pass along, why does Ossian sing? Soon shall he lie in the narrow house, and no bard shall raise his fame! Roll on, ye dark-brown years; ye bring no joy on your course! Let the tomb open to Ossian, for his strength has failed. The sons of song are gone to rest. My voice remains, like a blast that roars, lonely, on a sea-surrounded rock, after the winds are laid. The dark moss whistles there; the distant mariner sees the waving trees! When Macpherson had not the groundwork of Ossian to build upon, he was a very indifferent poet. The following, however, shows that, though his taste was defective, he had poetical fancy :— The Cave. [Written in the Highlands.] The wind is up, the field is bare, Some hermit lead me to his cell, Where Contemplation, lonely fair, With blessed content has chose to dwell. Behold! it opens to my sight, Dark in the rock, beside the flood; Dry fern around obstructs the light; The winds above it move the wood. Reflected in the lake, I see The downward mountains and the skies, The flying bird, the waving tree, The goats that on the hill arise. The gray-cloaked herd* drives on the cow; The slow-paced fowler walks the heath; A freckled pointer scours the brow; A musing shepherd stands beneath. Curved o'er the ruin of an oak, The woodman lifts his axe on high; Brings fuel to the homely flame; I see the smoky columns roll, And, through the chinky hut, the beam. Beside a stone o'ergrown with moss, One bleeding deer is stretched on grass. A lake at distance spreads to sight, As blows the blast along the sky. And seem to laugh and kiss between. The wind is rustling in the oak; They seem to hear the tread of feet; They start, they rise, look round the rock; Again they smile, again they meet. But see! the gray mist from the lake Ascends upon the shady hills; Dark storms the murmuring forests shake, Rain beats around a hundred rills. Neat-herd. To Damon's homely hut I fly; I see it smoking on the plain; From Macpherson's manuscripts at Belleville We copy the following fragment, marked, An Address to Venus, 1785: Thrice blest, and more than thrice, the morn What need is there of other day, Than the twin-stars that light those hills of snow! of age, but both were inferior to the verses of Chatterton at eleven; and his imitations of the antique, executed when he was fifteen and sixteen, exhibit a vigour of thought and facility of versification-to say nothing of their antiquarian character, which puzzled the most learned men of the day-that stamp him a poet of the first class. His education also was miserably deficient; yet when a mere boy, eleven years of age, this obscure youth could write as follows: Almighty Framer of the skies, *Wordsworth. 48 The sun of glory gleamed, the ray To cheer our gloomy sky. And hailed Salvation's morn? To gaudy pomp unknown: Despised, oppressed, the Godhead bears Nor bids his vengeance rise: He saw with Mercy's eyes. romantic imagination. He would also lie down on the meadows in view of St Mary's church, Bristol, fix his eyes upon the ancient edifice, and seem as if he were in a kind of trance. He thus nursed the enthusiasm which destroyed him. Though correct and orderly in his conduct, Chatterton, before he was sixteen, imbibed principles of infidelity, and the idea of suicide was familiar to his mind. It was, however, overruled for a time by his passion for literary fame and distinction. It was a favourite maxim with him, that man is equal to anything, and that everything might be achieved by diligence and abstinence. His alleged discoveries having attracted great attention, the youth stated that he found the manuscripts in his mother's house. 'In the muniment room of St Mary Redcliffe church of Bristol, several chests had been anciently deposited, among which was one called the "Coffre" of Mr Canynge, an eminent merchant of Bristol, who had rebuilt the church in the reign of Edward IV. About the year 1727 those ehests had been broken open by an order from proper authority: some ancient deeds had been taken out, and the remaining manuscripts left exposed as of no value. Chatterton's father, whose uncle was sexton of the church, had carried off great numbers of the parchments, and had used them as covers for books in his school. Amidst the residue of his father's ravages, Chatterton gave out that he had found many writings of Mr Canynge, and of Thomas Rowley (the friend of Canynge), a priest of the fifteenth century."