Lichfield, who asked his opinion of their genuineness. All sensible persons who had seen specimens had already made up their minds that they were forgeries; but many antiquarian old women stoutly maintained the contrary. Whenever a literary man from the metropolis was in the neighbourhood of Bristol, he endeavoured, as a matter of course, to see Catcott and Barrett, and to get all the particulars from them about Chatterton and his circumstances. They were very communicative on this subject, and spoke of Chatterton's talents, now that they had a kind of property in them, far more enthusiastically than they had done when he was alive; but they, and indeed nearly all Bristol, persisted in believing in the genuineness of the antiques. Chatterton, they said, was a youth of extraordinary genius; but he could not have produced such poems as these were! They were, they had no doubt of it, the works of the much older Bristol poet, Thomas Rowley, mysteriously preserved for three hundred years in the old chest in the muniment-room of St. Mary Redcliffe, and only brought to light by Chatterton! Thus, when in April 1776 Johnson and Boswell paid a visit to Bristol, they saw Catcott and Barrett, and were shown the original MSS. Johnson, says Boswell, read some of them aloud, while Catcott stood by with open mouth, amazed at his scepticism; after which, Catcott, to settle the matter, led them in triumph to the Church of St. Mary Redcliffe, and, by way of unanswerable argument, showed them "the chest itself." It was on this occasion that Johnson said to Boswell, speaking of Chatterton, "This is the most extraordinary young man that has encountered my knowledge it is wonderful how the whelp has written such things." In connexion with this same visit, it may be interesting to state that Hannah More, who was still residing in Bristol with her sisters, a young woman of twenty-five, at the time of Chatterton's death, had, between that time and Dr. Johnson's visit in 1776, added to the literary reputation of Bristol by the publication of her first dramas. In visiting Bristol, Johnson was paying a compliment to this rising poetess, as well as to the memory of Chatterton. One is glad to know also that, if Hannah More, as one of the conductors of the best boarding-school for young ladies in Bristol, was almost necessarily out of the circle of Chatterton's acquaintances while he was going about in the city as an attorney's apprentice, she was one of the first in Bristol to show an interest in his fate after she did hear of him, and to prove that interest by being kind to his mother and sister. Mrs. Chatterton, after her son's death, was seized with a nervous illness, which, though she lived a good many years longer, never left her; and among those who used to go to see her and sometimes take tea with her, for her dead son's sake, there was none, Mrs. Stockwell said, whom she respected so much as Miss More. It was in 1777 that the Rowley Poems were first published collectively, chiefly from the manuscripts in possession of Catcott and Barrett. A second and more splendid edition was published in 1782 by Dean Milles, President of the Society of Antiquaries, with the following title:"Poems supposed to have been written at Bristol in the Fifteenth Century by Thomas Rowley, Priest, &c.; with a Commentary, in which the antiquity of them is considered and defended by Jeremiah Milles, D.D., Dean of Exeter." Dean Milles, in his preliminary dissertation on the poems, gave a very slight account of Chatterton, with a view to show that he could not have been their author. Immediately on the publication of the volume, there blazed out a Rowley controversy, as fierce as that which had attended the appearance of the Ossian Poems. Bryant and one or two others sided with Milles, and the question was argued and re-argued in every shape; but all the great critical and antiquarian authorities, such as Malone, Tyrwhitt, and Warton, were on the other side, and their arguments, from evidence external and internal, set the question conclusively at rest in the minds of all who could be set at rest about anything. The collection and publication about the same time of Chatterton's acknowledged Miscellanies helped somewhat in the demonstration, by showing the possibility that their author might also have been the author even of things so extraordinary as the Rowley Poems. It was not till 1803, however, that the two sets of pieces were printed, together with additions as the undoubted works of Chatterton. This first com plete edition of Chatterton's works was undertaken in 1799 by subscription, with a view to raise a sum for the benefit of his sister, then Mrs. Newton, his mother being by that time dead. Southey and Mr. Cottle of Bristol acted as the editors. The subscription, however, not reaching the expenses of publication, an arrangement was made with Messrs. Longman in the interest of Mrs. Newton. According to what Mr. Cumberland heard in Bristol in 1808, the result of this speculation, and of other similar acts of kindness shown to the Chatterton family since the fatal year which had made them immortal, was that a sum of about 6007. came after Mrs. Newton's death to her only daughter, who had for some time been in the service of Miss Hannah More. This girl, the last of the Chattertons, died in 1807, leaving 1007. to a young man, an attorney, to whom she was about to be married. The rest went to her father's relatives, the Newtons, living in London somewhere about the Minories. We have already quoted enough from Chatterton's acknowledged writings in prose and in verse to give an idea of his ability and versatility as there shown. They are certainly astonishing productions for a boy not past his eighteenth year: astonishing for their very variety, and their precocious tone and manner, even where in substance they are most worthless. He writes political letters for the newspapers, shallow enough, but as good as were going; he writes scurrilous satires in the Churchill vein, with here and there lines as good as any in Churchill, and sometimes with turns of epigram reminding us of Pope; he writes very tolerable imitations of Ossian, and elegies and serious poems showing some power both of thought and of imagination; he catches the knack of magazine-articles, and scribbles them off currente calamo, exactly of a kind to suit; he goes an evening or two to Marylebone Gardens, and straightway he writes a capital Burletta. On the evidence, then, of his acknowledged productions alone, Chatterton must be pronounced to have been a youth of singular endowments, who, had he lived, would certainly have made himself a name in the literature of England at the close of the last and the beginning of the present century. The passages which we have hitherto quoted from those productions having, however, been selected mainly as affording illustrations of his character and life, it may be well to cite one or two more, exhibiting rather his poetical powers as such. Here is a piece entitled "An Elegy " : |