Born, at Bristol, 20 Nov. 1752. Educated at Colston’s Hospital, Bristol, Aug. 1760 to July 1767. First poems printed in “Farley’s Bristol Journal,” 1763 and 1764. Apprenticed to a Bristol attorney, July 1767. First of “Rowley” poems written, 1768. Success with pseudo-antique poems. Apprentice indentures cancelled, April 1770. Left Bristol for London, 24 April 1770. Contributed to various periodicals, but resources gradually failed. Only one poem separately printed in lifetime. Committed suicide, 25 Aug. 1770. Buried in Shoe Lane Workhouse Churchyard. Afterwards transferred to graveyard in Gary’s Inn Road. Works: “An Elegy on the much lamented death of William Beckford, Esq.” (anon.), 1770. Posthumous: “The Execution of Sir Charles Baldwin” (ed. by T. Eagles), 1772; “Poems supposed to have been written at Bristol, by Thomas Rowley and others” (ed. by T. Tyrwhitt), 1777 (2nd edn., same year); “Miscellanies in Prose and verse” (ed. by J. Broughton), 1778; “Rowley” poems, ed. by Dean Milles, 1782; Supplement to “Miscellanies,” 1784; “Rowley” poems, ed. by L. Sharpe, 1794; “The Revenge,” 1795. Poetical Works: in 1 vol., 1795; in 3 vols., 1803; in 2 vols., 1875; in 1 vol., 1885. Life: by Gregory, 1789; by Davis (with letters) 1806; by Dix, 1837; by Wilson, 1869, and memoirs in edns. of works.

Personal

  Sir,—Upon recollection I don’t know how Mr. Clayfield could come by his letter; as I intended to have given him a letter, but did not. In regard to my motives for the supposed rashness, I shall observe that I keep no worse company than myself. I never drink to excess; and have, without vanity, too much sense to be attracted to the mercenary retailers of iniquity. No! it is my pride, my damn’d native, unconquerable pride, that plunges me into distraction. You must know that 19–20ths of my composition is pride. I must either live a slave, a servant; have no will of my own, no sentiments of my own which I may freely declare as such; or die!—perplexing alternative. But it distracts me to think of it. I will endeavour to learn humility, but it cannot be here. What it will cost me on the trial Heaven knows!
  I am your much obliged, unhappy, humble Servant,

  EDWIN CROSS, APOTHECARY, BROOK STREET, HOLBORN. Knew the deceased well, from the time he came to live with Mrs. Angell in the same street. Deceased used generally to call on him every time he went by his door, which was usually two or three times in a day: Deceased used to talk a great deal about physic, and was very inquisitive about the natures of different poisons. I often asked him to take a meal with us, but he was so proud that I could never but once prevail on him, though I knew he was half-starving. One evening he did stay, when I unusually pressed him. He talked a great deal, but all at once became silent, and looked quite vacant. He used to go very often to Falcon Court, Fleet Street, to a Mr. Hamilton, who printed a magazine; but who, he said, was using him very badly. I once recommended him to return to Bristol, but he only heaved a deep sigh; and begged me, with tears in his eyes, never to mention the hated name again. He called on me on the 24th August about half-past eleven in the morning, and bought some arsenic, which he said was for an experiment. About the same time next day, Mrs. Wolfe ran in for me, saying deceased had killed himself. I went to his room, and found him quite dead. On his window was a bottle containing arsenic and water; some of the little bits of arsenic were between his teeth. I believe if he had not killed himself, he would soon have died of starvation; for he was too proud to ask of anyone. Witness always considered deceased as an astonishing genius.

  Unfortunate boy! poorly wast thou accommodated during thy short sojourning among us;—rudely wast thou treated,—sorely did thy feeling soul suffer from the scorn of the unworthy; and there are, at last, those who wish to rob thee of thy only meed, thy posthumous glory. Severe, too, are the censurers of thy morals. In the gloomy moments of despondency, I fear thou has uttered impious and blasphemous thoughts, which none can defend, and which neither thy youth, nor thy fiery spirit, nor thy situation, can extenuate. But let thy more rigid censors reflect, that thou wast literally and strictly but a boy. Let many of thy bitterest enemies reflect what were their own religious principles, and whether they had any, at the age of fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen…. In return for the pleasure I have received from thy poems, I pay thee, poor boy, the trifling tribute of my praise. Thyself thou has emblazoned; thine own monument thou has erected. But they whom thou has delighted, feel a pleasure in vindicating thine honours from the rude attacks of detraction.

  I am always intending to draw up an account of my intercourse with Chatterton, which I take very kindly you remind me of, but some avocation or other has prevented it. My perfect innocence on having indirectly been an ingredient in his dismal fate, which happened two years after our correspondence, and after he had exhausted both his resources and his constitution, have made it more easy to prove that I never saw him, knew nothing of his ever being in London, and was the first person, instead of the last, on whom he had practiced his impositions, and founded his chimeric hopes of promotion. My very first, or at least second letter, undeceived him in those views, and our correspondence was broken off before he quitted his master’s business at Bristol; so that his disappointment with me was but his first ill success; and he resented my incredulity so much, that he never condescended to let me see him. Indeed, what I have said now to you, and which cannot be controverted by a shadow of a doubt, would be sufficient vindication. I could only add to the proofs, a vain regret of never having known his distresses, which his amazing genius would have tempted me to relieve, though I fear he had no other claim to compassion.

