"When King Kynghill in his hand
Held the scepter of this land,
Shining star of Christ's own light,
The murky mists of pagan night
'Gan to scatter far and wide;
Then Saint Warburgh he arose,
Doffed his honors and fine clothes;
Preaching his Lord Jesus' name
To the land of West Sexx came,
Where yellow Severn rolls his tide.
"Strong in faithfulness he trode
Over the waters like a god,
Till he gained the distant hecke;[27]
In whose banks his staff did stick
Witness to the miracle.
Then he preachéd night and day,
And set many the right way.
This good staff great wonders wrought,
More than guessed by mortal thought,
Or than mortal tongue can tell.
"Then the folks a bridge did make
Over the stream unto the heck,
All of wood eke long and wide,
Pride and glory of the tide,
Which in time did fall away.
Then Earl Leof he besped
This great river from its bed,
Round his castle for to run;
'Twas in truth an ancient one;
But war and time will all decay.
"Now again with mighty force,
Severn in his ancient course,
Rolls his rapid stream along,
With a sand both swift and strong,
Whelming many an oaken wood.
We, the men of Bristol town,
Have rebuilt this bridge of stone,
Wishing each that it may last
Till the date of days be past,
Standing where the other stood."
Now, would it ever have been believed, had not the thing really taken
place in its unmitigated strangeness, that such poetry as this--poetry,
indeed, of which these are but mere fragments, which, while they display
the power, poetic freedom, and intellectual riches of the writer, do not
show the breadth and grandeur of his plans, to be seen only in the works
themselves--that they could have been 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_, that he must be a _glorious_ impostor? Yet Horace Walpole,
Gray, Mason, Sam 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 Littleton, Gibbon, the Scotch historians
and philosophers, Hume, Robertson, Adam Smith, and the like. There were,
too, such men about the stage as Foote, Macklin, Coleman, 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, it was, so far as poetry,
genuine poetry, was concerned, a dark and wintery time. The Wartons were
of a more hopeful character, and Mrs. Montagu, the founder of the
Blue-Stocking 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 honor 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 to 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! Oh
glorious thieves! glorious coiners! admirable impostors! would to God
that a thousand other such would appear, again and again appear, to fill
the hemisphere of England with fresh stars of renown! 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
honor 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 endeavored 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 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
splendor 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 beside. He had showed up the
infallibility of the critics--an unpardonable crime! These tricks of
mere boys, by which the craft, and the owl-gravity of the graybeards 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, dispatched 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 favored 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, had declared
it to be a forgery; and before poor Horace had discovered that he had
been thus complimenting a poor lawyer's clerk, and his own poems! The
man 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. Almost every writer of the end of the last century, and the
beginning of this, has written more or less respecting Chatterton and
the Rowley poems; and all have gone largely into the merits or demerits
of Walpole in the case. 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 ever excuse the conduct of
Walpole. If not to prevent the fate of Chatterton was, in his case, to
accelerate it, then indeed Walpole must be pronounced guilty of the
catastrophe which ensued; and what greatly aggravates the offense is,
that he made that a crime in Chatterton of which he himself set the
example. Chatterton gave out that his poems were written by Rowley, and
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 was 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 every thing possible done to
develop his rare powers, and secure them to his country. Walpole coolly
advised him to stick to his desk, and walked off! 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, on seeing the contemptible way in which the selfish aristocrat,
wounded in his vanity, had 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 honor 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
will ever be able to shield him from the utter contempt 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_."[28]
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-maître 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, and was one of the first to recognize
that of Scott and Southey, 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 cotemporary 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 in all the history of
the calamities of authors as the four fatal months of Chatterton's
