Clayfield could come by his letter, as I intended to give him a letter, but did not. In regard to my motives for the supposed rashness, I shall observe that I keep no worse company than myself: I never drink to excess, and have, without vanity, too much sense to be attached to the mercenary retailers of iniquity. No, it is my PRIDE, my damn'd native unconquerable PRIDE, that plunges me into distraction. You must know that nineteen-twentieths of my composition is pride. I must either live a slave, a servant, to have no will of my own, which I may freely declare as such, or DIE. Perplexing alternative! but it distracts me to think of it! I will endeavour to learn humility, but it cannot be here. What it may cost me in the trial Heaven knows.

"I am your much obliged unhappy humble servant, Thursday Evening."

"T. C.

Before this letter had been written by Chatterton, one thing had been fully determined with regard to him. Mr. Lambert was no longer to keep him in his service. Even had the lawyer himself been willing to make the attempt, his mother, who kept house for him—an old lady between whom and Chatterton there had never, we have reason to think, been any kind of cordiality— would certainly not have listened to such a thing. What! sleep under the same roof with a violent young fellow that had threatened to make away with himself? Find the garret in a welter some morning with the young rascal's blood, and have a coroner's

inquest in the house? Better at once give him up his indentures, and be rid of him! With this advice of the old lady even the calmer deliberations of Chatterton's own friends, Barrett, Catcott, and the rest, could not but agree. So, on or about Monday, the 16th of April, 1770, it was intimated to Chatterton that he was no longer in the employment of Mr. Lambert.

Tuesday, the 17th, it will be remembered, was the day of Wilkes's release from prison; and on Thursday, the 19th-the very day, as we guess, on which the foregoing letter to Mr. Barrett was written-there took place in Bristol that dinner, in honour of the patriot, at which, according to the announcement in the Public Advertiser, the more prominent Liberals of the town were to assemble at "the Crown, in the passage from Broad Street to Tower Lane," to eat their forty-five pounds of meat, drink their forty-five tankards of ale and their forty-five bowls of punch, and smoke their forty-five pipes of tobacco. Were we wrong in fancying that, while those Bristol Wilkesites were making merry in the tavern, Chatterton may have been moodily perambulating the adjacent streets? Shall we be wrong if we fancy, farther, that the story of Mr. Lambert's apprentice and his intended suicide may have been talked over by the happy gentlemen, when, having finished their toasts, they sat down at leisure to their pipes and their remaining punch?

CHAPTER III.

BOUND FOR LONDON.

CAST out of all chance of a livelihood in his native town, there was but one course open to Chatterton: to bid farewell to Bristol and attorneyship, and try what he could do in the great literary mart of London. Sanguine as were his hopes of success, it can have cost him but little thought to make up his mind to this course, if indeed he did not secretly congratulate himself that his recent escapade had ended so agreeably. Probably there was but one thing that stood in the way of an immediate declaration by himself, after the fracas was over, that this was the resolution he had come to the want, namely, of a little money to serve as outfit. No sooner, therefore, was this obstacle removed by the charitable determination of his friends, Mr. Barrett, Mr. Clayfield, the Catcotts, &c., to make a little subscription for him, so as to present him with the parting gift of a few pounds, than the tide of

feeling was turned, and from a state of despondency Chatterton gave way to raptures of unbounded joy. London London! A few days, and he should have left the dingy quays of abominable Bristol, and should be treading, in the very footsteps of Goldsmith, Garrick, and Johnson, the liberal London streets!

Chatterton remained exactly a week in Bristol after his dismissal from Mr. Lambert's; i.e. from the 16th to the 24th of April. A busy week we may suppose that to have been for Mrs. Chatterton and her daughter: stitching and sewing to be got through, so that all Thomas's wardrobe might be properly in order against his departure. Poor fellow! notwithstanding all that idle people say of him, they know better: he has a proud spirit, but a good heart, and he will make his way yet with the best of them! And so, in their humble apartments, the widow and her daughter ply their needles, talking of Thomas and his prospects as only a mother and a sister can.

The subject of their conversation, meanwhile, is generally out, going from street to street, and taking leave of his friends. Barrett, the two Catcotts, Mr. Alcock, Mr. Clayfield, Burgum, Matthew Mease, and his younger friends, the Carys, Smiths, and Kators -he makes the round of them all, receiving their good wishes, and making arrangements to correspond with them. To less intimate acquaintances, too, met

accidentally in the streets, he has to bid a friendly good-bye. Moreover, there are his numerous female friends-the Miss Webbs, the Miss Thatchers, the Miss Hills, &c., not to omit the "female Machiavel," Miss Rumsey-who have all heard, with more or less concern, that they are about to lose their poet, and are, of course, anxious to see him before he goes. Of some acquaintances of this class, probably the more humble of them, he appears to have taken a kind of collective farewell. Long afterwards, at least, a Mrs. Stephens, the wife of a cabinet-maker in Bristol, used to tell that she remembered, as an incident of her girlhood, Chatterton's "taking leave of her and some others, on the steps of Redcliffe Church, very cheerfully," before his going to London. "At parting, he said he would give them some gingerbread, and went over the way to Mr. Freeling's, to buy some." In connexion with which little anecdote we have a mysterious little scrap of document to produce.

A great deal of nonsense has been written on the question of Chatterton's moral character. Was he a libertine, as some have represented-a precocious young blackguard, indebted for his bad end to his own habits of profligacy; or was he at least no worse in this respect than his neighbours? Naturally resenting the harsh way in which Chalmers and other earlier biographers.