointed, and yet filled But it would be wrong to suppose that who can wonder? with a certain mischiev- this intermediate period was a loss to Chatous contempt for the man who swallowed terton. Mr. Lambert's business seems to every fiction he chose to bring yet laughed have been a very light one, and his apprenat the truth-instantly began to fabricate. tice must have been as much oflice-boy as His docility in such a case is very compre- clerk-" he had little of his master's busihensible. All the fun of his schoolboy na- ness to do, sometimes not two hours in a ture, and all the scorn with which an inex- day," says his sister; and though he was perienced young soul looks upon stupidity supposed to be " improving himself in proand intellectual blindness, must have moved fessional knowledge" by copying precehim to fool his patron to the top of his bent. dents during the remainder of the long It was the man's sin, if any real sin was in lonely days, there was plenty of time left it, and not the boy's. for more congenial work. Nearly four hundred closely-written folio pages "" of these precedents are left to prove that he did not neglect even this musty workwhich is no small tribute to his sense of duty; for the master was absent, and there was no one to keep him to the grindstone, and so many inducements to drop away. The office contained, besides a library of law-books, a complete edititon of Camden's

In July 1767, Chatterton was transferred from school to the office of an attorney, to whom he was bound apprentice, the fee being supplied by the Hospital. He was to have no wages, but to be clothed, lodged, and maintained by his new employer, a Mr. Lambert to take his meals with the servants and sleep with the footboy; an arrangement which was supposed by all parties very satisfactory for a Blue-coat boy. So far as we are informed, he himself does not seem to have been any way revolted by it as we are; for it must be remembered that Chatterton as yet had only a boy's glorious sense of being able to do almost anything he tried the first and perhaps the most delicious sensation of geniuswithout knowing what was his own real standing among all the owls and bats who were so much more important in the world's eye than he. His office hours were from eight o'clock in the morning till eight in the evening, with an hour in the middle of the day for dinner, and he was expected to return to his master's house every night by ten o'clock. Two hours in the evening were thus all he had for recreation of any kind, and these he almost invariably spent at his mother's house. During the two years he remained with Mr. Lambert he was only once late in returning. These facts effectually dispose of all insinuations made against the poor boy's character. He never drank, avoiding even the most modest potations was fond of tea, and not, it would seem, without an innocent liking for confectionery, simplest of all the tastes of youth.

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Britannia;" and his friends whom he sup plied with a succession of wonders lent him books at least, which was some small return. A number of dictionaries of Saxon and early English, Speght's Chaucer," and various old chronicles, fed his mind and formed his style. We are told that he compiled from these authorities for his own use an elaborate glossary in archaic and modern English, which was his constant companion. There can be no doubt, as Sir Walter Scott suggests, that to master a style so cumbrously and artificially antique must have taken almost as much time as the learning of a new language; but yet there is a great deal in the trick of such a mode of writing, and we are inclined to believe that the real labour must have been in the compliation of the glossary, which made the rest easy enough—especially as the antiquity of the Rowley poems is entirely artificial; and the young poet does not seem to have felt that any study of the sentiments or forms of expression natural to the period was required to give an air of truthfulness to his productions, greedily and unhesitatingly as they were swallowed by all the authorities round him. The fact seems to have been that a

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"The fol

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"On Fridaie was the Time fixed for passing the newe Brydge: Aboute the Time of the Tollynge the tenth Clock, Master Greggorie Dalbenye, mounted on a Fergreyne Horse, enformed Master Maior all Thyngs were prepared; when two Beadils want fyrst streying fresh stre, next came a Manne dressed up as follows: Hose of Goatskyn, erinepart outwards, Doublet and Waystcoat also, over which a white Robe without sleeves, much like an albe, but not so longe, reeching but to his Lends; a girdle of Azure over his left shoulder, rechde also to his Lends on the Ryght, and doubled back to his Left, his knee; thereby representing a Saxon Elderbucklying with a Gouldin Buckel, dangled to man. In his hande he bare a shield, the Maystrie of Gille a Brogton, who painete l the same, representyng Sainet Warburgh crossynge the Ford. Then a mickle strong Manne, in armour, carried a huge anlace; after whom came six claryons and Minstrels, who sang the Song of Saincte Warburgh; then came Master Maior,