  The activity of his mind is indeed almost unparalleled. But our surprise must decrease, when we consider that he slept but little; and that his whole attention was directed to literary pursuits; for he declares himself so ignorant of his profession, that he was unable to draw out a clearance from his apprenticeship, which Mr. Lambert demanded. He was also unfettered by the study of the dead languages, which usually absorb much of the time and attention of young persons; and though they may be useful to the attainment of correctness, perhaps they do not much contribute to fluency in writing. Mr. Catcott declared, that when he first knew Chatterton, he was ignorant even of Grammar…. The person of Chatterton, like his genius, was premature; he had a manliness and dignity beyond his years, and there was a something about him uncommonly prepossessing. His most remarkable feature was his eyes, which though grey, were uncommonly piercing; when he was warmed in argument, or otherwise, they sparkled with fire, and one eye, it is said, was still more remarkable than the other.

	Oh, ill-starr’d Youth, whom Nature form’d in vain,
	With powers on Pindus’ splendid height to reign!
	O dread example of what pangs await
	Young Genius struggling with malignant fate!

	Yet as with streaming eye the sorrowing muse,
	Pale Chatterton’s untimely urn bedews;
	Her accents shall arraign the partial care,
	That shielded not her son from cold despair.

	Sweet Flower of Hope! free Nature’s genial child!
	That didst so fair disclose thy early bloom,
	Filling the wide air with a rich perfume!
	*        *        *        *        *
	Poor Chatterton! he sorrows for thy fate
	Who would have praised and loved thee, ere too late,
	Poor Chatterton! farewell! of darkest hues
	This chaplet cast I on thy unshaped tomb;
	But dare no longer on the sad theme muse,
	Lest kindred woes persuade a kindred doom:
	For oh! big gall-drops, shook from Folly’s wing,
	Have blackened the fair promise of my spring;
	And the stern Fate transpierced with viewless dart
	The last pale Hope that shivered at my heart!
	*        *        *        *        *
	O Chatterton! that thou wert yet alive! *        *        *        *        *
	We, at sober eve, would round thee throng,
	Hanging, enraptured, on thy stately song,
	And greet with smiles the young-eyed Poesy
	All deftly masked as hoar Antiquity.
	*        *        *        *        *
	Sweet Harper of time-shrouded Minstrelsy!

	The Bard, to dark despair resign’d,
	With his expiring art,
	Sings, midst the tempest of his mind,
	The shipwreck of his heart.
	If Hope still seem to linger nigh,
	And hover o’er his head,
	Her pinions are too weak to fly,
	Or Hope ere now had fled.
	Rash Minstrel! who can hear thy songs,
	Nor long to share thy fire?
	Who read thine errors and thine wrongs,
	Nor execrate the lyre?
	The lyre, that sunk thee to the grave,
	When bursting into bloom,
	That lyre, the power to Genius gave
	To blossom in the tomb.
	Yes;—till his memory fail with years,
	Shall Time thy strains recite;
	And while thy story swells his tears,
	Thy song shall charm his flight.

	I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy,
	The sleepless Soul that perish’d in his pride.

  As to his person, his sister said that he was thin of body, but neatly made; that his features were by no means handsome, and yet, notwithstanding, the tout-ensemble was striking; which arose, she conceived, from the wonderful expression of his eyes, and more particularly of the left eye, which, to use her own words, seemed at times, from its brilliancy, “to flash fire.” She then proceeded to acquaint me that some malevolent aspersions had been thrown out as to his moral character, and particularly his being partial to the society of abandoned women, which she positively denied, with tears in her eyes; stating that he was the best and most tender of brothers, never enjoying so much satisfaction as when he could present them some little token of his affection; that he always kept good hours at night, to her certain knowledge; and that by day he was by far too much taken up with books and his occupations to be a loose character.—As to his having a predilection for some female, she told me she believed that to have been the case; but, to the best of her knowledge, and from her soul (she assured me) she spoke it, no stain whatsoever could attach itself to his moral conduct.

  This boy [a nephew of Mr. Walmsley] who was the bedfellow of Chatterton, informed Mr. Croft that Chatterton used to sit up all night reading and writing; that he never came to bed till very late, often three or four o’clock, but that he was always awake when he waked, and got up at the same time. He lived chiefly upon a half-penny roll, or a tart and some water…. He did not, however, wholly abstain from meat, for he was once or twice known to take a sheep’s tongue out of his pocket…. Early in July Chatterton left his lodgings in Shoreditch, and went to lodge with Mrs. Angel, a sock-maker, in Brook Street, Holborn. It were an injury not to mention historically the lodgings of Chatterton, for every spot he made his residence has become poetical ground…. Of his extreme indigence there is positive testimony. Mrs. Angel remembers that for two days, when he did not absent himself from his room, he went without food…. Pressed hard by indigence and its companions, gloom and despondency, the mind of Chatterton became disordered, and on the night of the 24th of August, 1770, he swallowed a large dose of opium, which caused his death…. The inquest of the jury was brought in insanity, and the body of Chatterton was put into a shell, and carried unwept, unheeded, and unowned to the burying-ground of the workhouse in Shoe Lane.

  He became an infidel, but whether this was in consequence of any course of reading into which he had fallen, or that he found it convenient to get rid of the obligations which stood in the way of his past or future schemes, it is not very material to inquire…. In his writings we find some passages that are more licentious than could have been expected from a young man unhackneyed in the way of vice, but not more so than might be expected in one who was premature in every thing, and had exhausted the stock of human folly at an age when it is usually found unbroken. All his deceptions, his prevarications, his political tergiversation, &c., were such as should have been looked for in men of an advanced age, hardened by evil associations, and soured by disappointed pride or avarice.