sojourn in London. It was his great misfortune, from the hour of his
birth till that moment, that he never had one suitable friend; one wise,
generous, and sympathizing friend, who saw at once his splendid
endowments and the faults of his character, and who could thus acquire a
sound, and, at the same time, an inspiring influence over him. Born of
poor people, who, however they might love him, did not and could not
comprehend him; living in a town devoted to trade, and nailed to the
desk of a pettifogging attorney, he went on his way alone, conscious of
his own powers, and of the inferiority of those around him, till his
pride and his passions kept pace with his genius, and he would have been
a miracle had he not had great and many faults. If we, therefore, sigh
over his religious skepticism, and regret the occasional symptoms of a
sufficient want of truth and high principle in his literary hoaxes,
especially in foisting fictitious matter into grave history, we are
again compelled to acknowledge that it was because he had no adequate
friend and counselor. He was like a young giant wandering solitarily
over a wilderness without guide or guide-post; and if he did not go
wrong in proportion to his unusual ardor, strength, and speed, it were a
wonder. But from the moment that he sets foot in London, what is there
in all biography so heart-breaking to contemplate? With a few borrowed
guineas he sets out. Arrived in this great ocean of human life, where
one living wave rushes past another as unrecognizant as the waves of the
ordinary sea, his heart overflowing with domestic affections, he expends
the few borrowed guineas in presents to his mother and sister, and sends
them with flaming accounts of his prospect of honors for himself, and of
wealth for them. If any one would make himself acquainted with the true
pathetic, let him only read the few letters written home by Chatterton
from Shoreditch and Holborn. He was to get four guineas a month by one
magazine; was to write a history of England, and occasional essays for
the daily papers. "What a glorious prospect!" He was acquainted with all
the geniuses at the Chapter Coffee-house. "No author can be poor who
understands the arts of booksellers; this knowledge I have pretty well
dipped into!" Ah! poor Chatterton, one frog more gone to put himself
under the protection of King Stork! Mr. Wilkes knew him by his writings;
and he was going to visit him, and use his interest to secure the
Trinity House for a Mrs. Ballance. He wrote to all his young men
acquaintances. They were to send him up compositions, and he would have
them inserted in all sorts of periodicals. Songs he was to write for a
doctor in music; and such was the good fortune pouring in, that he could
not help exclaiming, "_Bravo, my boys! up we go!_" One person would give
him a recommendation as traveling companion to the young Duke of
Northumberland, only he spoke nothing but English; another to Sir George
Colebrook, an East India director, for a place of no despicable
description, only he would not go to sea. He was about to wait on the
Duke of Bedford, and had had a most polite interview with Beckford, the
lord-mayor. In short, all, according to his poetic fancy, was going on
most mountingly. "If," wrote he to his sister, "money flowed as fast
upon me as honors, I would give you a portion of £5000."
But what was the stern reality? Amid all the flush of imaginary honors
and success, or what he would have his family to think such, to
tranquilize their minds, he was, in truth, almost from the first, in a
state of starvation. His journey, and the presents so generously but so
injudiciously purchased for his mother and sister--the little fund of
borrowed guineas was gone. Of friends he does not appear to have had one
in this huge human wilderness. Besides the booksellers for whom he did
slave-work, not a single influential mortal seems to have put out a
single finger of fellowship toward him. So far as the men of literary
fame were concerned, it was one wide, dead, and desert silence. From the
wretched region of Shoreditch, he flitted to the good-natured
dress-maker's of Brook-street, Holborn. But starvation pursued him, and
stared him every day more fearfully in the face. He was, with all his
glorious talents and his indomitable pride, utterly alone in the world.
Walpole, who had given him advice "as kindly as if he had been his
guardian," was in great bodily comfort, penning smart letters, and
compiling a "Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors" at Strawberry Hill,
while the noblest genius living was stalking on sternly through the
streets of pitiless London to famine and despair. Sam Johnson, all _his_
struggles now over, and at the annual price of £300 become, according to
his own definition of Pensioner in his Dictionary, "A slave of state,
hired by a stipend to obey his master," was comfortably lolling on the
soft sofas of Mrs. Thrale, or acting the lion in the Literary Club, or
in the saloon of some wealthy noble. Goldsmith was hastening to his end
at fifty-three, and Chatterton to his at seventeen!