* These fictitious poems were published in the Town and Country Magazine, to which Chatterton had become a contributor, and occasioned a warm controversy among literary antiquaries. Some of them he had submitted to Horace Walpole, who showed them to Gray and Mason; but these competent judges pronounced them to be forgeries. After three years spent in the attorney's office, Chatterton obtained his release from his apprenticeship, and went to London, where he engaged in various tasks for the booksellers, and wrote for the magazines and newspapers. He obtained an introduction to Beckford, the patriotic and popular lord-mayor, and his own inclinations led him to espouse the opposition party. But no money,' he says, is to be got on that side of the question; interest is on the other side. But he is a poor author who cannot write on both sides.' He boasted that his company was courted everywhere, and that he would settle the nation before he had done.' The splendid visions of promotion and consequence, however, soon vanished, and even his labours for the periodical press failed to afford him the means of comfortable subsistence. He applied for the appointment of a surgeon's mate to Africa, but was refused the necessary recommendation. This seems to have been his last hope, and he made no farther effort at literary composition. His spirits had always been unequal, alternately gloomy and elevated-both in extremes; he had cast off the restraints of religion, and had no steady principle to guide him, unless it was a strong affection for his mother and sister, to whom he sent remittances of money, while his means lasted. Habits of intem THOMAS CHATTERTON was born at Bristol, November 20, 1752. His father, who had taught the Free School there, died before his birth, and he was educated at a charity school, where nothing but English, writing, and accounts were taught. His first lessons were said to have been from a blackletter Bible, which may have had some effect on his youthful imagination. At the age of fourteen he was put apprentice to an attorney, where his situation was irksome and uncomfortable, but left him ample time to prosecute his private studies. He was passionately devoted to poetry, antiquities, and heraldry, and ambitious of distinction. His ruling passion, he says, was unconquerable pride.' He now set himself to accomplish his various impositions by pretended discoveries of old manuscripts. In October 1768 the new bridge at Bristol was finished; and Chatterton sent to a newspaper in the town a pretended account of the ceremonies on opening the old bridge, introduced by a letter to the printer, intimating that the description of the friars first passing over the old bridge was taken from an ancient manuscript.' To one man, fond of heraldic honours, he gave a pedigree reaching up to the time of William the Conqueror; to another he presents an ancient poem, the Romaunt of the Cnyghte,' written by one of his ancestors 450 years before; to a religious citizen of Bristol he gives an ancient fragment of a sermon on the Divinity of the Holy Spirit, as wroten by Thomas Rowley, a monk of the fifteenth century; to another, solicitous of obtaining information about Bristol, he makes the valuable present of an account of all the churches of the city, as they appeared three hundred years before, and accompanies it with drawings and descriptions of the castle, the whole pretended to be drawn from writings of the 'gode prieste Thomas Rowley.' Horace Walpole was engaged in writing the History of British Painters, and Chatterton sent him an account of eminent Carvellers and Peync-perance, succeeded by fits of remorse, exasperated ters,' who once flourished in Bristol. These, with various impositions of a similar nature, duped the citizens of Bristol. Chatterton had no confidant in his labours; he toiled in secret, gratified only by the stoical pride of talent.' He frequently wrote by moonlight, conceiving that the immediate presence of that luminary added to the inspiration. His Sundays were commonly spent in walking alone into the country about Bristol, and drawing sketches of churches and other objects which had impressed his his constitutional melancholy; and after being re- * Campbell's Specimens. No Eng same age.' The remains of the unhappy youth were interred in a shell in the burying-ground of ShoeLane workhouse. His unfinished papers he had destroyed before his death, and his room, when broken open, was found covered with scraps of paper. The citizens of Bristol have erected a monument to the memory of their native poet. The poems of Chatterton, published under the name of Rowley, consist of the tragedy of Ella, the Execution of Sir Charles Bawdin, Ode to Ella, the Battle of Hastings, the Tournament, one or two Dialogues, and a description of Canynge's Feast. Some of them, as the Ode to Ella (which we subjoin), have exactly the air of modern poetry, only disguised with antique spelling and phraseology. The avowed compositions of Chatterton are equally inferior to the forgeries in poetical powers and diction; which is satisfactorily accounted for by Sir Walter Scott by the fact, that his whole powers and energies must, at his early