a taste for that exercise had been roused in him, as well as in other boys in Colston's School, by the usher or under-master of the school, a Mr. Thomas Phillips, who himself dabbled in literature, and contributed to periodicals. If so, however, the little pupil does not seem to have taken even the usher into his confidence originally, but to have proceeded on his own account. His first known attempt in verse had been a pious little achievement, entitled "On the Last Epiphany; or, Christ's coming to Judgment;" and so proud had he been of this performance, and so ambitious of seeing it in print, that he boldly dropped it, one Saturday afternoon, into the letter-box of Felix Farley's Bristol Journal, a weekly newspaper in high local repute. It appeared in the columns of that newspaper on the 8th of January, 1763. From that day Chatterton was a sworn poet. Piece after piece was dropped by him during a period of three years into the letter-box of the accommodating Journal. Only one of these, however, is it necessary to mention particularly—a little lampoon, printed the 7th of January, 1764, and entitled "The Churchwarden and the Apparition; a Fable." A Mr. Joseph Thomas, a brickmaker by trade, chancing in that year to hold the office of churchwarden for the parish of St. Mary Redcliffe, had greatly scandalized the public mind by causing the old churchyard to be levelled, and the surplus earth and clay to be carted

away, as people said, for his own professional uses. For this outrage on decorum he was much attacked by the local press, and nowhere more severely than in the above-mentioned verses of the little Bluecoat; in whom, by-the-bye, there must have been a kind of hereditary resentment of such a piece of sacrilege, as his ancestors, the Chattertons, had been sextons of the church of St. Mary Redcliffe for a period of one hundred and fifty years continuously. The office had, in fact, only passed out of the family on the death of an older brother of his father, named John Chatterton.

The date does not seem quite certain, but it was probably nearly three years after this occurrence, and when Chatterton was above fourteen years of age, and one of the senior boys in the Bluecoat School, that he stepped, one afternoon, into the shop of a Mr. Burgum, partner of a Mr. Catcott in the pewter trade.

"I have found out a secret about you, Mr. Burgum,' he said, going up to the pewterer at his desk.

Indeed what is it?" said Mr. Burgum.

"That you are descended from one of the noblest families in England."

"I did not know it," said the victim.

"It is true though," said Chatterton; "and, to prove it, I will bring you your pedigree written out, as I have traced it by the help of books of the peerage and old parchments."

Accordingly, a few days afterwards, he again called, and presented the astonished pewterer with a manuscript copybook, headed in large text as follows: "Account of the Family of the De Berghams, from the Norman Conquest to this Time; collected from original Records, Tournament Rolls, and the Heralds of March and Garter Records, by T. Chatterton." In this document the Burgum pedigree was elaborately traced up, through no end of great names and illustrious intermarriages, to one "Simon de Seyncte Lyze, alias Senliz," who had come into England with the Conqueror, married a daughter of the Saxon chief Waltheof, become possessed of Burgham Castle in Northumberland, and other properties, and been eventually created Earl of Northampton.

Pleased with the honours thus unexpectedly thrust upon him, the pewterer gave the Bluecoat five shillings for his trouble. To show his gratitude, Chatterton soon returned with "A Continuation of the Account of the Family of the De Berghams, from the Norman Conquest to this time." In the original pedigree the young genealogist had judiciously stopped short at the sixteenth century. In the supplement, however, he ventures as far down as the reign of Charles II., back to which point the pewterer is left to supply the links for himself. But the chief feature in the pedigree, as elaborated in the second document, is that, in addi

tion to other great names, it contains a poet. This poet, whose name was John de Bergham, was a monk of the Cistercian order, in Bristol; he had been educated at Oxford, and was "one of the greatest ornaments of the age in which he lived." He wrote several books, and translated some part of the Iliad, under the title of "Romance of Troy." To give Mr. Burgum some idea of the poetic style of this distinguished man, his ancestor, there was inserted a short poem of his in the ancient dialect, entitled, "The Romaunte of the Cnychte;" and, to render the meaning of the poem more intelligible, there was appended a modern metrical paraphrase of it by Chatterton himself.

By the éclat of this wonderful piece of genealogical and heraldic ingenuity done for Mr. Burgum, as well as by the occasional exercise in a more or less public manner of his talent for verse-making, Chatterton, already recognised as the first for attainments among all the lads in Colston's School, appears to have won a kind of reputation with a few persons of the pewterer's stamp out of doors-honest people, with small pretensions to literature themselves, but willing to encourage a clever boy whose mother was in poor circumstances.

It was probably through the influence of such persons that, after having been seven years at the school, he was removed from it, in July, 1767, to be

apprenticed to Mr. John Lambert, a Bristol attorney. The trustees of Colston's School paid to Lambert, on the occasion, a premium of ten pounds; and the arrangement was that Chatterton should be bound to him for seven years, during which period he was to board and lodge in Mr. Lambert's house, his mother undertaking to wash and mend for him. There was no salary; but, as happens in such cases, there were probably means in Bristol by which a lad writing, as Chatterton did, a neat clerk's hand, could hope to earn, now and then, a few stray shillings. At any rate, he had the prospect of finding himself, at the end of seven years, in a fair way to be a Bristol attorney.

Lambert's office-hours were from eight in the morning till eight in the evening, with an interval for dinner. From eight till ten in the evening the apprentice was at liberty; but he was required to be home at his master's house, which was at some distance from the office, punctually by ten. An indignity which he felt very much, and more than once complained of, was that, by the household arrangements, which were under the control of an old lady, his master's mother, he was sent to take his meals in the kitchen, and made to sleep with the footboy. To set against this, however, there was the advantage of plenty of spare time; for, as Lambert's business was not very extensive, the apprentice was often left alone in the office with nothing

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