fill up the outline by conjectures and synchronisms, so as to clear out for himself, so to speak, "Canynge's Life and Times," as a luminous little spot in the general darkness of the English past. And here comes in the story of the old parchments.

Over the north porch of St. Mary's Redcliffe was a room known as "the muniment-room." Here, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, there lay six or seven locked chests, which were understood to contain old deeds and other writings. One of the chests was traditionally known as "Mr. Canynge's coffer." The keys of this chest had been long lost, and when, in the year 1727, it was deemed expedient to secure some title-deeds that were believed to be contained in it, a locksmith was employed to break it open. Such documents as were thought of importance were then removed, and the rest were left in the open chest as of no value. The other chests were similarly treated. Accordingly, parcels of the remaining contents were subsequently, from time to time, carried off by various parties; and, in particular, it was remembered that, when John Chatterton was sexton, his brother, the choir-singer and teacher of Pylestreet school, had carried off a quantity of them to be used as book-covers and for other such-like purposes. A bundle of these parchments remained in the possession of Mrs. Chatterton after her husband's death, and such of them as had not been previously snipped into thread-papers came into Chatter ton's hands.

What these old documents really contained we have no means of knowing. That some of them may have been papers of historical value is not improbable. It is certain, at least, that they interested Chatterton, that the possession of them nourished his sense of the antique, and that he learnt to decipher parts of them, catching out old bits of Latin phraseology, and such like, which he mis-wrote in copying. We may even go farther, and surmise that, out of those papers, he may have derived hints that were of use to him in his attempt to represent the circumstances of Canynge's life. They may have helped him, for example, to appropriate names for some of those fictitious or semi-fictitious personages whom he thought proper to group around Canynge in that tableau or his

torical romance of "Bristol in the Fifteenth Century," with the construction of which he regaled himself.

Of these secondary dramatis personæ, grouped in his imagination around Canynge, the most important was a supposed priest called Thomas Rowley, or more fully, "Thomas Rowlie, parish-preeste of St. John's, in the city of Bristol." The relations between Canynge and Rowley, as bodied forth in Chatterton's conception, were as follows:-Rowley, who had been at school in Bristol along with Canynge, became chaplain to Canynge's father; on that old gentleman's death, Canynge, then a rising young merchant, continued the family patronage to his schoolmate, and employed him, amongst other things, in collecting manuscripts and drawings for him. About the time of Canynge's first mayoralty, in 1431, Rowley was settled as parish priest of St. John's, and from that time forward, for a period of thirty or forty years, the two men continued on terms of the most friendly and cordial intimacy-Canynge, the wealthiest man in the west of England, and the civic soul of Bristol, living as a liberal merchant prince in a noble residence ; Rowley, a man of books and literature, in a modest priest's habitation, made comfortable by his patron's munificence. These two men, with a few others of minor activity-as Carpenter, Bishop of Bristol; Sir Tibbot Gorges, a country gentleman of the neighbourhood; Sir Charles Baldwin, a brave knight of the Lancastrian faction; Iscam, another priest of Bristol; Ladgate, a monk of London, &c., &c., constituted, in fact, an enlightened coterie in Chatterton's ideal Bristol of 1430-60, enlivening that city by their amateur theatricals and other literary relaxations from more severe business, and rendering it more distinguished for culture than any other town in England, excepting Oxford and London. The fine old merchant himself occasionally uses his pen to some purpose, as in his epigram on the imaginary John à Dalbenie, a hot politician of the town

"John makes a jar 'bout Lancaster and YorkBe still, good manne, and learn to mind thy work."

Generally, however, he abstains from literature himself, and prefers reading or hearing the productions of his friends

Iscam and Rowley; especially those of Rowley, who is his poet-laureate.

Had Chatterton put forth this coinage of his brain in the shape of a professed historical romance, all would have been well. But from working so lovingly in the matter of antiquity, he contracted also a preference for the antique in form. As Scott, in the very process of realising to himself the Quentin Durwards, the Mause Headriggs, and the Jedediah Cleishbothams of his inimitable fictions, acquired in his own person an antique way of thinking, and a mastery over the antique glossary, if not a positive affection for it, so it became natural to Chatterton, revelling as he did in conceptions of the antique, to draw on, as it were, an ancient-fashioned suit of thought, and make use of antique forms of language. Hence, when, prompted by his literary impulse, he sought to embody in verse any of those traditions or fictions relative to the past time of England which his enthusiasm for the antique had led him to fix upon—as, for example, the story of the Danish invasions of England, the story of the Battle of Hastings, or the story of a Tournament in the reign of Edward I. -he found himself obliged by a kind of artistic necessity to impart a quaintness to his style by the use of old vocables and idioms. Persisted in thereafter for the mere pleasure of the exercise, the habit would become exaggerated, till at last it would amount to an ungovernable disposition to riot in the obsolete.