  When we conceive the inspired boy transporting himself in imagination back to the days of his fictitious Rowley, embodying his ideal character, and giving to airy nothing a “local habitation and a name,” we may forget the impostor in the enthusiast, and forgive the falsehood of his reverie for its beauty and ingenuity.

	Marvellous boy, whose antique songs and unhappy story
	Shall, by gentle hearts, be in mournful memory cherished
	Long as thy ancient towers endure, and the rocks of St. Vincent,
	Bristol! my birthplace dear.

	O Chatterton! how very sad thy fate!
	Dear child of sorrow—son of misery!
	How soon the film of death obscur’d that eye,
	Whence Genius mildly flash’d, and high debate.
	How soon that voice, majestic and elate,
	Melting in dying numbers! Oh! how nigh
	Was night to thy fair morning. Thou didst die
	A half-blown flow’ret which cold blasts amate.
	But this is past: thou art among the stars
	Of highest Heaven: to the rolling spheres
	Thou sweetly singest: nought thy hymning mars,
	Above the ingrate world and human fears.
	On earth the good man base detraction bars
	From thy fair name, and waters it with tears.

  He would sometimes, for days together, go in and out of the house without speaking to any one, and seemingly absorbed in thought. After such occasions he frequently called some of his associates into his room, and read them some portions of Rowley.

  A native aptitude to self-sufficiency, pertinacity, and scorn of interference or censure, gave a ready admission into the formation of his character of the unmitigated effect of every thing that, in the circumstances of his situation, tended to create a predominance of the qualities we are describing. Growing up separate and alien, in a great degree, from the social interests and sentiments which bind men together, he was habitually ready and watchful for occasions to practise on their weakness and folly, and to indulge a propensity to annoyance by satire. He would play off the witty malice, no matter who was the object. He was a very Ishmael with this weapon. It is somewhere his own confession that, when the mood was on him, he spared neither foe nor friend. Very greatly amusing as it may well be believed that his company was when he chose to give it, nobody was safe against having his name, with his peculiarities, his hobby, his vanity, hitched into some sarcastic stanza. Men must not be expected to sympathize very kindly with the mortifications of a person, who, whatever be his talents, demands that such temper and habits shall be no obstruction to advancement in society.

  The house in which Chatterton was born was behind a shop nearly opposite the northwest corner of the church; and the monument to the young poet, lately erected by subscription, has been very appropriately placed in a line between this house and the north porch of the church in which he professed to have found the Rowley MSS. This monument is a Gothic erection, much resembling an ancient cross, and on the top stands Chatterton, in the dress of Colston’s school, and with an unfolded roll of parchment in his hand. This monument was erected under the care and from the design of John Britton, the antiquary, who, so much to his honor, long zealously exerted himself to rescue Chatterton’s memory from apparent neglect in his native city. The man who can gaze on this monument; can contemplate the boyish figure and face of the juvenile poet; can glance from this quarter, where he was born in poverty, to that old porch, where he planned the scheme of his fame; and can call to mind what he was and what he did without the profoundest sensations of wonder and regret, may safely pass through life without fear of an astonishment. It is, in my opinion one of the most affecting objects in Great Britain. How much, then, is that feeling of sympathy and regret augmented when you approach, and, upon the monument, read the very words written by the inspired boy himself for his supposed monument, and inserted in his “will.”

	“To the Memory of
	Thomas Chatterton.
	Reader, judge not: if thou art a Christian—believe that he shall be judged by a Superior Power; to that Power alone is he now answerable.”

  A little beyond Snow Hill is Shoe Lane, running from Holborn into Fleet Street. In the burial ground of Shoe Lane workhouse was interred the ill-fated poet, Thomas Chatterton. The ground in which he lies buried now forms a part of Farringdon Market, immediately adjoining Shoe Lane, but the exact site of his resting place is unfortunately unknown.

  The first place that I visited was connected with a far deeper tragedy, the beautiful church of St. Mary Redcliffe. I climbed up to the muniment room over the porch, now and forever famous, and sitting down on the stone chest then empty, where poor Chatterton pretended to have found the various writings he attributed to Rowley, and from whence he probably did obtain most of the ancient parchment that served as his material, I could understand the effect that the mere habit of haunting such a chamber might produce upon a sensitive and imaginative boy…. A most painful irreligious paper, called his will, written, let us hope, under the influence of the same phrensy that prompted his suicide, is shown in a glass case in the museum at Bristol.

  Although Walpole was very indignant at Chatterton’s attempt to impose upon him, in the course of his own career he affords several instances of having indulged in similar deceptions…. Walpole quite forgot his own offences in the greatness of his anger at the offence of the Bristol apprentice—possibly imagining, that what was the most natural thing in the world, when done by a gentleman of family, was altogether unpardonable when attempted by a boy just emancipated from a charity school.

  Besides being an antiquarian, and a creative genius in the element of the English antique, Chatterton was also, in the year 1769–70, a complete and very characteristic specimen of that long-extinct phenomenon, a thinking young Englishman of the early part of the reign of George III. In other words, reader, besides being, by the special charter of his genius, a poet in the Rowley vein, he was also, by the more general right of his life at that time, very much such a young fellow as your own unmarried great-great-grandfather was.

  That he was, in one sense of the word, profligate—that is, that he was a habitual and gross liar, and not restrained by any religious or moral principle from saying or writing that which he knew to be false, for the sake of gain,—is too clear; but that he was profligate as the word is used with reference to sensual immorality, at least in such way as should account for pecuniary distress, I do not believe.

