day, the 25th of April, 1770-the day on which Chatterton sat beside the driver of the Bristol coach all the way from Speenhamland to London-is entered as a day of "smart frost, very bright and very cold," snow having fallen in some parts of the country during the previous night. It was on the evening of this bright, cold day, therefore (or, notwithstanding the wording of his letter, was it not rather next morning?), that Chatterton, setting out from Mr. Walmsley's, contrived, by inquiring his way of people he met, to pilot himself along Shoreditch, Norton Folgate, and Bishopsgate Street, towards the city, bent as he was on calling without delay on the four gentlemen mentioned in his letter-Mr. Edmunds, Mr. Fell, Mr. Hamilton, and Mr. Dodsley. Let us see if we can make out anything respecting those gentlemen. They were the first persons Chatterton visited in London, and some of them had not a little to do with his subsequent fate.

Mr. Edmunds has been already introduced to the reader. He was the proprietor, editor, and publisher of the Middlesex Journal, a bi-weekly newspaper, to which, we have seen, Chatterton had sent several communications from Bristol. His offices were in Shoe Lane, Holborn.Of Mr. Hamilton we learn something from that interesting collection of scraps, "Nichols's Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century." He was the printer and proprietor of The Town and

Country Magazine; in which capacity Chatterton had, as we know, for some time corresponded with him. He was the son of one Archibald Hamilton, a Scotchman; who, having been obliged to quit Edinburgh in 1736 for having been actively concerned in the Porteous Riot, had settled in London as a printer, and had made a considerable fortune there. The son Archibald, enjoying the benefit of his father's connexion, had also set up as a printer. He had, says Nichols, two printing-offices, one "in the country, on the road between Highgate and Finchley," the other in town, "near St. John's Gate, Clerkenwell;" and it was probably in allusion to this circumstance that, when he started a new magazine, in the beginning of 1769, he named it The Town and Country Magazine. The magazine, Nichols informs us, had "a prodigious sale."- -Nichols also gives us some particulars respecting Dodsley, in addition to those already communicated to the reader. Having succeeded his brother Robert, whose junior he was by twenty-two years, in the year 1759, James Dodsley had carried on the bookselling business in Pall Mall so profitably as to be already a wealthy man. When he died in 1797, he left a fortune of 70,000l.; and a good part of this sum must have been accumulated before 1770, when he was forty-five years of age. "By a habit of excluding himself from the world," says Nichols, "Mr. James Dodsley, who

certainly possessed a liberal heart and a strong understanding, had acquired many peculiarities." One of these is mentioned as specially characteristic. "He kept a carriage many years, but studiously wished his friends should not know it; nor did he ever use it on the eastern side of Temple Bar." The inscription on the tablet erected to the memory of the bookseller in St. James's Church, Westminster, where he was buried, is to the same effect. "He was a man," says the epitaph, “of a retired and contemplative turn of mind, though engaged in a very extensive line of public business; he was upright and liberal in his dealings, a friend to the afflicted in general, and to the poor of this parish in particular,”—in fact, an eccentric, shy, good sort of man. Finally, what of Mr. Fell? From what Chatterton says of him, we learn that he was printer,' publisher, and editor of the Freeholder's Magazine, a periodical conducted in the interest of Wilkes, and to which, as well as to the Town and Country, Chatterton had recently sent articles for insertion. We imagine him, on some shadow of authority, to have been a needy, nondescript kind of publisher, with a place of business in Paternoster Row, and not nearly so respectable as either Edmunds or Hamilton, not to speak of Dodsley.

Such were the four persons upon whom we are to imagine the impetuous young fellow who had just

come off the Bristol coach dropping in unexpectedly long, long ago. His hopes from Edmunds were, of course, chiefly in connexion with the Middlesex Journal, for which he could furnish poems and paragraphs. Through Fell he might obtain a footing in the Freeholder's Magazine, and whatever else of a literary kind might be going on under the auspices of Wilkes. From Hamilton he looked for some definite and paying engagement on the Town and Country. From Dodsley his expectations were probably still higher. Besides being the publisher of the Annual Register, and the friend of Burke and other notable political men, Dodsley was a bookseller on a large scale, and a publisher of poetry; it was to him that Chatterton had applied by letter sixteen months before as a likely person to publish his Ella; one or two letters had probably passed between them since; and, in resolving to introduce himself personally to this magnate of books, Chatterton had, doubtless, dreams not only of the opening of the Annual Register to his lucubrations, but also of the appearance of his Rowley performances some day or other in the form of one or more wellprinted volumes, the wonder of all the critics. It was with these views on the persons severally concerned, that Chatterton made his four rapid calls. The enterprise was certainly less Quixotic than if a young literary provincial, now-a-days, were, on the

first day of his being in London, to resolve at once to call on Murray or Longman, then to beat up the office of the Daily News in search of the editor, after that to knock at Mr. Parker's door to seek an engagement on Fraser, and finally to go and see what could be done on Dickens's Household Words. Still, with all allowance for the difference between that day and this, the idea of achieving interviews with four different editors and publishers in one ramble was somewhat bold. As regards mere time and distance, to compass calls, in such circumstances, on four different individuals-one of them living in Shoe Lane, another at St. John's Gate, Clerkenwell, a third in Pall Mall, and the fourth somewhere else can have been no easy task. But Chatterton was a resolute youth, with plenty of the faculty of self-assertion, and capable, as we imagine, not only of making four calls in one walk, but also of going through each without any unnecessary degree of bashfulness. We have no doubt that he saw Hamilton, Fell, Edmunds, and Dodsley himself, with the most perfect self-assurance; that he explained his case to them, and stated what he wanted from them, very distinctly; and that, with the advantage he had in having corresponded with all of them before, he came off from the interviews in a very satisfactory manner. As to how they received him, and what they said to him, we have but his own