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presented to the public, and passed over with contempt, not a century ago? Would it have been credited, that the leading men of the literary world at that time, instead of flinging back such poems at the boy who presented them as a discovered antiquity, were not struck with the amazing fact, that if the boy were an impostor, as they avowed, if he indeed had written them himself, he must at the same time be a glorious poet? Yet Horace Walpole, Gray, Mason, Dr. Johnson, and the whole British throng of literati were guilty of this blindness!

That was a dark time in which Chatterton had the misfortune to appear. Spite of the mighty intellects, the wit or learning of such men as Johnson, Gray, Goldsmith, Thomas and Joseph Warton, Burke, and Walpole, poetry, and the spirit of poetry, were, as a general fact, at a low ebb. It was the midnight succeeding the long declining day of the imitators of Pope. The great crowd of versifiers had wandered away from Nature, and her eternal fountain of inspiration, and the long array of Sprats, Blackmores, Yaldens, Garths, and the like, had wearied the ear and the heart to death with their polished commonplaces. The sweet muse of Goldsmith was almost the only genuine beam of radiant light, before the great dawn of a more glorious day which was about to break; and Goldsmith himself was hasting to his end. Beattie was but just appearing, publishing the first part of his Minstrel the very year that Chatterton perished by his own hand. The great novelists, Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne, had disappeared from the scene, and their fitting cotemporary, Smollett, was abroad on his travels, where he died the year after Chatterton's suicide. Akenside died the same year; Falconer was drowned at sea the year before; Sheridan's literary sun appeared only above the horizon five years later, with the publication of his Rivals. Who then were in the ascendant, and therefore the influential arbiters of public opinion; they who must put forth the saving hand, if ever put forth, and give the cheering "all hail," if it were given? They were Gray, who, however, himself died the following year, Armstrong, Anstey of the Bath Guide, Mason, Lord Lyttelton, Gibbon, the Scotch historians and philosophers, Hume, Robertson, Adam Smith, and the like. There were, too, such men about the stage as Foote, Macklin, Colman, and Cumberland; and there were the lady writers, or patrons of literature, Mrs. Carter, Mrs. Macauley, Mrs. Montagu. Macpherson was smarting under the flagellations received on account of his Ossian, and that was about all. Spite of great names, is that a literary tribunal from which much good was to be hoped? No, we repeat it, so far as poetry, genuine poetry, was concerned, it was a dark and wintry time. The Wartons were of a more hopeful character, and Mrs. Montagu, the founder of the BlueStocking Club, had then recently published her Essay on the Genius and Writings of Shakspeare. She, a patron and an advocate of Shakspeare, might, one would have thought, have started from the herd, and done herself immortal honour by asserting the true rank of the new genius, and saving him from a fearful death. But it is one thing to assert the fame of a Shakspeare, established on the throne of the world's homage, and another to discover, much more ta hymn, the advent of a new genius. The literary world, warned by the scarifying castigation which Macpherson had undergone for introducing Ossian, as if, instead of giving the world a fresh poet, he had robbed it of one, shrunk back from the touch of a second grand impostor-another knave come to forge for the public another great poet! It was a new kind of crime, this endowment of the republic of literature with enormous accessions of wealth; and, what was more extraordinary, the endowers were not only denounced as thieves, but as thieves from themselves! Macpherson and Chatterton did not assert that they had written new and great poems, which the acute critics proved to be stolen from the ancients, Ossian and Rowley; that and their virtuous indignation we might have comprehended; but, on the contrary, while the critics protested that Chatterton and Macpherson themselves were the actual poets, and had only put on the masks of ancients, they treated them, not as clever maskers, joining in the witty conceit, and laughing over it in good-natured triumph, but they denounced them in savage terms, as base thieves, false coiners, damnable impostors!

And of what were they impostors? Were not the poems real? Were they not genuine, and of the true Titanic stamp? Of what were they thieves? Were not the treasures which they came dragging into the literary bank of England genuine treasures? and if they were found not to have indeed dug them out of the rubbish of the ruined temple of antiquity, were they not their own? Did the critics not protest that they were their own? What, then, was their strange crime? That they would rob themselves of their own intellectual riches, and deposit them on the altar of their country's glory.* Wondrous crime! wondrous age! Let us rejoice that a better time has arrived. Not thus was execrated and chased out of the regions of popularity, and even into a self-dug grave, "The Great Unknown," "The Author of Waverley." He wore his mask in all peace and honour for thirteen years, and not a soul dreamed of denouncing Sir Walter Scott, when he was compelled to own himself as the real author, because he had endeavoured to palm off his productions as those of Peter Pattison, or Jedediah Cleishbotham.