  At every step it is needful to recall this fact of boyhood, apart from every other adverse element of orphanage, poverty, and misguidance. For the study is that of a child, a boy, a youth, running counter to all the tastes and habits of his age; acting in defiance of ordinary influences; at every stage doing a man’s work: often unwisely, perversely, unaccountably; but still doing the work of a man, and baffling the astute selfishness of men, while yet a child. Viewed in its most unfavourable aspects, such an intellectual phenomenon may well attract our study, as a strange example of precocity, approximating, almost to genius acting by instinct: like those manifestations of irrational vital action, which puzzle us by their resemblance to the highest intelligence. But the brief existence here retraced has also its phases of sorrowful, and even tragic interest, on which we now look back as on a precious inheritance which that eighteenth century wasted and flung aside.

  Thomas Chatterton, whose forgery consisted in publishing his own compositions as the poems of Rowley, who lived in the fifteenth century, was an infidel in profession and a libertine in practice; and as he was the most precocious in genius, so was he the most circumstantial in falsehood, of the literary forgers of the age. That his suicide was premeditated is undoubted…. He chose to leave Bristol, where he had many friends, to seek his fortune in London, where he had none; and, when he failed, was too proud to return to his native city. To complain of the “cold neglect” of the world with regard to a boy of eighteen, however great his genius, is quite preposterous. But it was the fashion to consider he was neglected and starved, and epigrams, such as the following, were written on him (“Asylum for Fugitive Pieces,” 1785, 118):

	All think, now Chatterton is dead,
	His works are worth preserving!
	Yet no one, when he was alive,
	Would keep the bard from starving!

Johnson, Goldsmith, and a hundred others, who were nearly starved at eighteen, persevered and won their way to fame, as Chatterton might have done, had his character been of a higher stamp.

	With Shakspeare’s manhood at a boy’s wild heart,—
	Through Hamlet’s doubt to Shakspeare near allied,
	And kin to Milton through his Satan’s pride,—
	At Death’s sole door he stooped, and craved a dart;
	And to the dear new bower of England’s art,—
	Even to that shrine Time else had deified,
	The unuttered heart that soared against his side,—
	Drove the fell point, and smote life’s seals apart.
	Thy nested home-loves, noble Chatterton;
	The angel-trodden stair thy soul could trace
	Up Redcliffe’s spire; and in the world’s armed space
	Thy gallant sword-play:—these to many an one
	Are sweet for ever; as thy grave unknown
	And love-dream of thine unrecorded face.

  Chatterton’s remains, enclosed in a shell, were interred in the Shoe Lane workhouse burying-ground on 28 Aug. 1770, as appears from the register of burials at St. Andrew’s, Holborn, where the name is entered as “William Chatterton,” to which another hand has added “the poet.” Years afterwards, when that site had to be cleared for the building up of the new Farringdon Market, the paupers’ bones, all huddled together, were removed to the old graveyard in the Gray’s Inn Road. A wildly improbable story about the exhumation and reinterment of his remains at Bristol was first told by George Cumberland in Dix’s Appendix A (p. 299), and afterwards reiterated more in detail by Joseph Cottle in Pryce’s “Memorials of the Canynges Family” (p. 293). A still wilder story was put forth in 1853 by Mr. Gutch in “Notes and Queries” (vii. 138, 139) and which purported to be an authentic record of the coroner’s inquest on the occasion of Chatterton’s suicide. Four years afterwards, however, Mr. Moy Thomas was able to demonstrate, from the parish books of St. Andrew’s, Holborn, in the “Athenæum” of 5 Dec., 1857, the spurious character of the whole narrative. The books also showed that Chatterton died in the first house from Holborn on the left-hand side, the last number of all in Brooke Street, No. 39.

	Below, an open window kept
	Old books in rare display,
	Where critics drowsed and poets slept
	Till Grub Street’s judgment-day.
	One book brought care again to me,—
	The book of Rowley’s rhyme,
	That Chatterton, in seigneury
	Of song, bore out of time.
	The merchant of such ware, unseen,
	Watched spider-like the street;
	He came forth, gray, and spider-thin,
	And talked with grave conceit.
	Old books, old times,—he drew them nigh
	At Chatterton’s pale spell:
	“’Twas Brook Street,” said he, “saw him die,
	Old Holborn knew him well.”
	The words brought back in sudden sway
	That new-old tale of doom;
	It seemed the boy but yesterday
	Died in his lonely room.
	Without, the press of men was heard;
	I heard, as one who dreamed,
	The hurrying throng, the singing bird,
	And yesterday it seemed.
	And as I turned to go, the tale
	This pensive requiem made,
	As though within the churchyard’s pale
	The boy was newly laid:
	Perhaps, who knows? the hurrying throng
	Gave hopeless thoughts to him;
	I fancy how he wandered, long,
	Until the light grew dim.
	The windows saw him come and pass
	And come and go again,
	And still the throng swept by—alas!
	The barren face of men.
	And when the day was done, the way
	Was lost in lethal deeps:
	Sweet Life!—what requiem to say?—
	“’Tis well, ’tis well, he sleeps.”

  The public of 1830 permitted itself to be moved by the misfortune of Chatterton; it pitied that ulcerated soul, for whom the fatal result of genius is suicide. When the work is reproduced thirty years later, the audience advises the poor devil “to sell his boots.”

  Perhaps it may be more than an idle fancy to attribute to heredity the bent which Chatterton’s genius took spontaneously and almost from infancy; to guess that some mysterious ante-natal influence—“striking the electric chain wherewith we are darkly bound”—may have set vibrating links of unconscious association running back through the centuries. Be this as it may, Chatterton was the child of Redcliffe Church. St. Mary stood by his cradle and rocked it; and if he did not inherit with his blood, or draw in with his mother’s milk a veneration for her ancient pile, at least the waters of her baptismal font seemed to have signed him with the token of her service. Just as truly as “The Castle of Otranto” was sprung from Strawberry Hill, the Rowley poems were born of St. Mary’s Church.

