200 EICARDUS CORINENSIS. 



Thomas Chatterton, the Bristol Bluecoat boy, was the sole author of 

 the Rowley poems. But Dr. Milles published a very learned quarto to 

 prove the genuineness of the apocryphal priest, and the antiquity of 

 the marvellous charity-boy's " JEWa," " Hastings," " The Bristowe 

 Tragedy/' and the rest. The Dean did not meddle with the reputed 

 prose works of his medieval priest. They were then in preparation 

 for the press by a no less painstaking Bristol antiquary : Mr. William 

 Barrett, Surgeon and F. S. A. But among the latter is a passage, 

 which, had any unbeliever then ventured a doubt as to the genuine- 

 ness of Richard's Itinerary, would have been hailed by his champions 

 as an irrefragable confutation. It curiously illustrates the revolution 

 of opinion in the interval, that the same evidence would now suffice, 

 were any such needed, to confute all the voluminous arguments of 

 Dean Milles in support of the imaginary poet-priest of the fifteentli 

 century. 



The good priest Rowley is in search of manuscripts and antiquarian 

 treasures of all sorts, for his friend and patron, Maister William Canynge, 

 Mayor of Bristol. But the times are full of trouble, for they are those 

 of the wars of the Roses ; and Rowley, writing from Cirencester, 

 betrays his political sympathies. But, after a brief comment on my 

 Lord of Warwick's unprincipled ambition, he thus passes to a more 

 congenial theme, suited to the place from which he writes. "I have 

 founde the papers of Fryar Rycharde : he saieth nothynge of Bristolle, 

 albeit he haveth a long storie of Seyncte Vyncente and the Queede. 

 His celle is most lovelie depycted on the whyte walles wythe black 

 cole, displaieynge the Iters of the Weste." Such was the spirit of that 

 eighteenth century ; ingenious, inventive, but wholly unscrupulous as 

 to the uses to which its ingenuity was applied. 



Yet Bertram and Chatterton, though foremost among the " literary 

 forgers " of that eighteen century, must not be classed together, as 

 thougb they stood on common ground. Chatterton did indeed deceive 

 Barrett, Milles, and many another credulous dupe ; but now that his 

 mystifications have all vanished, his priest Rowley remains as an 

 ingenious, and harmless fiction ; and his Ballads, Epics, and Dramatic 

 Interludes take a permanent rank in the poetic literature of his age. 

 But the De Situ Britannise, if a forgery of that eighteenth century, is 

 not merely worthless : it is one of the most mischievous of literary 

 impostures, reflecting disgrace on its mendacious perpetrator; and 

 tainting with misconception and falsehood the investigations of honest 



