THOMAS CHATTERTON. 
pointment, and made an unsuccessful attempt to abstain the very 
undesirable post of surgeon’s mate to the coast of Africa. The 
remainder of his history is short and melancholy. 
Falling into a state of indigence, which is not easily accounted for, 
supposing him to have continued his eitertions even in a moderate 
degree, he was reduced to the want of necessary food. Yet such 
was his pride, that he refused, as a sort of insult, an invitation to a 
dinner with his hostess, on the day preceding his death, assuring her 
he was not hungry. This was on August 24, 1770, and he soon after 
swallowed afsenic in water, the consequences of which proved fatal 
on the ensuing day. He was then in lodgings in Brook-street, HoF 
born. His remains w'ere interred in the burying ground uf Shoe-lane 
workhouse. Thus, a prey to all the horrors of despair, friendless 
and forlorn, poor Chatterton terminated a life which he had not 
enjoyed eighteen complete years. 
To enter into more minute particulars concerning the moral charac- 
ter of Chatterton, seems unnecessary, but the character of his genius 
demands a further discussion. It seems agreed that its measure 
should be taken from the poems published under the name of Rowley ; 
for that they are really the product of the age and person to whom 
he attributed them, is a supposition now abandoned by all who pre- 
tend to literary discernment. Their authenticity, it is true, was at 
first defended by great names, especially of the antiquarian class, 
who too often have proved the dupes to their fondness for the wonders 
of antiquity. But, exclusive of strong external marks of suspicion, 
internal evidence is abundantly sufficient to decide the question. That 
an unknown writer, of the fifteenth century should, in productions 
never heard of, but made to be locked up in a chest, so far surpass 
the taste and attainments of his age, as to write pieces of uniform 
correctness, free from all vulgarity and puerility, requiring nothing 
but a change of spelling to become harmonious to a modern ear, and 
even containing measures peculiar to the present age of English poetry, 
may safely be pronounced a moral impossibility; that such could be 
produced by a boy of fifteen or sixteen, is only extraordinary. 
Rowley’s Poems were first collected in an octavo volume by Mr. 
Tyrwhit, and afterwards splendidly published in quarto by Dean 
Milles, president of the society of antiquarians. They consist of 
pieces of all the principal classes of poetical composition ; tragedies, 
lyric and heroic poems, pastorals, epistles, ballads, &c. Many of 
them abound in sublimity and beauty, and display wonderful powers 
of imagination, and facility of composition ; yet there is also much 
of the common-placo flatness and extravagance, that might be expect- 
ed from a juvenile writer, whose fertility was greater than his judg- 
ment, and who had fed his mind upon stores collected with more 
avidity than choice. The spelling is designedly uncouth, and plain 
words are copiously besprinkled, which good judges say were never 
the diction of any one age of English literature, but are culled from 
glossaries. There is no doubt that these peculiarities have thrown 
a veil over the defects of the poems, and have aggrandized their 
beauties, by referring the imagination, even of those who w'ere disbe- 
lievers of their genuineness, to a remote age, when they would have 