Even so far, however, there was nothing blameworthy. In thus selecting a style artificially antique for the conveyance of his historic fancies, Chatterton, it might be affirmed, had but obeyed the proper instinct of his genius, and chosen that element in which he found he could work best. Every man has his mode, or set of intellectual conditions most favourable for the production and development of what is best in him; and in Chatterton's case this mode, this set of conditions, consisted in an affectation of the antique. For let any one compare the Rowley Poems of Chatterton with his own acknowledged productions, and the conclusion will be inevitable, that his forte was the antique, and that here alone lay any preternatural power he was endowed with. There are, indeed, in his acknowledged poems, felicities of

VOL. XXXVIII.-NO. CCXXIII.

expression and gleams of genius, showing that even as a modern poet he would certainly in time have taken a high rank; but to do justice to his astonishing abilities we must read his antique compositions. In the element of the antique Chatterton rules like a master; in his modern effusions he is but a clever boy beginning to handle with some effect the language of Pope and Dryden. Moreover, there is a perceptible moral difference between the two classes of his performances. In his antique poems there is freshness, enthusiasm, and a fine earnest sense of the becoming; throughout the modern ones we are offended by irreverence, malevolence, and a kind of vicious, boyish pruriency. And conscious as Chatterton must have been of this difference; aware as he must have been that it was when he wrote in his artificially-antique style that his invention worked most powerfully, that his heart beat most nobly, and the poetic shiver ran most keenly through his veins, we cannot wonder that he should have given himself up to this kind of literary recreation rather than to any other.

meaner

Unfortunately, however, causes were all this while at workmaliciousness towards individuals, craving for notoriety, delight in misleading people, and, above all, want of money. Moreover, for this unhappy combination of moral states and dispositions, it so happened that the Grandfather of Lies had a very suitable temptation ready, in the shape of that most successful literary imposture, the Ossian Poems, then in the first blush of their contested celebrity. Yielding to the temptation, Chatterton resolved to turn what was best and most original in his genius, i. e., the enthusiasm for the antique, into the service of his worst propensities; in other words, he resolved to adopt, with certain variations and adaptations to his own case, the trick of Macpherson. That this was the act of one express and distinct determination of his will-a solemn and secret compact with himself, made at a very early period indeed, probably before the conclusion of his fifteenth year-there can be no manner of doubt. The elaboration of his scheme of imposture, however, was gradual. The first exhibition of it, and probably that which suggested much that followed, was the Burgum Hoax, with its afterthought of the old English poet, John

C

de Bergham. Of this original trick the Rowley device was but a gigantic expansion. To invent a poet of the past, on whom to father all his own compositions in the antique style, and to give this poet a probable and fixed footing in history, was the essential form of the scheme. That the poet thus invented should be a Bristolian, and that his date should be in the times of the merchant Canynge, were special accidents determined by Chatterton's position and peculiar capabilities. And thus the two processes of invention, the legitimate and the illegitimate, worked into each other's hands,-Chatterton's previous conceptions of the life and times of Canynge providing him with a proper chronological and topographical environment for his required poet; and his device of the poet giving richness and interest to his romance of Canynge. And once begun, there were powerful reasons why the deceit should be persevered in-the pleasure of the jest itself; the secret sense of superiority it gave him; its advantage as a means of hooking half-crowns out of people's pockets; and last, though not least, the impossibility of retracting without being knocked down by Barrett for damaging his history, or kicked by the Catcotts for having made fools of them. Hence, by little and little, the whole organisation of the imposture, from the first rumour of old manuscripts, up to the use of ochre, black lead, and smoke, in preparing specimens of them.

