blue eyes—though unfortunately that is not in Rowley.

His art was essentially dramatic, and he has some fine dramatic moments, as for example when the Usurer soliloquizing miserably on his certain ultimate damnation suddenly cries out

O storthe unto mie mynde! I goe to helle. (Gouler's Requiem.)

The word 'storthe' is a good example of Chatterton's use of strange words. The effect of a sudden outcry which it produces would be lost in a modernized version which rendered it 'death'.

Mr. Watts-Dunton in his article on Chatterton in Ward's English Poets speaks of his extraordinary metrical inventiveness and of his ultimate responsibility for such lines as these—

  And Christabel saw the lady's eye
  And nothing else she saw thereby
  Save the boss of the shield of Sir Leoline tall
  Which hung in a murky old niche in the wall—

the anapaestic dance of which breaks in upon the normal iambic movement of the poem with a natural dramatic propriety. He compares too The Eve of St. Agnes with the Excelente Balade of Charitie, remarking that it was only in his latest work that Keats attained to that dramatic objectivity which was 'the very core and centre of Chatterton's genius.'

Another writer, Mr. Thomas Seccombe, speaks of his 'genuine lyric fire, a poetic energy, and above all an intensity remote from his contemporaries and suggestive (as Cimabue in his antique and primitive manner is suggestive of Giotto and Angelico) of Shelley and Keats.'

Chatterton's influence on the great body of poets of the generation succeeding his own was very considerable—Mr. Watts-Dunton indeed declares him to have been the father of the New Romantic School—and the affection with which Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth and many others regarded him was extraordinary. He was their pioneer, who had lost his life in a heroic attempt to penetrate the dull crassness of the mid-eighteenth century.

He had great originality and the gift of an intense imagination. If he is sometimes crude and immature in thought and expression—if his images sometimes weary by their monotony—it is accepted that a poet is to be judged by his highest and not his lowest; and Chatterton's best work has an inspiration, a singular and unique charm both of thought and of music that is of the first order of English poetry.

III. BIBLIOGRAPHY.

A great deal more has been written about Chatterton than it is worth anybody's while to read. To begin with, there are all the volumes and pamphlets concerning themselves with the question whether the Rowley poems were written by Chatterton or by Rowley, or by both (Chatterton adding matter of his own to existing poems written in the fifteenth century), or by neither. It may be said that these problems were not conclusively and finally solved till Professor Skeat brought out his edition of Chatterton in 1871.

Then again there are the various lives of the poet; for the most part mere random aggregations of such facts, true or imagined, as fell in the editor's way, filled out with pulpit commonplaces and easy paragraphs beginning 'But it is ever the way of Genius …' Professor Wilson's Chatterton: a Biographical Study is as final in its own way as Professor Skeat's two volumes. It is a scholarly compilation of all previous accounts, very well digested and arranged. Moreover, the Professor has for the most part left the facts to tell their own story; and thus his book is free from such absurdities as the sentimental regrets of Gregory and Professor Masson that Chatterton was led into a course of folly ending in suicide through being deprived of a father's care. Such a father as Chatterton's was!

While premising that any one who wishes to learn the facts of the boy-poet's life—his circumstances and surroundings—can find them all set forth in Professor Wilson's book: while equally if he is interested in the pseudo-Rowley's language, philologically considered, he will find this elaborately examined in Professor Skeat's second volume; it has been thought that the following bibliography of books dealing with various aspects of the poet which were read and valued in their day may be found of interest to students of literary history.

1598. Speght's edition of Chaucer, the glossary of which Chatterton used in the compilation of his Rowley Dictionary.

1708. Kersey's Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum, and

1737. Bailey's Universal Etymological Dictionary. (8th Enlarged Edition.) Bailey is largely copied from Kersey, but Chatterton certainly used both dictionaries in making his antique language.

1777. Tyrwhitt's edition of the Rowley poems. Tyrwhitt was Chatterton's first editor and in his edition many of the poems were printed for the first time. 'The only really good edition is Tyrwhitt's.' 'This exhibits a careful and, I believe, extremely accurate text … an excellent account of the MSS. and transcripts from which it was derived. It is a fortunate circumstance that the first editor was so thoroughly competent.' (Professor Skeat, Introd. to Vol. II of his 1871 edition.)

1778. Tyrwhitt's third edition, from which the present edition is printed. With this was printed for the first time 'An appendix … tending to prove that the Rowley poems were written not by any ancient author but entirely by Thomas Chatterton.' This edition follows the first nearly page for page; but was reset.

1780. Love and Madness by Sir Herbert Croft. This strange book deserves a brief description as it is the source of almost all our knowledge of Chatterton.

A certain Captain Hackman, violently in love with a Miss Reay, mistress of the Earl of Sandwich, and stung to madness by his jealousy and the hopelessness of his position, had in 1779 shot her in the Covent Garden Opera House and afterwards unsuccessfully attempted to shoot himself. Enormous public interest was excited, and Croft—baronet, parson, and literary adventurer—got hold of copies which Hackman had kept of some letters he had sent to the charming Miss Reay. These he published as a sensational topical novel in epistolary form, calling it Love and Madness. This is quite worth reading for its own sake, but much more so for its 49th letter, which purports to have been written by Hackman to satisfy Miss Reay's curiosity about Chatterton. As a matter of fact Croft, who had been very interested in the boy-poet and had collected from his relations and those with whom he had lodged in London all they could possibly tell him, wrote the letter himself and included it rather inartistically among the genuine Hackman-Reay correspondence. Amongst other valuable matter, this letter 49 contains a long account of her brother by Mary Chatterton.—(See Love letters of Mr. Hackman and Miss Reay, 1775-79, introduction by Gilbert Burgess: Heinemann, 1895.) 1774-81. Warton's History of English Poetry, in Volume II of which there is an account of Chatterton.

1781. Jacob Bryant's Observations upon the Poems of T. Rowley in which the authenticity of those poems is ascertained. Bryant was a strong Pro-Rowleian and argues cleverly against the possibility of Chatterton's having written the poems. He shows that Chatterton in his notes often misses Rowley's meaning and insists that he neglected to explain obvious difficulties because he could not understand them. Bryant is the least absurd of the Pro-Rowleians.

1782. Dean Milles' edition of the Rowley poems—a splendid quarto with a running commentary attempting to vindicate Rowley's authenticity. Milles was President of the Society of Antiquaries