The world has grown wiser, and that through a new and more generous, because a more gifted, generation which has arisen. The age which was in its wane when Chatterton appeared upon the stage, was lying beneath the incubus of scholastic formality. Dr. Johnson ruled it as a growling dictator, and the mediocre herd of copyists shrunk equally from the heavy blow of his critical cudgel, and the

This fact of two poets at the same period producing extraordinary compositions, which they protested were not their own, and who, rather than enjoy the glory of them, died steadfastly ret udiating them, amid one universal yell of execration as impostors, is one of the most inexplicable phenomena in the history of literature. The Spiritualists would solve the whole by declaring them unconscious mediums. And, curiously enough, Macpherson belonged to the country of second-sight, and Chatterton exhibited all the symptoms of mediumship. His trance-like appearance in the Redcliffe meadows, in which he made sudden oracular declarations; his wonderful architecture; and the splendour of his poetry, so far above his years, all favour their supposition, and without pronouncing upon it, we may affirm that it is, at least, curious.

sharp puncture of Horace Walpole's wit. But the dawn was at hand. Bishop Percy had already, in 1765, published his Reliques, and they were beginning to operate. Men read them, went back again at once to nature, and, at her inspiration, up sprung the noble throng of poets, historians, essayists, and romance writers, which have clothed the nineteenth century with one wide splendour of the glory of genius.

The real crime, however, which Chatterton committed was, not that he had attempted to palm off upon the world his own productions as Rowley's, but that he had succeeded in taking the knowing ones in. He had caught in his trap those to whom it was poison and death not to appear more sagacious than all the world besides. He had showed up the infallibility of the critics, an unpardonable crime! These tricks of mere boys, by which the craft, and the owlgravity of the greybeards of literary dictation, might any day be SO lamentably disconcerted, and exposed to vulgar ridicule, was a dangerous practice, and therefore it was to be put down with a genuine Mohawk onslaught. Walpole, who had been bitten by Macpherson, and was writhing under the exposure so agonizing to his aristocratic pride, was most completely entrapped again by Chatterton. Spite of his cool denial of this, any one has only to read his letter to Chatterton, despatched instantly on the receipt of Chatterton's first packet, to be quite satisfied on this point. He "thinks himself singularly obliged," he "gives him a thousand thanks for his very curious and kind letter." "What you have sent," he declares, "is valuable, and full of information; but instead of correcting you, sir, you are far more able to correct me." Think of the cruel chagrin of the proud dilettante, Walpole, when he discovered that he had been making this confession to a boy of sixteen! What was worse, he had offered, in this letter of March 28, 1769, to print the poems of Rowley, if they had never been printed! and added, "The Abbot John's verses which you have given me are wonderful for their harmony and spirit!"

Never was a sly old fox so perfectly entrapped by a mere lad. But hear with what excess of politeness he concludes :

"I will not trouble you with more questions now, sir; but flatter myself, from the urbanity and politeness you have already shown me, that you will give me leave to consult you. I hope, too, you will forgive the simplicity of my direction, as you have favoured me with no other.

" I am, Sir,

"Your much obliged and obedient servant,

"HORACE WALPOLE."

This was before Gray and Mason, who had seen the MS. sent, declared it to be a forgery; and before Horace had discovered that he had been thus complimenting a poor lawyer's clerk, and his poems! He thought that he was addressing some gentleman of fortune, pursuing antiquarian lore in his own noble library, no doubt; but he was stung by two serpents at once-the writer was a poor lad, and the verses were his own!

