STRAWBERRY HILL, _June_ 19, 1777.
I thank you for your notices, dear Sir, and shall remember that on
Prince William. I did see the _Monthly Review_, but hope one is not
guilty of the death of every man who does not make one the dupe of a
forgery. I believe M'Pherson's success with "Ossian"[1] was more the
ruin of Chatterton[2] than I. Two years passed between my doubting the
authenticity of Rowley's poems and his death. I never knew he had been
in London till some time after he had undone and poisoned himself there.
The poems he sent me were transcripts in his own hand, and even in that
circumstance he told a lie: he said he had them from the very person at
Bristol to whom he had given them. If any man was to tell you that
monkish rhymes had been dug up at Herculaneum, which was destroyed
several centuries before there was any such poetry, should you believe
it? Just the reverse is the case of Rowley's pretended poems. They have
all the elegance of Waller and Prior, and more than Lord Surrey--but I
have no objection to anybody believing what he pleases. I think poor
Chatterton was an astonishing genius--but I cannot think that Rowley
foresaw metres that were invented long after he was dead, or that our
language was more refined at Bristol in the reign of Henry V. than it
was at Court under Henry VIII. One of the chaplains of the Bishop of
Exeter has found a line of Rowley in "Hudibras"--the monk might foresee
that too! The prematurity of Chatterton's genius is, however, full as
wonderful, as that such a prodigy as Rowley should never have been heard
of till the eighteenth century. The youth and industry of the former are
miracles, too, yet still more credible. There is not a symptom in the
poems, but the old words, that savours of Rowley's age--change the old
words for modern, and the whole construction is of yesterday.
[Footnote 1: Macpherson was a Scotch literary man, who in 1760 published
"Fingal" in six books, which he declared he had translated from a poem
by Ossian, son of Fingal, a Gaelic prince of the third century. For a
moment the work was accepted as genuine in some quarters, especially by
some of the Edinburgh divines. But Dr. Johnson denounced it as an
imposture from the first. He pointed out that Macpherson had never
produced the manuscripts from which he professed to have translated it
when challenged to do so. He maintained also that the so-called poem had
no merits; that "it was a mere unconnected rhapsody, a tiresome
repetition of the same images;" and his opinion soon became so generally
adopted, that Macpherson wrote him a furious letter of abuse, even
threatening him with personal violence; to which Johnson replied "that
he would not be deterred from exposing what he thought a cheat by the
menaces of a ruffian"--a reply which seems to have silenced Mr.
Macpherson (Boswell's "Life of Johnson," i. 375, ii. 310).]
[Footnote 2: Chatterton's is a melancholy story. In 1768, when a boy of
only sixteen, he published a volume of ballads which he described as the
work of Rowley, a priest of Bristol in the fifteenth century, and which
he affirmed he had found in an old chest in the crypt of the Church of
St. Mary Redcliffe at Bristol, of which his father was sexton. They gave
proofs of so rich and precocious a genius, that if he had published them
as his own works, he would "have found himself famous" in a moment, as
Byron did forty years afterwards. But people resented the attempt to
impose on them, Walpole being among the first to point out the proofs of
their modern composition; and consequently the admiration which his
genius might have excited was turned into general condemnation of his
imposture, and in despair he poisoned himself in 1770, when he was only
eighteen years old.]
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