phrase “not of one, but of all” (p. 31). Malone attended to the more general stylistic aspects of his essay as well as to minute details. If he paused to recompute the number of parchments which could fit into the famous Bristol chests (p. 59), he also changed the simple declarative “I shall” to the more forceful “I will” throughout the essay. Although his verbal revisions cannot be called drastic, they are numerous and are frequently strategic.

Malone’s expansion of his essay, however, was in itself ample reason to call the pamphlet a “new edition.” The reviewer for the Gentleman’s Magazine might assure readers that “great part of this pamphlet” had already appeared there,21 but there were also “great” additions. What Malone came to consider Bryant’s “most plausible argument” (“that every author must know his own meaning—that Chatterton did not know the meaning of many words and lines in his book, and therefore was not the author”), he answered in an entirely new passage (pp. 41-45). He observed later that “almost every writer on the subject” subsequently “adopted” this rebuttal.22 Another crucial section (pp. 45-49), in which Malone compares a modernized passage from “Rowley” with a passage from Chatterton’s acknowledged poetry translated into Rowleian verse, was also new. This critical technique, which Malone perfected, became a standard one thereafter.23 Malone added six other passages, none of which is less than half a page in length, as well as five footnotes documenting or elaborating points which he had made in the magazine.24 The most heavily augmented part of the essay is that containing miscellaneous proofs, but Malone bolstered his initial arguments as well. In his comparison of “Rowley’s” smooth versification with the work of authentic late-medieval poets—the passage which, as we shall see, Tyrwhitt thought so effective—Malone introduced two further quotations and substituted the first lines from Bradshaw’s Holy Life for those he had quoted in the magazine.25 Malone’s additions to his essay, which taken together amount to some twenty pages (in a pamphlet of sixty-two pages), represent a careful effort to support with an irresistable battery of arguments the main line of attack which he had thrown against the Rowleians.

As his second paragraph and his appeals to “poetical readers” indicate, Malone’s fundamental message was that the Rowley poems must be judged as literature and not as historical documents. The poems had, of course, found many appreciative readers. A correspondent in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1777 (XLVII, 361-365), for instance, discussed with frank admiration the imagery, pathetic sentiment, accommodation of sound to sense and other aspects of the poems. It was Malone, however, who got to the heart of the matter in showing that poetry inevitably bears the hallmark of the era in which it is written. Even to appreciate the importance of this fact, he insisted, one must have read the early English poets with perception and taste. In establishing this criterion, Malone delivered his most devastating blow against the Rowleians: all their learned arguments were irrelevant.

Malone’s essay helped to awaken some very witty attacks on the Rowleians. Malone himself made use of wit in occasional passages, such as his abuse of Milles for relying on Shakespeare’s historical accuracy (pp. 22-24). The cure for Rowleiomania which he prescribed in the concluding passage aroused a good deal of comment. Not all readers were happy that he chose to ridicule respectable scholars,26 and the effectiveness of his humor did not go unquestioned. Burnaby Greene, whose Strictures were the only major attempt to discredit Malone, was anxious to show that, although Malone seemed to promise humor, he did not prove to be “a writer abounding in exertions of the risible muscles.”27 Among the replies to Greene were some jovial verses in the St. James’s Chronicle very likely contributed by Malone:

Greene’s criticisms are frequently absurd, but probably even Malone was ready to acknowledge that humor was not the outstanding feature of the Cursory Observations. His purpose was not to satirize but to refute.

Other writers in 1782, however, exerted their risible muscles much more vigorously than Malone did. William Julius Mickle wrote The Prophecy of Queen Emma; An Ancient Ballad lately discovered, written by Johannes Turgotus, Prior of Durham, in the Reign of William Rufus, to which he added a long satirical postscript about the discovery of the poem. George Hardinge’s Rowley and Chatterton in the Shades brilliantly depicts various scenes in the other world after news of the Rowley controversy is carried there. The most hilarious performance of the year—indeed, of the entire controversy—was the Archaeological Epistle to Dean Milles, published by John Nichols at the end of March,29 which turned the language of the Rowley poems ingeniously against the two fumbling historians. Such pieces would have appeared whether or not Malone had written the Cursory Observations. The general reader was likely to find ridiculous the sober effort to document Rowley’s existence. As a contributor to the St. James’s Chronicle said, “To mistake the Apprentice of a modern Attorney for an ancient Priest, too nearly resembles an Incident in the new Pantomime at Covent-Garden, where a Bailiff, intent on arresting an old Beau, is imposed on by a Monkey dressed in his Clothes, and employed in an awkward Imitation of his Manners.”