Of all the fine flourishes about the booksellers, whose arts he
flattered himself that he understood, the following extract from his
pocket-book, found after his death, will show the wretched result:
"Received to May 23, for Middlesex £1 11 6
" " of B 1 2 3
" " of Fell, for the Consuliad 0 10 6
" " of Mr. Hamilton, for Candidus
and Foreign Journal 0 2 0
" " of Mr. Fell 0 10 6
" " of Middlesex Journal 0 8 6
" " of Mr. Hamilton, for 16 songs 0 10 6
-------
£4 15 9
"In another part of this little book," says his biographer, "shortly
before his death he had inserted a memorandum, intimating that the sum
of eleven pounds was due to him from the London publishers. It was a
cruel fate to be compelled to turn literary drudge, with four-and-twenty
shillings a month for wages, and more cruel still to be doomed to suffer
all the pains of hunger because those wages were not paid!"
Such was the life of Chatterton. His fate is too well known; and so
little sensation did the awful death of this
"Marvelous boy, who perished in his pride,"
occasion, that it was long before his friends heard any thing of him.
He was buried without ceremony, _among paupers in Shoe Lane_; his
identity could with difficulty be established when the fact was known.
In all the annals of literature there is nothing resembling the history
of this boy-poet; he stands alone. Never did any other youth of the same
years, even under the most favorable circumstances, produce works of the
same high order; and never was child of genius treated by his country
with such unfeeling contempt, with such an iron and unrelenting
harshness of neglect. The fate of Francis Hilary Gilbert, a French
writer, has been compared to that of Chatterton; but, besides that
Gilbert was a man of forty-three, and had no claims to the genius of
Chatterton, being a writer on veterinary medicine and rural economy, he
destroyed himself because the government, which had sent him to Spain,
neglected to send him his remittances, not from neglect of a whole
nation. Except in the mere facts of destitution and suicide, there is
little resemblance in the characters, claims, or fates of the two men.
Chatterton's death has furnished a tragedy to the French stage from the
pen of Alfred de Vigny.
* * * * *
The haunts of Chatterton lie within a narrow space. He was not one of
those whom fate or fortune allows to traverse many lands; Bristol and
London were his only places of residence. In London, little can now be
known of his haunts: that he frequented Vauxhall and Marylebone Gardens;
resorted to the Chapter Coffee-house; that he lived nine weeks at Mr.
Walmsley's, a plasterer, in Shoreditch; and then removed to Mrs.
Angel's, dress-maker, No. 4 Brook-street, Holborn, comprises nearly the
totality of his homes and haunts in London. Where Mr. Walmsley's house
was can not now be ascertained; the Chapter Coffee-house still retains
its old situation, but has long ceased to be the resort "of all the
literary characters" of London; Vauxhall is in its deserted old age, and
Marylebone Gardens are, like many other gardens of Chatterton's time,
now overrun, not with weeds, but houses. No. 4 Brook-street, Holborn,
would be an interesting number if it remained; but, as if every thing
connected with the history of this ill-fated youth, except his fame,
should be condemned to the most singular fatality, there is no No. 4; it
is swallowed up by an enormous furniture warehouse, Steffenoni's,
fronting into Holborn, and occupying what used to be numbers one, two,
three, and four of Brook-street. Thus the whole of the interior of these
houses has been cleared away, and they have been converted into one long
show-shop below, and as long manufacturing shops above. In this form
they have been for the last eighteen years; and previous to that time, I
am told, were occupied by an equally extensive ironmongery concern. Thus
all memory of the particular spot which was the room of Chatterton, and
where he committed the suicide, is rooted out. What is still more
strange, the very same fate has attended his place of sepulture. He was
buried among the paupers in Shoe Lane; so little was known or cared
about him and his fate, that it was some time, as stated, before his
friends learned the sad story; in the mean time, the exact site of his
grave was wellnigh become unknown. It appears, however, from inquiries
which I have made, that the spot was recognized; and when the public
became at length aware of the genius that had been suffered to perish in