There has been a great war of words regarding the conduct of Walpole to Chatterton. Some have declared him guilty of the fate of the poor youth; others have gone as far the other way, and exempted him from all blame. In my opinion, nothing can excuse the conduct of Walpole. If not to prevent the fate of Chatterton, was, in his case, to accelerate it, then Walpole must be pronounced guilty of the catastrophe which ensued; and what greatly aggravates the offence is, that he made that a crime in Chatterton of which he himself had set the example. Chatterton gave out that his poems were written by Rowley; Walpole had given out that his Castle of Otranto was the work of an old Italian, and that it had been found, not in Canynge's chest, but "in the library of an ancient catholic family in the north of England." Nothing is more certain, then, that, brought into close communication with this extraordinary youth and his brilliant productions, he either did not or would not see, that if Rowley were nobody, Chatterton was a great poet, and as a boy, and a poor boy, was an extraordinary phenomenon; and that both patriotism and humanity demanded that he should be at once brought under the notice of the good and wise, and everything possible done to develop his rare powers, and secure them to his country. Walpole coolly advised him to stick to his desk, and left him! Sir Walter Scott has said that Walpole is not alone to blame; the whole country partakes the censure with him, and that he gave the boy good advice. This is not quite true. The whole country did not know of Chatterton, of his wonderful talents, and his peculiar situation; but all these were thrust upon the attention of Walpole, and he gave him advice. True, the advice in itself was good; but, unluckily, it was given when Walpole by his conduct had destroyed all its value with Chatterton-when the proud boy, seeing the contemptible way in which the aristocrat, wounded in his vanity, turned round upon him, had torn his letters to atoms, and stamped them under his feet.

Had Walpole, when he discovered the real situation and genius of Chatterton, kindly taken him by the hand, had he, instead of deserting him on account of his poverty, and of his having put on him the pardonable trick of representing his own splendid productions as those of a nonentity, Thomas Rowley, then and there advised him to adhere to his profession, as a certain source of fortune, and to cultivate his poetic powers in his leisure moments, promising to secure for him, as he so easily could, a full acknowledgment of his talents from the public, it is certain that he might have made of Chatterton, who was full of affection, what he would. He might have represented to him what a fair and legitimate field of poetry he had chosen, thus celebrating the historic glory of his nation, and what an injustice he was doing to himself by giving the fame of his own genius to Rowley. Had he done this, he would have assuredly saved a great mind to his country, and would have deserved of it all honour and gratitude. But to have expected this from Walpole was to expect warmth from an icicle.

Spite, therefore, of the advice of Walpole, "given with as much

kindness and tenderness as if he had been his guardian," no argument or eloquence can shield him from the blame of posterity. There stands the fact that he turned his back on a great poet, when he stood before him blazing like a star of the first magnitude, and suffered him to perish. He did more. When that poet had perished, and the great soul of his country had awoke to its error and its loss, and acknowledged that "a prince had fallen in Israel," then, on the publication of Chatterton's letters to him in 1786, did this mean-souled man, in a canting letter to Hannah More, absolutely deny that he had ever received these letters!" letters pretended to have been sent to me, and which never were sent." *

After this, let those defend Walpole who like; would that we could clear that rough, dogmatic, but noble fellow, Samuel Johnson, from a criminal indifference to the claims and fate of Chatterton; but, with that unreflecting arbitrariness of will, which often led him into error, we learn from Boswell, who often urged him to read the poems of Rowley, that he long refused, saying, "Pho, child! don't talk to me of the powers of a vulgar, uneducated stripling! No man can coin guineas but in proportion as he has gold." When at length he was induced to read them, he confessed-"This is the most extraordinary young man that has encountered my knowledge. It is wonderful how the whelp has written such things." It had then been long too late to begin to admire; and the giant prejudices of Johnson had driven poor Chatterton as completely from him, as the petit-maitre vanity of Walpole repulsed him in that quarter.

Miss Seward, a woman who, with all her faults as a writer, had always the tact to discern true genius, would have dared to acknowledge the vast powers of Chatterton, had it been in her own day of popularity; but at the death of Chatterton, she was a country girl of twenty-three. What she says of Johnson's conduct is very just:"Though Chatterton had long been dead when Johnson began his Lives of the Poets, though Chatterton's poems had long been before the world, though their contents had engaged the literati of the nation in controversy, yet would not Johnson allow Chatterton a place in those volumes into which Pomfret and Yalden were admitted. So invincible were his grudging and surly prejudices, enduring long-deceased genius but ill, and contemporary genius not at all."

Thus we have traced the course of Thomas Chatterton to that eventful crisis of his fate, when he found himself rejected, as it were, by the literary senate of his nation, and thrust down the few steps of the temple of fame, which he had dared to ascend, as a forger and impostor. He was thrust away, in a manner, from the heart, and what was more, from the intellect of his country; yet his proud spirit spurned the ignominious treatment, and he dared to make one grand effort, one great and final appeal against the fiat, in the face of the whole world, and in the heart of the British metropolis. Alas! it was a desperate enterprise, and our hearts bleed as we follow him in his course. There is nothing, in my opinion, so utterly melancholy

Horace Walpole's Letters, vol. ii. 1840.

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