Accordingly Chatterton continued to support, in the eyes of the portion of the community of Bristol that knew him, a twofold character-that on the one hand of an enthusiastic youth with much antiquarian knowledge, the possessor of many antique manuscripts, chiefly poetry of the fifteenth century; and that on the other of an ill-conditioned boy of spiteful temper, the writer of somewhat clever but very scurrilous verses. Nay, more, it was observable that the latter character was growing upon him, apparently at the expense of the former; for while, up to his seventeenth year (1768-9), his chief recreation seemed to be in his antiques and Rowley MSS., after that date he seemed to throw his antiques aside, and devote all his time to imitations of the satires of Churchill, under such names as The Consuliad, Kew Gardens, &c. And here the reader must permit me a little Essay or Disquisitional Interleaf on the Character and Writings of Chatterton.

ALL thinking persons have now agreed to abandon that summary method of dealing with human character according to which unusual and eccentric courses of action are attributed to mere caprices on the part of the individuals concerned, mere obstinate determinations to go out of the common route.

"The dog, to gain some private ends,
Went mad, and bit the man,"

is a maxim less in repute than it once was. In such cases as that of Chatterton, it is now believed, deeper causes are always operating than the mere wish to deceive people and make a figure.

Now, in the case of Chatterton, it appears, we must first of all take for granted an extraordinary natural precocity or prematurity of the faculties. We are aware that there is a prejudice against the use of this hypothesis. But why should it be so? How otherwise can we represent to ourselves the cause of that diversity which we see in men than by going deeper than all that we know of pedigree, and conceiving the birth of every new soul to be, as it were, a distinct creative act of the unseen Spirit? That now, in some Warwickshire village, the birth should be a Shakespeare, and that, again, in the poor posthumous child of a dissipated Bristol choir-singer the tiny body should be shaken by the surcharge of soul within it, are not miracles in themselves, but only variations in the great standing miracle that there should be birth at all. Nor with the idea of precocity is it necessary to associate that either of disease or of insanity. There was nothing in Chatterton to argue disease in the ordinary sense, or to indicate that, had he lived, he might not, like Pope or Tasso, who were also precocious, have gone on steadily increasing in ability till the attainment of a good old age. And, though it seems certain that

there was a tendency to madness in the Chatterton blood-Chatterton's sister, Mrs. Newton, having afterwards had an attack of insanity-the use of this fact by Southey and others to explain the tenor of Chatterton's life has been much too hasty and inconsiderate. A medical friend of ours avers that he never knew a man of genius who had not some aunt or other in a lunatic asylum, or at least fit for one; and, so long as we can account for Chatterton's singularities in any other way, we see no reason, any more than in the similar instance of Charles Lamb, why we should attribute them to what was at the utmost only a dormant taint of madness in his constitution.

Assuming, then, that Chatterton, without being either a mere lusus naturæ or insane, was simply a child of very extraordinary endowments, we would point out, as the predominant feature in his character, his remarkable veneration for the antique. In the boyhood even of Sir Walter Scott, born as he was in the very midst of ballads and traditions, we see no manifestation of a love of the past and the historic nearly so strong as that which possessed Chatterton from his infancy. The earliest form in which this constitutional peculiarity appeared in him seems to have been a fondness for the ecclesiastical antiquities of his native city, and, above all, an attachment to the old Gothic Church of St. Mary Redcliffe.

Some time ago we saw in a provincial Scottish newspaper an obituary notice of a poor idiot named John M'Bey, who had been for about sixty years a prominent character in the village of Huntly, Aberdeenshire. Where the poor creature had been born, no one knew ; he had been found, when apparently about ten years old, wandering among the Gartly Hills, and had been brought by some country people into the village. Here, "supported by the kindness of several families, at whose kitchen-tables he regularly took his place at one or other of the meals of the day," he continued to reside ever after, a conspicuous figure in the schoolboy recollections of all the inhabitants for more than half a century. The "shaggy carroty head, the vacant stare, the idle trots and aimless walks of Jock,' could yet," said the notice, "be recalled in a moment" by all that knew him. "At an early period of his history," proceeded the notice, "he had formed a strong affection for the bell in the old ruined church of Ruthven, in the parish of Cairnie; and many were the visits he paid to that object of, to him, surpassing interest. Having dubbed it with the name of 'Wow,' he embraced every opportunity at funerals to get a pull of the rope, interpreting the double peals, in his own significant language, to mean, Come hame, come hame.' Every funeral going to that churchyard was known to him; and, till his old age, he was generally the first person that appeared

on the ground. The emblems of his favourite bell, in bright yellow, were sewed on his garments; and woe to the schoolboy that should utter a word in depreciation of his favourite. When near his end, he was asked how he felt. He said he was ga'in awa' to the wow, nae to come back again.' After his death, he was laid in his favourite burying-place, within sound of his cherished bell."

Do not despise this little story, reader. To our mind it illustrates much. As this poor idiot, debarred from all the general concerns of life, and untaught in other people's tenets, had invented a religion for himself, setting up as a central object in his own narrow circle of images and fancies an old ruined belfry, which had somehow (who knows through what horror of maternity?) caught his sense of mystery, clinging to this object with the whole tenacity of his affections, and even devising symbols by which it might be ever present to him: so, with more complex and less rude accompaniments, does the precocious boy of Bristol seem to have related himself to the Gothic fabric near which he first saw the light. This church was his fetich, his "wow." It was through it, as through a metaphorical gateway, that his imagination worked itself back into the great field of the past, so as to expatiate on the ancient condition of his native "Brystowe and the whole olden time of England.