certain impetuous, almost feverish, haste of experience might be found. and impatience had come upon the lad un-lowing description of the Mayor's first passconsciously to himself. The silent moments ing over the Old Bridge, taken from an old flew over him as he laboured in that dreary MS., may not at this time be unacceptable little office. Something in him, something to the generality of your readers," he says, instinctive, inarticulate, incapable of giving signing himself" Dunelmus Bristoliensis, any warning of what was to come, had been to Farley's Bristol Journal;" and the acimpressed by a sense of the shortness of the companying extract was given with all fortime and the quantity of work to do. We mality as it is quoted. The reader will are informed repeatedly that the attorney perceive how, under the strange and overon his visits to the office tore up pages of elaborate marks of antiquity, are forms of poetry which he found in his clerk's hand- expression audaciously modern, and a genwriting, and which he perceived was not eral air of to-day, by which no true anlaw-work, nor within his range of compre- tiquary could ever be deceived: hension; so that it is perfectly probable that a much larger quantity of the Rowley poems was produced than those which have reached us. In his ignorance and innocence most likely the boy was swept along by an eager desire to set Rowley, and his time and ways and everything surrounding him the friends and citizens and noble knights who were so much kinder, nobler, and more true than anything in the eighteenth century - fully before his audience. He wanted, with a certain human longing at the bottom of all his childish trickery and intrigue, to convey to others some glimpse of that splendid visionary world which, from his earliest years, had surrounded himself. And he thought he had succeeded in doing so, poor, brilliant, foolish boy of genius! He thought his painfully-selected, uncouth words, and wonderful spelling, were no masquerade, but gave a real representation of the life he wanted to make ap-mounted on a white Horse, dight with sable parent to the world. Nothing could show more clearly his unsophisticated simplicity; for he believed in their truth himself as fervently as the most credulous of all his dupes, not in their truth of fact as the poems of Rowley, for that, of course, was impossible; but in their truth to the period they professed to represent, and real faith-a fulness to its characteristics-a belief which only shows how little educated, how simple and unacquainted with the history of the ages, and the difference between one and another, was the boy poet. The masquerade, transparent as it is to us, was reality to himself.

In 1768, when Chatterton was sixteen, after he had been a whole year in Mr. Lambert's office, the new bridge, over which, when half built, Catcott had ridden with so much silly braggadocio, was formally opened; and on occasion of this ceremony, Chatterton tried his hand at a mystification of the general public. He sent an extract to a local paper out of Rowley's wonderful stories, in which, it appeared, every kind of illustration appropriate to every variety

Trappyng, wrought about by the Nunnes of Saincte Kenna with gould and silver. Next followed the Eldermen and Cittie Broders' all fitly mounted and caparisoned; and after them procession of priests and friars, also singing St. Warburgh's Song.

"In thilk Manner reechyng the Brydge, the Manue with the aulace stole on the fyrst Top of Mound, yreed in the midst of the Bridge; then want up the Manne with the sheclde, after him the Minstrels and Clarions; and then the Preestes and Freeres, all in white Albs, makyng a most goodlie shewe; the Maior and Eldermen standying round, theie sang, with the sound of Clarions, the Song of Saincte Baldwyn: which beyng done, the Manne on the Top threwe with greet Myght his anlace into the see, and the Clarions sounded an auntiant charge and Forloyn: then theie sang againe the Songe of Saincte the Cross, where a Latin Sermon was preached Warburgh, and proceeded up Chryst's Hill to by Ralph de Blundeville. And with sound of clarion theie agayne went to the Brydge, and there dined; spendyng the rest of the Daie in Sportes and Plaies: the Freeres of Saincte Augustine doeyng the Plaie of the Knyghtes of Bristowe, making a greete Fire at Night on Kynwulph Hyll."