despair, a headstone was erected by subscription among some admirers of
his productions. With the rapid revolutions of property which now take
place, especially in the metropolis and other large cities; with new
plans and improvements, which in their progress seem to spare nothing of
the past, however sacred, we have already seen, in the course of these
volumes, how many traces of the resorts and dwellings of our poets have
vanished from among us. The very resting-place of Chatterton could not
escape the ungenial character of his fate. London, which seemed to
refuse to know him when alive, refused a quiet repose to his ashes. To
lie among the paupers of Shoe Lane was, one would have thought, a
sufficiently abject lot for so proud and soaring a nature; but fortune
had still another spite in reserve for his remains! The burial-ground in
Shoe Lane, one of those inclosures of the dead which a dignitary of the
Church has asserted to be guarded and guarantied against all violence
and change by the ceremony of consecration, was sold to form Farringdon
market; and tombs and memorials of the deceased disappeared to make way
for the shambles and cabbage stalls of the living. Was there no lover of
literature, no venerator of genius to take the alarm; to step in and see
that the bones and the headstone of Chatterton were removed to the
grave-yard which still is attached to St. Andrew's Church? It appears
not. Neglected in death as in life, the headstone was pulled up, the
bones of the poet were left to share the fate of those of his pauper
comrades, and it is now most probable that they are scattered--Heaven
knows where! for I am assured, on good authority, that houses are now
built on the spot where this unfortunate youth lay. If houses are built,
most likely cellars were dug to those houses; and then the bones of
Chatterton--where are they? Echo may answer--where?
Let us now quit the desecrated scene of the poet's interment, and,
returning to Bristol, seek that of his birth: we shall seek it equally
in vain! The house of his birth, and the last narrow house of his
remains, are alike swept away from the earth! Chatterton was born on
Redcliffe Hill, in a back court behind the row of houses facing the
northwest side of St. Mary's churchyard; the row of houses and its back
courts have all been pulled down and rebuilt. The house in which
Chatterton was born was behind a shop nearly opposite the northwest
corner of the church; and the monument to the young poet, lately erected
by subscription, has been very appropriately placed in a line between
this house and the north porch of the church in which he professed to
have found the Rowley MSS. This monument is a Gothic erection, much
resembling an ancient cross, and on the top stands Chatterton, in the
dress of Colston's school, and with an unfolded roll of parchment in his
hand. This monument was erected under the care and from the design of
John Britton, the antiquary, who, so much to his honor, long zealously
exerted himself to rescue Chatterton's memory from apparent neglect in
his native city. The man who can gaze on this monument; can contemplate
the boyish figure and face of the juvenile poet; can glance from this
quarter, where he was born in poverty, to that old porch, where he
planned the scheme of his fame; and can call to mind what he was and
what he did without the profoundest sensations of wonder and regret, may
safely pass through life without fear of an astonishment. It is, in my
opinion, one of the most affecting objects in Great Britain. How much,
then, is that feeling of sympathy and regret augmented when you
approach, and, upon the monument, read the very words written by the
inspired boy himself for his supposed monument, and inserted in his
"will."
"TO THE MEMORY OF
"THOMAS CHATTERTON.
"Reader, judge not: if thou art a Christian--believe that
he shall be judged by a Superior Power; to that Power alone
is he now answerable."
* * * * *
One of the spots in Bristol which we should visit with the intensest
interest connected with the history of Chatterton, would be the office
of Lambert the attorney, where he wrote the finest of his poems
attributed to Rowley. The first office of this person was on St. John's
Steps, but he left this during Chatterton's abode with him; and, ceasing
to be an office, it does not now seem to be exactly known in which house
it was. From this place he removed to the house now occupied by Mr.