But Chatterton, as we have already hinted, was not a literary monomaniac, a creature of one faculty. His enthusiasm for the antique, although the most remarkable part of him, was not the whole of him; the Rowley habit of thought and expression, though he liked to put it on, was also a thing that he could at pleasure throw off. Though an antiquarian, and a midnight reader of Speght's Chaucer and other blackletter volumes, he was also an attorney's apprentice, accustomed to viatic flirtations; accustomed to debate and have brawls with other attorneys' apprentices, to read the newspapers and magazines, to be present at street mobs and public meetings, and in every other way to take an apprentice's interest in the current ongoings of the day. In short, besides being an antiquarian, and a great creative genius in the element of the English antique, Chatterton

was also, in the year 1769-70, a complete and very characteristic specimen of that long-extinct phenomenon, a thinking young Englishman of the early part of the reign of George III. In other words, reader, besides being, by the special charter of his genius, a poet in the Rowley vein, he was also, by the more general right of his life eighty years ago, very much such a young fellow as your own unmarried great grandfather was.

Now

And what was that? Why, reader, your unmarried great grandfather, besides wearing a wig (which Chatterton did not), a coat with broad lapels and flaps, knee-breeches, buckles, and a cocked hat, was also, ten to one, a wild young dog of a free-thinker, fond of Churchill and Wilkes's " Essay on Woman," addicted to horrible slang against Bute and the whole Scottish nation, and raving mad about a thing he called Liberty. He read and repeated Junius, made jokes against parsons, and (only until he married, remember) talked Deism and very improper moral doctrine with respect to the sexes. Chatterton, up to his capacities as a youth of seventeen, was all this. He repudiated orthodoxy, refused to be called a Christian, and held the whole clerical profession in unbounded contempt. He drew up articles of faith on a slip of paper (still to be seen in the British Museum) which he carried in his pocket; which articles of faith were very much what Pope believed before him, and what Burns, Byron, and hundreds of others have believed since. In short, he was recognised in Bristol circles as an avowed freethinker; and his politics were to correspond. He sneered at Samuel Johnson, and thought him an old Tory bigot who had got a pension for political partizanship; he delighted in the scandal about Bute and the King's mother; he thought the King himself an obstinate dolt; he denounced Grafton and the ministry to small Bristol audiences . and he desired the nation to rally round Wilkes.

One remark more, and we end our Interleaf. As Chatterton was this dual phenomenon that we have described, as he was composed of two parts, a mania for the antique, and that general assemblage of more ordinary qualities and prejudices which constituted the able young Englishman of his era; so, it appears to us, the latter part of his

A

And so, dear reader, with a heavy heart we proceed to that often neglected, but somewhat necessary, preliminary to the practice of our "ungentle craft." Let not the rythmical induction to our article be objected to. Few critics are found so generous as to give such an advantage to their victims as we have done in those lines. From the judicial bench, arrayed in all the awful paraphernalia of a literary Rhadamanthus, we descend and take our place by the side of those shivering spectres who stand tremblingly awaiting their doom before our august tribunal. We adopt their crime, become abetters in their treason, repeat their plea.-Abandoning the safe commonplaces and prosaic formulas prescribed by the General Orders in the High Court of Criticism, we have introduced a phrase ology, a form of pleading which we fear will leave us open to many serious demurrers. Well, we cannot help it; it is an act of common justice, however opposed to common law and to common sense. "Oh! that mine enemy would write a book," says Job, in the midst of his undeserved trials and calamities. "Oh! that my reviewer would write a poem," must have been the revenge

ful wish of many an unpraised and sorely punished poetaster. Critics have too long mingled in the literary fight, surrounded by a cloud, like the gods of Homer, dealing unmerciful blows around them, but never leaving themselves open to the slightest wound. We rather imitate Achilles, the bravest of the well-booted Greeks. Our prose is invulnerable, our criticism impregnable; but our verse, like the heel of the son of Peleus, leaves us open to

"The slings and arrows of outrageous"-rhymers.

Well, gentlemen, aux armes! While we apply the critical toe, you may amuse yourselves by taking aim at the exposed heel.

In the title to this article we have attempted a classification which would have puzzled Linnæus himself. We have divided the specimens before us into "weeds, wild flowers, and waste paper." No other arrangement would give us such ample scope for honest praise, or well-earned censure, as the one we have made. No single division of the three but has in its epithet a complimentary, as well as a condemnatory meaning. There are

"Weeds of glorious feature,"

† Calderon.

Beaumont and Fletcher.