  We all know the history of Chatterton: what would be the history of a Chatterton of the present day? I will tell it, taking a living example, from my own knowledge. As a boy he was bookish: he devoured all the books he could lay hands upon: he borrowed and read: at school he was easily first: at home he locked himself up and secretly wrote poetry: already he had joined the fraternity of those who write. When he left school, at which he had learned shorthand, he was placed in a newspaper office. Here he reported meetings and lectures and police cases: he picked up news; he shaped the paragraph: he made himself generally useful: presently he began to write descriptive papers: he reviewed books: all this time he was giving his leisure hours—which were not too many—to the cultivation of literature. And at last he brought out his first work—a volume of poems perhaps: or a volume of fiction or a volume of essays—with the help of which he introduced himself. His name now began to appear in magazines, and more and more frequently—yet he remained on his newspaper: he was not in the least danger of starving: he was, on the contrary, well fed and fairly prosperous. But he drifted more and more into authorship. He has now become well known as a writer. If he is wise he will continue to write for the papers as well as the magazines. Perhaps at last the day will come when he will be fully justified in trusting to himself, and can give up the newspaper work. But he will never quite give up his connection with journalism. Very likely he will be appointed editor of some magazine: he may be invited to advise on some great publishing firm: he may be appointed literary editor of a great morning paper. That would be the modern career of a new Chatterton.

General

  Johnson said of Chatterton, “This is the most extraordinary young man that has encountered my knowledge. It is wonderful how the whelp has written such things.”

  I think poor Chatterton was an astonishing genius…. The prematurity of Chatterton’s genius is, however, full as wonderful, as that such a prodigy as Rowley should never have been heard of till the eighteenth century. The youth and industry of the former are miracles, too, yet still more credible. There is not a symptom in the poems, but the old words, that savours of Rowley’s age—change the old words for modern, and the whole construction is of yesterday.

  We find, among these Poems, Odes in irregular metres, Eclogues of the Pastoral kind, and Discoursing Tragedies; compositions, for not one of which any example could be found in England in the XVth century. Even in those compositions, of which the species was not entirely unknown, it is impossible not to observe a striking difference from the other compositions of that age, with respect to the manner in which they are constructed, and the subjects to which they are applied. Instead of tedious chronicles we have here interesting portions of history, selected and embellished with all the graces of epic poetry; instead of devotional hymns, legendary tales, and moralizations of scripture, we have elegant little poems upon charitie and happinesse, a new church, a living worthy, and other occurrences of the moment: no translations from the French, no allusions to the popular authors of the middle ages; nothing, in short, of what we see in so many other writers about that time. If Rowley really lived and wrote these poems in the XVth century, he must have stalked about, like Tiresias among the Homeric ghosts—

“He only wise, the rest mere fleeting shades.”

  On the whole, I am inclined to believe, that these poems were composed by the son of the school-master before mentioned; who inherited the inestimable treasures of Cannynge’s chest in Radcliffe-church, as I have already related at large. This youth, who died at eighteen, was a prodigy of genius: and would have proved the first of English poets, had he reached a maturer age.

  Nor does my memory supply me with any human being, who, at such an age, with such disadvantages, has produced such compositions. Under the heathen mythology, superstition and admiration would have explained all, by bringing Apollo upon earth; nor would the god ever have descended with more credit to himself.

  Gentlemen of the jury, the prisoner at the bar is indicted for the uttering certain poems composed by himself, purporting them to be the poems of Thomas Rowley, a priest of the fifteenth century, against the so frequently disturbed peace of Parnassus, to the great disturbance and confusion of the Antiquary Society, and likewise notoriously to the prejudice of the literary fame of the said Thomas Chatterton.

  Chatterton’s conduct and opinions were early tinctured with irreligion. How must his mind have laboured under the burden of describing pathetically the pleasures of virtue and the rewards of religion; which are so frequently mentioned in these poems, though they had not made their proper impression on his heart!

  The greatest genius England has produced since the days of Shakespear.

  For Chatterton, he was a gigantic genius, and might have soared I know not whither.

  On Monday, April 29, he [Johnson] and I made an excursion to Bristol, where I was entertained with seeing him enquire upon the spot, into the authenticity of “Rowley’s Poetry,” as I had seen him enquire upon the spot into the authenticity of “Ossian’s Poetry.” George Catcot, the pewterer, who was as zealous for Rowley, as Dr. Hugh Blair was for Ossian, (I trust my Reverend friend will excuse the comparison), attended us at our inn, and with a triumphant air of lively simplicity called out, “I’ll make Dr. Johnson a Convert.” Dr. Johnson, at his desire, read aloud some of Chatterton’s fabricated verses, while Catcot stood at the back of his chair, moving himself like a pendulum, and beating time with his feet, and now and then looking into Dr. Johnson’s face, wondering that he was not yet convinced. We called on Mr. Barret the surgeon, and saw some of the originals as they were called, which were executed very artificially; but from a careful inspection of them, and a consideration of the circumstances with which they were attended, we were quite satisfied of the imposture, which, indeed, has been clearly demonstrated from internal evidence, by several able critics.