Short, silversmith, in Cornhill, opposite to the Exchange; and here
Chatterton probably wrote the greater portion of Rowley's poems. Another
favorite haunt of Chatterton's, Redcliffe Meadow, is now no longer a
meadow, but is built all over; so rapidly has about seventy years
eradicated the footsteps of the poet in his native place. There are two
objects, however, which, from their public character, remain, and are
likely to remain, unchanged, and around which the recollections of
Chatterton and his singular history will forever vividly cling: these
are, Colston's School, and the Church of St. Mary's.
The school in Pyle-street, where he was sent at five years of age, and
which his father had taught, I believe no longer exists. The school on
St. Augustine's Back exists, and is likely to exist. It is one of those
endowments founded by the great merchants of England, which, if they had
been preserved from the harpy and perverting fingers of trustees, would
now suffice to educate the whole nation. This school, founded at a
comparatively recent date, and in the midst of an active city like
Bristol, seems to be well administered. There you find an ample
school-room, dining-hall, chapel, and spacious bed-rooms, all kept in
most clean and healthy order; a hundred boys, in their long, blue,
full-skirted coats and scarlet stockings, exactly as they were in the
days of Chatterton. You may look on them, and realize to yourself
precisely how Chatterton and his schoolfellows looked when he was busy
there devouring books of history, poetry, and antiquities, and planning
the Burgum pedigree, and the like. Take any fair boy of a similar age;
let him be one of the oldest and most attractive--for, says his
biographer, "there was a stateliness and a manly bearing in Chatterton
beyond what might have been expected from his years." "He had a proud
air," says Mrs. Edkins, and, according to the general evidence, he was
as remarkable for the prematurity of his person as he was for that of
his intellect and imagination. His mien and manner were exceedingly
prepossessing; his eyes were gray, but piercingly brilliant; and when he
was animated in conversation, or excited by any passing event, the fire
flashed and rolled in the lower part of the orbs in a wonderful and
almost fearful way. Mr. Calcott characterized Chatterton's eye "as a
kind of hawk's eye, and thought we could see his soul through it." As
with Byron, "one eye was more remarkable than the other; and its
lightning-like flashes had something about them supernaturally grand."
Take some fine, clever-looking lad, then, from the crowd, and you will
find such, and you will feel the strangest astonishment in imagining
such a boy appearing before the grave citizen Burgum with his pedigree,
and within a few years afterward acting so daring and yet so glorious a
part before the whole world.
To the admirers of genius, and the sympathizers with the strange fate of
Chatterton, a visit to this school must always be a peculiar
gratification; and under the improved management of improved times, and
that of a zealous committee, and so excellent a master as the present
one, Mr. Wilson, that gratification will be perfect. All is so airy,
fresh, and cheerful; there is such a spirit of order evinced even in the
careful rolling up of their Sunday suits, with their broad,
silver-plated belt clasps, each arranged in its proper place, on shelves
in the clothes-room, under every boy's own number; and yet without that
order degenerating into severity, but the contrary, that you can not
help feeling the grand beneficence of those wealthy merchants who, like
Edward Colston, make their riches do their generous will forever; who
become thereby the actual fathers of their native cities to all
generations; who roll in every year of the world's progress some huge
stone of anxiety from the hearts of poor widows; who clear the way
before the unfriended, but active and worthy lad; who put forth their
invisible hands from the heaven of their rest, and become the genuine
guardian angels of the orphan race forever and ever; raising from those
who would otherwise have been outcasts and ignorant laborers, aspiring
and useful men, tradesmen of substance, merchants the true enrichers of
their country, and fathers of happy families. How glorious is such a
lot! how noble is such an appropriation of wealth! how enviable is such
a fame! And among such men there were few more truly admirable than
Edward Colston. He was worthy to have been lifted by Chatterton to the
side of the magnificent Canynge, and one can not help wondering that he
says so little about this great benefactor of his city.