This bit of supposed antiquity caused a "If the reader turn from the biographer's considerable sensation in the town. It had pages to those of the historian and antiquary of been brought to the printing-office by a Bristol, for information about William Canynge stranger, and it was only on his return with the elder, merchant and mayor of Bristol in the another communication of a similar charac-age of Chaucer, when Edward III. and his ter that his identity was discovered. Cat-grandson Richard reigned; or for the facts concott, to whom the narrative was doubly interesting on account of his recent exploit, had made eager inquiries about the source from which it came, and was no doubt confirmed in his belief in Rowley by finding that this wonderful piece of narrative proceeded from the same inexhaustible stores. The boy appears to have been rather roughly handled by the printing-house people. His age and appearance altogether precluded the idea of his being the author; " and when peremptorily questioned as to where he got it, he drew back within himself, and became as obstinate as his

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cerning the younger Canynges of the times of win Fulford, or even of the good priest Rowley, the Roses; of Sir Symon de Byrtoune, Sir Bald- he suddenly finds himself involved in the most ludicrous perplexities. Mr. Barrett was, in earlier days, an undoubted believer in Rowley, and continued to welcome with unquestioning credulity the apt discoveries which were ever rewarding the researches of Chatterton among the old parchments purloined by his father from Redcliffe Church. Did the historian attempt to follow up his first chapter of British and Roman Bristol, with its Roman camps, roads, and coins, by a second, treating in like manner of Saxon and Norman Bristol, his mea

"So it is throughout the volume."

tioners were surly. It was only when they gre data are forthwith augmented by the discovsoftened, and begged for the information ery of an account by Turgot, a Saxon ecclesiaswhich he alone could afford, that he yielded. by Camden for the origin of the city, Of auntic, who lived not long after the time assigned He gave the same reply that he had already cient coynes found at and near Bristowe, with done to Catcott and Burgum that this the historie of the fyrst coynynge, by the Saxwas one of the many MSS. which his father onnes, done from the Saxon ynto Englyshe, by had taken from the muniment-room at Red- T. Rowlie.' From the same veracious pen folcliffe Church. At the very same time, how-lows an account of Mayster Canynge, hys cabiever, he showed to a certain John Rudhall, net of auntyaunte monuments;' the same being one of his comrades, with boyish impru- a wondrous library and antiquarian museum of dence, the process by which he prepared Bristol in the days of Henry VI. Did Leland his parchments and imitated the ancient fail the historian, painfully assiduous in rewriting. No doubt the publication of this searches into early ecclesiastical foundations: an scrap of history gave fresh energy to his old MS. of Rowley fortunately turns up, with dealings with Barrett, whom he served in valuable notes on St. Baldwyn's Chapelle in the strangest way, humouring his longing Magdalen, in the time of Earl Goodwyne; Seyncte Baldwyn's Street; the Chapelle of St. Mary for original documents, and inventing, as Austin's Chapelle, with its aunciauntrie and he went along, with a miraculous appropri- nice carvellynge; and other equally curious ateness to the need of the moment, which and apocryphal edifices. one would think must have excited some suspicion in the mind of the historian. Authorities do not generally drop down from heaven upon a writer exactly when he wants them in this lavish way. But no doubt seems to have crossed the mind of the antiquary. "No one surely ever had such good fortune as myself," he cried many years after ecstatically, in procuring MSS. and ancient deeds to help me in investigating the history and antiquities of this city." It does not seem ever to have occurred to the self-absorbed compiler that there was anything remarkable in the fact of the lad Chatterton being able to decipher and identify such documents, even had his possession of them been fully explained. He took everything for granted with the most admirable imbecility, and made the fullest use of them, as will be seen from the following account of his work, which we quote from Dr. Wilson:

It seems to have been only when he had thus fully convinced all the authorities round him—and of course such men as the Catcotts and Barrett were, till he saw through them, great men to the attorney's apprentice, the charity-boy and descendant of grave-diggers that Chatterton began to dream of fame and fortune. No doubt it must have been every way bad for the boy to fathom so speedily, and find out the narrowness and meanness of the only people he had to look up to. When he perceived with his clear eyes how utterly deceivable they were and yet how selfish, taking from him what they wanted without any attempt to help him, or the slightest appreciation of his powers, it is not wonderful if the natural impulse of arrogant youth to despise its pottering commonplace seniors, grew stronger and more bitter within him. He took these small luminaries as a type of the