  That the Rowley-poems are thus printed as the Works of Chatterton, will not surprise the public, though it may perhaps renew a controversy in which much talent has been mis-employed. The merit of these poems has been long acknowledged. Whatever be the value of the others, the Editors hope they have performed an acceptable, as they know it to be a useful labour, in thus collecting, so far as they have been able, all the productions of the most extraordinary young man that ever appeared in this country. They have felt peculiar pleasure, as natives of the same city, in performing this act of justice to his fame and to the interests of his family.

  As Rowley, Chatterton had put forth his whole strength, and exerted himself to the utmost, in describing those scenes of antique splendour which captivated his imagination so strongly. But when he wrote in his own character, he was under the necessity of avoiding every idea, subject, or expression, however favourite, which could tend to identify the style of Chatterton with that of Rowley; and surely it is no more to be expected that, thus cramped and trammelled, he should equal his unrestrained efforts, than that a man should exert the same speed with fetters on his limbs, as if they were at liberty.

  Chatterton had written a political essay for “The North Briton,” which opened with the preluding flourish of “A spirited people freeing themselves from insupportable slavery:” it was, however, though accepted, not printed, on account of the Lord Mayor’s death. The patriot thus calculated the death of his great patron!

		£.	s.	d.
	Lost by his death in this Essay,	1	11	6
	Gained in Elegies,	£2	2
	———in Essays,	3	3
		5	5	0
	Am glad he is dead by	£3	13	6

  I cannot find in Chatterton’s works anything so extraordinary as the age at which they were written. They have a facility, vigour, and knowledge, which were prodigious in a boy of sixteen, but which would not have been so in a man of twenty. He did not shew extraordinary powers of genius, but extraordinary precocity. Nor do I believe he would have written better had he lived. He knew this himself, or he would have lived. Great geniuses, like great kings, have too much to think of to kill themselves; for their mind to them also “a kingdon is.” With an unaccountable power coming over him at an unusual age, and with the youthful confidence it inspired, he performed wonders, and was willing to set a seal on his reputation by a tragic catastrophe. He had done his best; and, like another Empedocles, threw himself into Ætna, to ensure immortality.

	INSCRIBED,
	WITH EVERY FEELING OF PRIDE AND REGRET
	AND WITH “A BOWED MIND,”
	TO THE MEMORY OF
	THE MOST ENGLISH OF POETS EXCEPT
	SHAKESPEARE,
	THOMAS CHATTERTON.

  Had Chatterton possessed sufficient manliness of mind to know the magnanimity of patience, and been aware that great talents have a commission from Heaven, he would not have deserted his post, and his name might have been paged with Milton.

  Chatterton’s language is entirely northern. I prefer the native music of it to Milton’s, cut by feet.

  The inequality of Chatterton’s various productions may be compared to the disproportions of the ungrown giant. His works had nothing of the definite neatness of that precocious talent which stops short in early maturity. His thirst for knowledge was that of a being taught by instinct to lay up materials for the exercise of great and undeveloped powers. Even in his favourite maxim, pushed it might be to hyperbole, that a man by abstinence and perseverance might accomplish whatever he pleased, may be traced the indications of a genius which nature had meant to achieve works of immortality. Tasso alone can be compared to him as a juvenile prodigy. No English poet ever equalled him at the same age.

  We are told in the life of Chatterton, that, in his early boyhood, he was reckoned of very dull intellect, till he “fell in love,” as his mother expressed it, with the illuminated capitals of an old musical manuscript, in French, from which she taught him his letters…. It is impossible to think of the subsequent history of this wonderful young man, without tracing a probable connexion of those accidental circumstances, which could not fail to give a peculiar importance to certain conceptions, with the character of that genius, which was afterwards to make grey-headed erudition bend before it, and to astonish at least all those on whom it did not impose.

  Nothing indeed is more wonderful in the Rowley poems than the masterly style of versification which they frequently display. Few more exquisite specimens of this kind can be found in our language than the Minstrel’s song in Ælla, beginning,

O sing unto my roundelay.

A young poet may be expected to describe warmly and energetically whatever interests his fancy or his heart; but a command of numbers would seem to be an art capable of being perfected only by long-continued and diligent endeavours. It must be recollected, however, that much might be done in the time which was at Chatterton’s disposal, when that time was undivided by the study of any other language but his own.

  I have said that there was not a new book written within these ten years. In the days of our fathers, it would have been necessary, at least, to mention as a forgery the celebrated poems attributed to Thomas Rowley. But probably no one person living believes in their authenticity.

  It may be observed, before we close the chapter, that Chatterton has used the Spenser-staves, in the poems which he ascribed to Rowley. This anachronism would, of itself, be sufficient to prove the forgery, even though it had baffled every other test, which modern criticism has applied to it.

  We have never thought that the world lost more in the “marvellous boy,” Chatterton, than a very ingenious imitator of obscure and antiquated dulness.

  There can be no doubt of the admirable merit of the poems themselves; they are full of genius, and some of them are in the highest degree dignified and sublime; but this beauty and sublimity are certainly not of the fifteenth century; so that whatever glory Chatterton loses as an antiquarian, he more than recovers as a poet. As a poet alone he would, if he had lived, have been the greatest of his age.

  Chatterton evinced how mighty his genius was, by the distance at which it anticipated experience. Why, when most of our boys are but blubbering their books, this superhuman youth was pouring out the thoughts, that swell and shake the breast of manhood. Still, there is no means by which genius can altogether anticipate experience. The faculties most powerful, therefore, in the youth of genius, are those which distinguish the writings of Chatterton. These are luxuriance of fancy and opulence of expression. The fancy of Chatterton is not only rich but strong; it has not only a plumage of dazzling splendor, but a pinion of daring flight; and his language reflects, perfectly, the brilliancy of his fancy and sustains him amidst the bravest of its soarings.

