respects in which he did not deny himself.

"I employ

my money now," he writes to his sister on the 30th of May, "in fitting myself fashionably, and getting into good company," i.e. going to coffee-houses, the gardens, the theatres, &c. Add to this the little presents sent home to his mother and sister, and it will not be difficult to see how, even without supposing any extravagance, the end of his second and beginning of his third month in London should have found him in some such state as we have imagined. Still there was as yet no appearance of despondency in Chatterton as to the future. What he had spent in dress and "getting into good company" was sure to bring him in interest; and each succeeding month would bring its own earnings! If money flowed as fast as honours upon him, he would give his sister a portion of 5,000l. That day might be still distant; but, at least, he could look forward to the time when his mother and sister should leave Bristol and join him in London, where he could take apartments for them and himself. Then how happy they should be, all three together, walking out on Sundays to Hampstead or Kensington, when the heaven over London should begin to glow and blush with the burning beneath it of that hard-to-kindle but still surely combustible river, and the whole town, his mother and sister included, should gaze at the crimson air and see his portrait and the letters T. C. freaked in keener fire

in the heart of the crimson! Dream on, poor boy, for the end is not yet.

It will have been observed that, all this while, in his ceaseless efforts to become known in London, Chatterton made no use of his antiques. Of at least one of those longer modern satirical pieces which he had brought with him to town from Bristol-that called The Consuliad-he had contrived to make something; but, though he must have had his tragedy of Ella with him, his fragment of the tragedy of Goddwyn, his Tournament, his Battle of Hastings, and others of his Rowley Poems, he seems to have made no attempt to get them published. Indeed, his only allusion, after his arrival in London, to the Rowley Poems, is contained in his saying to his sister that, if Rowley had been a Londoner, instead of a "Bristowyan," he could have lived by copying his works. It is possible, however, from his writing to his sister for his MS. glossary of obsolete terms, that he may have had some scheme in his head with regard to his antiques. One wonders what would have been the effect if he had tried the London public with a bit of his Ella, fresh from his lodging in Brooke Street. Fancy Johnson, Goldy, Warton, and the rest of them, reading it! The London antiquarians of that day may be supposed to have been to the Bristol ones, in respect of perspicacity, as hawks

to doves; but what a fluttering there would have been even among the hawks! Would it have been better for Chatterton had he made the attempt? Who can tell? On the one hand, by refraining from it, he moved to a fate sad enough; on the other, he might have lived on a hardened literary liar.

CHAPTER IV.

BROOKE STREET, HOLBORN.

CHATTERTON had been in his new lodging in Brooke Street now about three weeks. During that time he had become pretty well acquainted with his landlady, Mrs. Angell, and with her husband, Frederick Angell, who seems to have been engaged in some kind of business which took him from home during the day, leaving his wife to her dress-making. Always of social habits and willing to converse with those about him, he seems now and then to have sat with Mr. and Mrs. Angell of an evening, talking with them. The impression he made on them appears to have been very much the same as that made on the Walmsleys of Shoreditch. Sir Herbert Croft, indeed, who made repeated attempts, some years afterwards, to see Mrs. Angell, in order to learn from her all he could about her strange lodger of 1770, never succeeded in finding her. She was then, he tells us, in distressed circumstances, very suspicious of all visitors, and unable to

imagine what motive there could be for the calls with which she was assailed, unless it might be something of a police nature, or at least molestation for debt. In default of Mrs. Angell, however, Sir Herbert found a neighbour and acquaintance of hers, "Mrs. Wolfe, a barber's wife," living two doors off, on the same side of the street. She remembered Chatterton, and spoke of "his proud and haughty spirit," adding that "he appeared both to her and to Mrs. Angell as if born for something great." Thomas Warton, whose interest in the controversy as to the authenticity of the Rowley Poems led him to similar inquiries about Chatterton personally, discovered, in 1781 or 1782, yet another person who had been a resident in Brooke Street in 1770 and had known Chatterton there. This was a Mr. Cross, an apothecary. His information was to the effect that Chatterton, dropping in at his shop, and familiarly talking with him over the counter, had, almost from the first day of his residence in Brooke Street, struck up an acquaintance with him. Cross, who, from his profession, was probably a man of some intelligence, had begun to contract a real liking for his odd visitor, and "found his conversation," as he afterwards told Warton, "a little infidelity excepted, most captivating."

So the month of July opens, Chatterton going out and in as usual, and sitting up late at night in his room