critics and teachers of the world as in- these quaint delights of antiquity, half simudeed, to a certain extent, they were and lated, half real to see through the distrimmed his pinions to a loftier flight. As guise, and recognize the real poet? Such, he had taken in the wiseacres at home, no no doubt, was the poor lad's dream - and doubt he could take in the others outside such a dream has aroused, one time or the little world of Bristol, and make a step- another, every poetical youthful imaginaping-stone of them, and dash forth upon a tion. A sudden exhilaration seems to have universe where surely grand final hope filled his mind when this project dawned which represents some faith still in an ideal upon him. He could not, would not, doubt buman nature somebody was to be found its success. "He would often speak in who would know what all those hieroglyphics great raptures of the undoubted success of meant, and decipher the strange language his plan for future life," says his sister. and hail the new poet. There is the strang-"His ambition increased daily. His spirits est mixture of simplicity and cunning, be- were rather uneven, sometimes so gloomed lief in the credulity of others, and pathetic that for days together he would say but very credulity on his own part, in Chatterton's little, and apparently by constraint; at first attempt upon the larger world. He other times exceedingly cheerful. When wrote to Dodsley the publisher, offering in spirits he would enjoy his rising fame: "several ancient poems, and an interlude, confident of advancement, he would promise perhaps the oldest dramatic work extant, my mother and me that we should be parwrote by one Rowley, a priest in Bristol, takers of his success." who lived in the reigns of Henry VI. and Strangely enough, however, this pure imEdward IV." Receiving no answer to this pulse to seek a higher sphere and a patron letter, after an interval of two months he more likely to comprehend him, was carried wrote again, a pitiful epistle, giving an out by another of those amazing fictions_to account of the tragedy of "Ella," and ask- which his mind had grown familiar. He ing for "one guinea to enable him to pro- approached Walpole not as a young poet cure permission to copy it." Poor boy! seeking to make himself known, nor even The extreme poverty to which one guinea as the discoverer of a poet, but with a long, is a matter of importance has something quaint, very absurd, and, to our eyes, very pathetic in it, which drops a merciful veil transparent account of a multitude of medieover those little meannesses, by none more val painters, immortalized by Rowley, which bitterly felt than by those compelled to do might be used (he suggests) in a future them, which need produces. Whether he edition of Walpole's "Anecdotes of Paintreceived any answer at all to this painful ing"! Nothing more daring than this application there is no way of knowing. sudden creation of a Bristol school of paintBut shortly after, he made another and more ers, as numerous as the Umbrian or Venedignified effort. Horace Walpole, who is tian, and to all appearance quite as disso well known to us all a man of much tinguished, could be conceived; and it greater calibre than the Catcotts and Bar- shows the wonderful simplicity of the poor rett, yet who probably in the same circum- boy, and his unconsciousness of the fact stances would have been as easily deceived, that history did exist independent of Rowand as little conscious of Chatterton's real ley, and that his wonderful statement could qualities as they was, at the distance be put to its test. In the note which from which alone the Bristol boy could accompanied this extraordinary production regard such a potentate, as a god among he introduced himself to Walpole as a men. Distance, alas! has an immense deal brother dilettante. "Being versed a little to do with many reputations. A vague in antiquities, I have met with several dilated idea of the noble gentleman, who, curious MSS.," he says. No doubt this though already in the highest place which mode of approaching the great man seemed fortune could bestow, yet condescended to to the youth the perfection of craft and pruwrite, to take an interest in art, and to be- dence; and when he received in return a stow a glorious patronage upon its profes- courtly letter, complimenting him upon his sors, was the young poet's conception of learning, his urbanity, and politeness, and the dilettante of Strawberry Hill. He was couched in the terms due from one stately a patron worth having. a man whose student to another, it is not wonderful if he notice would open an entire world of hon- felt his hopes almost realized. The poor our and gladness to the ardent boy. He boy wrote again, not abandoning his granditoo, even, bad sinned, if it could be called loquent pretence as to Rowley, but bursting sin, in the same splendid way. Chatterton into a little personal history as well. He was Rowley; but was not Walpole the told his splendid correspondent that he was Baron of Otranto, able to understand all the son of a poor widow who supported