  Curious is it to note that in the long controversy, which followed on the publication by Chatterton of the poems which he ascribed to a monk Rowlie, living in the fifteenth century, no one appealed at the time to such lines as the following,

“Life, and all its goods I scorn,”

as at once decisive of the fact that the poems were not of the age which they pretended. Warton who rejected, although with a certain amount of hesitation, the poems, and gives reasons, and many of them good ones, for this rejection, yet takes no notice of this little word, which betrays the forgery at once; although there needed nothing more than to point to it, for the disposing of the whole question.

  Up to a certain point, as it were, Chatterton could remain himself; but the moment he was hurried past that point, the moment he attained to a certain degree of sublimity, or fervour, or solemnity in his conceptions, and was constrained to continue at the same pitch, at that moment he reverted to the fifteenth century, and passed into the soul of Rowley. No one who has not read the antique poems of Chatterton can conceive what extraordinary things they are…. These antique poems of Chatterton (and there are about twenty shorter ones in the same series) are perhaps as worthy of being read consecutively as many portions of the poetry of Byron, Shelley, or Keats. There are passages in them, at least, quite equal to any to be found in these poets; and it is only the uncouth and spurious appearance of antiquity which they wear when the absurd spelling in which they were first printed is retained that prevents them from being known and quoted…. With no other evidence before us than is afforded by this and the other antique pieces which we have quoted, one may assert, unhesitatingly, not only that Chatterton was a true English poet of the eighteenth century, but also that, compared with the other English poets of the part of that century immediately prior to the new era begun by Burns and Wordsworth, he was, with all his immaturity, almost solitary in the possession of the highest poetic gift. Pope, Thomson, and Goldsmith, were poets of this century; and no sensible man will for a moment think of comparing the boy of Bristol, in respect of his whole activity, with those fine stars of our literature, or even with some of the lesser stars that shone along with them. But he had a specific fire and force of imagination in him which they had not.

	Think you, no fond creatures
	Draw comfort from the features
	Of Chatterton, that Phaëthon pale, struck down to sunless soil?
	Scorch’d with sunlight lying,
	Eyes of sunlight hollow,
	But, see! upon the lips a gleam of the chrism of Apollo!

  Perhaps the clearest evidence of his high poetic gifts is to be found in the comparisons instituted between him and other poets. By reason of his very excellence he has been tried by the highest standards, without thought of his immaturity. Grave critics are found testing the Rowley Poems by Chaucer, or matching them with Cowley and Prior; and even finding in the acknowledged satires of a boy of sixteen “more of the luxuriance, fluency, and negligence of Dryden, than of the terseness and refinement of Pope.” One of the strongest evidences of his self-originating power is, in reality, to be found in the contrast which his verse presents to that of his own day. In an age when the seductive charm of Pope’s polished numbers captivated public taste, Chatterton struck a new chord and evolved principles of harmony which suggest comparison with Elizabethan poets, rather than with those of Anne’s Augustan era. But he was no imitator. Amid all the assumption of antique thought, the reader perceives everywhere that he had looked on Nature for himself; and could discern in her, alike in her calm beauty, and in her stormiest moods, secrets hidden from the common eye. He had, moreover, patriotic sympathies as intense as Burns himself. His Goddwyn, Harold, Ælla, and Rycharde, his Hastings, Bristowe, or Ruddeborne, are all lit up with the same passionate fire, to which some of his finest outbursts of feeling were due; and which was still more replete with promise for the future.

  If he had really taken pains to read and study Chaucer or Lydgate or any old author earlier than the age of Spenser, the Rowley poems would have been very different. They would then have borne some resemblance to the language of the fifteenth century, whereas they are rather less like the language of that period than of any other. The spelling of the words is frequently too late, or too bizarre, whilst many of the words themselves are too archaic or too uncommon.

  As to the Rowley series, I do not hesitate to say that they contain some of the finest poetry in our language, though they are unequal, just as the modern poems are. They are jewels set in the prose-romance of ancient Bristol as imagined by Chatterton; though Canynge, the old mayor, who is the central figure, was an actual person of importance.

  His genius was capable of great sweetness and tenderness, but it shows to greatest advantage where he gives a loose rein to his powers. His description of the battle of Hastings is widely magnificent, and his ballad “Dethe of Sir Charles Bawdin” ranks with the finest heroic lays of the old English and Scotch ballads.

  His name, indeed, is better known than that of many men who have filled large places in our literature; and there is a general conviction that he was a genius, although it is doubtful if anyone except his editor or biographer could be found who could quote a line of his works. Chatterton’s fame has come primarily from the events of his own brief life, and the world has been content to take his genius on trust…. Apart from his marvellous fecundity, one finds buried in the mediæval débris passages of real beauty and strength both in thought and expression. The rarity of such qualities in juvenile verses entitles Chatterton to a high place among very young poets, and speculation may therefore fairly say that in the future—never reached—he might have been among the first.

  Chatterton—the marvellous youth—seems to me to be marvellous chiefly from his youth. There is little, if anything, of permanent value in his writings. In one way, however, he showed an acuteness which may, perhaps, be fairly called marvellous. He showed an instinctive knowledge—remarkable in one so young—of the kind of intellectual food for which a demand was springing up in the country.

  So steeped indeed was Chatterton in romance, that, except in the case of the “African Eclogues,” his imagination seems to be never really alive save when in the dramatic masquerade of the monk of Bristol. And here we touch the very core and centre of Chatterton’s genius—his artistic identification.