Edward Colston was not merely the founder of this school for the
clothing, maintaining, and apprenticing of one hundred boys, at a charge
of about £40,000, but he also founded another school in Temple-street,
to clothe and maintain forty boys, at a cost of £3000; and he left £8500
for an alms-house for twelve men and twelve women, with 6_s._ per week
to the chief brother, and 3_s._ per week to the rest, with coals, &c.;
£600 for the maintaining of six sailors in the Merchants' Alms-house;
£1500 to clothe, maintain, instruct, and apprentice six boys; £200 to
the Mint Work-house; £500 to rebuild the Boys' Hospital; £200 to put out
poor children; £1200 to be given, in £100 a year, for twelve years, to
apprentice the boys with, £10 each for his school; £1230 to beautify
different churches in the city; £2500 to St. Bartholomew's Hospital in
London; and £2000 to Christ Church School in London; £500 to St.
Thomas's Hospital; £500 to Bethlehem Hospital; £200 to New Work-house in
Bishopsgate Without; £300 to the Society for Propagating the Gospel;
£900 for educating and clothing twelve poor boys and twelve girls, at
£45 yearly, at Mortlake in Surrey; to build and endow an alms-house at
Sheen in Surrey, sum not stated; £6000 to augment poor livings; besides
various other sums for charitable purposes. All this property did this
noble man thus bestow on the needs of his poorer brethren, without
forgetting, as is often the case on great occasions, those of his own
blood relatives, to whom he bequeathed the princely sum of £100,000.
But, like an able and wise merchant, he did not merely bequeath these
munificent funds, but "he performed all these charitable works in his
lifetime; invested revenues for their support in trustees' hands; lived
to see the trusts justly executed, as they are at this day; and saw with
his own eyes the good effects of all his establishments." Great, too, as
were these bequests, they were not the result of hoarding during a long,
penurious life, as is often the case, to leave a boastful name at his
death; his whole life was like the latter end of it. True, he did not
marry, and when urged to it, used to reply, with a sort of pleasantness,
"Every helpless widow is my wife, and her distressed orphans my
children." "He was a most successful merchant," says Barrett, in his
History of Bristol, "and never insured a ship, and never lost one." He
lived first in Small-street, Bristol, but having so much business in
London, and being chosen to represent the city, he removed thither, and
afterward lived, as he advanced in years, a very retired life, at
Mortlake, in Surrey. His daily existence was one of the noblest acts of
Christian benevolence; and his private donations were not less than his
public. He sent at one time £3000 to relieve and free debtors in
Ludgate, by a private hand; freed yearly those confined for small debts
in Whitechapel Prison and the Marshalsea; sent £1000 to relieve distress
in Whitechapel; twice a week distributed beef and broth to all the poor
around him; and were any sailor suffering or cast away in his employ,
his family afterward found a sure asylum in him.
Why did not Chatterton, who, by the splendid provision of this man,
received his education and advance into life, resound the praises of
Edward Colston as loudly as he did those of William Canynge? There is no
doubt that it was because time had not sufficiently clothed with its
poetic hues the latter merchant as it had the former. Canynge, too, as
the builder of Redcliffe Church, was to him an object of profound
admiration. This church is the most lively monument of the memory of
Chatterton. His mother is said to have lived on Redcliffe Hill, nearly
opposite to the upper gate of this church, at the corner of Colston's
parade; this must have been when he was apprentice at Lambert's, and
also probably before, while he was at Colston's school. The houses
standing there now, however, are too large and good for a woman in her
circumstances to have occupied; and it is therefore probable that _this_
abode of his, too, must have been pulled down. We turn, then, to the
church itself, as the sole building of his resort, next to Colston's
school, which remains as he used to see it. A noble and spacious church
it is, as we have stated, of the lightest and most beautiful
architecture. The graceful, lofty columns and pointed arches of its
aisles; the richly-groined roof; and the fine extent of the view from
east to west, being no less than 197 feet, and the height of the middle
cross aisle, 54 feet, with a proportionate breadth from north to south,
fills you, on entering, with a feeling of the highest admiration and
pleasure. What does not a little surprise you is to find in the church,
where the great painted altar-piece used to hang, now as large a
painting of the Ascension, with two side pieces, one representing the
stone being rolled away from the sepulcher of our Savior, and the other
the three Maries come to visit the empty tomb; and those by no other
artist than--Hogarth! The curiosity of such a fact makes these paintings
a matter of intense interest; and if we can not place them on a par with
such things from the hands of the old masters, we must allow that they
are full of talent, and wonderful for a man whose ordinary walk was
extremely different.