  As an unpublished poem by Chatterton the “Exhibition” is deserving of notice, but it would be unjust to regard it in any way as a fair sample of its author’s genius. It was written in great haste, left uncorrected, and, like most of his satirical pieces on local personages, was not intended for publication.

  His name has been coupled in good faith with that of Keats, a comparison inconceivably unjust to the latter. Hyperion to a Satyr, truth to falsehood, are not more unlike than was Keats to Chatterton. Keats was a sweet and noble spirit, a devotee of the beautiful, a Galahad circled about with snowy doves; Chatterton was a pestilent backbiter, a vain and moody egotist, a genuine product of an age of shams…. Chatterton’s precocity is undeniable. If it be meritorious to write bad verses at eleven, that merit is certainly his. Few of his pieces, however, bear date prior to 1768, when Chatterton was nearly sixteen. Facility he possessed, and versatility. He imitated all styles in turn; now he smacks of Pope, now of Gray or Spenser, just as the schoolboy’s clumsy copy bears a provoking resemblance to the master’s elegant penmanship. The taint of insincerity runs through Chatterton’s writings almost from the first. Upon this point he says himself, “He is a poor author who cannot write on both sides.” He gives us alternately a hymn and an indecent lampoon, an elegy in the vein of Gray and a burlesque in the vein of Halévy. Lovesick ballads and mock heroics are addressed to the same lady. Satire was his forte, for in satire the unscrupulous egoism of his nature found a ready vent.

  The most extraordinary poet for his years who ever lived.

  In Chatterton’s true poetry, as distinguished from his fugitive and occasional work, the two pre-eminent qualities are genius and imagination. If any mortal ever possessed genius—that divine mirage so inexplicably elusive—it was Chatterton; and, as in Byron’s case, it must cover a multitude of sins. Artificial and affected as much of his work is, there can still be discerned in it the artistic power of the true poet; and had he written nothing else, “The Balade of Charitie” alone would have rescued his name from oblivion…. No poet—not even Coleridge—was ever so imbued with the romantic spirit; and, without giving him more than his due, we must acknowledge Chatterton to be the founder of the modern romantic school of poetry. That Coleridge was influenced to a considerable extent by Chatterton is patent to everyone, and that he was deeply impressed by the fate of the younger poet is also evident…. To try and ascertain the character of Chatterton from his works were as vain as to study Shakespeare with a like object. We cannot trace his personality: in vain do we rub the ring; the genius stubbornly refuses to appear. He belongs to the objective order of poets; his mind is creative rather than reflective. This power of concealing, or effacing, his own identity, while still preserving a thorough sympathy with the character he is delineating, is especially surprising in one so young.

  It is not to be denied that, in relation of his years and equipments to the vigour and bulk of his work produced, Chatterton is—let us say it boldly—the most extraordinary phenomenon of infancy in the literature of the world. To an intellect so untrammelled, to a taste so mature, to an art so varied and so finished at the age of seventeen, twenty years more of life might have sufficed to put the possessor by the side of Milton and perhaps of Shakespeare. But when we come to think not of what was promised, but of what was actually achieved, and to compare it with the finished poems of Thomson and Goldsmith, of Collins and Gray, some moderation of our rapture seems demanded…. There are frequent flashes of brilliancy in Chatterton, and one or two very perfectly sustained pieces, but the main part of his work, if rigorously isolated from the melodramatic romance of his career, is surely found to be rather poor reading, the work of a child of exalted genius, no doubt, yet manifestly the work of a child all through.

  After a very brief period of controversy as to the genuineness of Rowley (which even at the time such mere pioneers and dilettanti in the study of Old English as Gray and Mason at once negatived), this had been entirely given up, and the patient exertions of Professor Skeat have shown the originals, the processes, and the entire machinery in the invention of the dialect. But it may be permitted to protest against the printing of the poems as a whole in modernised form, and still more against the extraordinary liberties which others have taken with Chatterton’s text, even to the Bentleian extent of substituting words which to the individual critic “seem more appropriate.” It is certain that if we wish to appreciate Chatterton’s actual poetic powers, we must take the words he wrote in the spelling in which he wrote them; though linguistic inquiry may take its own course. Thus considering, we shall find him a distinct puzzle, showing in his ordinary English nothing of the charm which floats about his Rowleian dialect-pieces, and even in these not perhaps suggesting the certain possession of that charm had he lived. His metrical ability is great, though it is rather too much to claim for him that he fully anticipated Coleridge’s reversion to the Genesis and Exodus scheme, and his phrase and word-music have now and then a singular romantic appeal. But there is something disquieting in this, since it exactly resembles the not infrequent, but always passing, gifts of very young children; and it makes him æsthetically a delight, but critically a problem. His antiques vary from pastiches, hardly more really antique than Thomson or Shenstone, though inspired by the study of somewhat older models, to things almost or wholly exquisite, like “Ælla’s Dirge.” The nature-touches are in the same way sometimes exquisite, sometimes conventional, and the whole is a strange medley of promise, performance, and failure.

  My only belief is that the Rowley poems are interesting principally as literary curiosities—the work of an infant phenomenon—and that they have little importance in themselves, or as models and inspirations to later poets. I cannot help thinking that, upon this subject, many critics have lost their heads.

  The Chatterton manuscripts are sadly scattered. Some are in the British Museum, some in the museum in Bristol, one or two at the Bodleian, at Oxford, and some in private hands. Many have perished. No collection of his writings, complete or even fairly complete, has been made; even his poems, although existent in many editions, have never been systematically collected. Oddly, the many attempts to modernize the Rowley poems have had only indifferent success. They must be read in the original to judge of their real beauties.