Another object of interest is the tomb of Admiral Penn, the father of
the founder of Pennsylvania, which is in the pavement of the south
aisle, with this inscription: "Here lieth the body of Sir William Penn,
who departed this life the 16th of September, 1674. Dum clavum teneam."
On a pillar near hang two or three decayed banners, a black cuirass and
helmet, gantlets and swords, with his escutcheon and motto. Not being
aware that Admiral Penn lay buried here, I can not describe the singular
feeling which the sight of these remnants of aristocratic pageantry,
suspended above the tomb of the father of the great Quaker of
Pennsylvania, gave me; suspended, too, in one of the proudest temples of
that proud national church, the downfall of which this very man
predicted on his death-bed: "Son William, if you and your friends
continue faithful to that which has been made known to you, you will
make an end of priests and priestcraft to the end of the world."
In the south transept stand conspicuously the tomb and effigies of
William Canygne. These are striking objects in connection with the
history of Chatterton. Here you behold the very forms which, from the
early dawn of his life, filled the mind of the poet-child with the
deepest sense of admiration. It was here, before these recumbent
figures, that he used to be found sitting in profound thought; and when
the reading of the wealth, the princely merchant state, and the
munificent deeds of William Canynge had arrayed the inanimate stone with
the hues of long-past life and the halo of solemn and beautiful
deeds--the raising of this fair church, the most beautiful of all--then
was it these which became the germ of the great Rowley fable; Canynge,
the ancient and magnificent, now the merchant, and now the shaven priest
and dean, arose once more at the touch of the inspired boy, and played
his part, not as a citizen of Bristol, but as a citizen of the world.
These effigies are singular in themselves. First, you have William
Canynge and Joan his wife, lying on an altar-tomb in full proportion,
under a canopy handsomely carved in freestone; then, not far off, you
have Canynge again carved in alabaster, lying along in his priest's
robes as Dean of Westbury, with hands lifted up as in devotion, and a
large book under his head. It is rare, and almost unique, to have two
monuments of the same person side by side, and that in two different
characters, yet still little would these have attracted notice over a
thousand other goodly tombs in our churches, had they not chanced to
attract the attention of this little charity-boy, the descendant of the
sextons of the church.
Last, but far most striking of all the haunts of Chatterton, is that
muniment room over the north porch. When you ascend the dark and winding
stair, and enter this dim and stony hexagon apartment, and see still
standing on its floor the seven very chests of the Rowley story, old and
moldering, their lids--some of them circular, as if hewn out of solid
trees--broken off, and all dirty and worm-eaten, the reality of the
strange facts connected with them comes thrillingly upon you. You seem
then and there only first and fully to feel how actual and how sad is
the story of Thomas Chatterton: that here, indeed, began his wondrous
scheme of fame; hence it spread and stood forth as a brilliant mystery
for a moment; hence the proud boy gloried in its sudden blaze as in that
of a recognizing glory from heaven; and then how
"Black despair,
The shadow of a starless night, was thrown
Over the earth, in which he moved alone."--_Shelley._
[Illustration]