age, have been converted to the acquisition of the obsolete language and peculiar style necessary to support the deep-laid deception. He could have had no time for the study of our modern poets, their rules of verse, or modes of expression; while his whole faculties were intensely employed in the Herculean task of creating the person, history, and language of an ancient poet, which, vast as these faculties were, were sufficient wholly to engross, though not to overburden them.' power of picturesque painting seems to be Chatterton's most distinguishing feature as a poet. The heroism of Sir Charles Bawdin, who Summed the actions of the day A and who bearded the tyrant king on his way to the scaffold, is perhaps his most striking portrait. The following description of Morning in the tragedy of Ella, is in the style of the old poets: Bright sun had in his ruddy robes been dight, Her sable tapestry was rent in twain: The meads be sprinkled with the yellow hue, In daisied mantles is the mountain dight, The fresh young cowslip bendeth with the dew; The trees enleafed, into heaven straight, When gentle winds do blow, to whistling din is brought. The evening comes, and brings the dews along, The ruddy welkin shineth to the eyne, Around the ale-stakel minstrels sing the song, Young ivy round the door-post doth entwine; I lay me on the grass, yet to my will Albeit all is fair, there lacketh something still. Plays made from holy tales I hold unmeet; The satirical and town effusions of Chatterton are often in bad taste, yet display a wonderful command of easy language and lively sportive allusion. They have no traces of juvenility, unless it be in adopting the vulgar scandals of the day, unworthy his original genius. In his satire of Kew Gardens are the following lines, alluding to the poet laureate and the proverbial poverty of poets : Though sing-song Whitehead ushers in the year, In a poem entitled The Prophecy are some vigorous stanzas, in a different measure, and remarkable for maturity and freedom of style : This truth of old was sorrow's friend- Your tenants holding at your will; The boy who could thus write at sixteen, might soon have proved a Swift or a Dryden. Yet in satire, Chatterton evinced but a small part of his power. His Rowleian poems have a compass of invention, and a luxuriance of fancy, that promised a great chivalrous or allegorical poet of the stamp of Spenser. Bristow Tragedy, or the Death of Sir Charles Bawdin.* The feathered songster chanticleer And told the early villager The coming of the morn: King Edward saw the ruddy streaks And heard the raven's croaking throat, "Thou'rt right,' quoth he, 'for by the God Then with a jug of nappy ale His knights did on him wait; He leaves this mortal state.' But when he came, his children twain, With briny tears did wet the floor, 'Oh good Sir Charles!" said Canterlone, 'Speak boldly, man,' said brave Sir Charles; What says the traitor king?' 'I grieve to tell: before yon sun 'We all must die,' said brave Sir Charles; "Of that I'm not afraid; What boots to live a little space? But tell thy king, for mine he's not, Than live his slave, as many are, Then Canterlone he did go out, Then Mr Canynge sought the king, And fell down on his knee; 'I'm come,' quoth he, unto your grace, To move your clemency.' "Then,' quoth the king, 'your tale speak out, You have been much our friend; Whatever your request may be, We will to it attend.' *The antiquated orthography affected by Chatterton being evidently no advantage to his poems, but rather an impediment to their being generally read, we dismiss it in this and other specimens. The diction is, in reality, almost purely modern, and Chatterton's spelling in a great measure arbitrary, so that there seems no longer any reason for retaining what was only designed at first as a means of supporting a deception. 'My noble liege! all my request Is for a noble knight, Who, though mayhap he has done wrong, He has a spouse and children twain; If that you are resolved to let 'My noble liege!' good Canynge said, And lay the iron rule aside; Be thine the olive rod. Was God to search our hearts and reins, Let mercy rule thine infant reign, But if with blood and slaughter thou Thy crown upon thy children's brows 'Canynge, away! this traitor vile 'My noble liege! the truly brave 'Canynge, away! By God in heaven I will not taste a bit of bread Whilst this Sir Charles doth live! By Mary, and all saints in heaven, With heart brimful of gnawing grief, He to Sir Charles did go, And sat him down upon a stool, And tears began to flow. 'We all must die,' said brave Sir Charles; 'What boots it how or when? Death is the sure, the certain fate, Of all we mortal men. Say why, my friend, thy honest soul Is it for my most welcome doom And leave thy sons and helpless wife; When through the tyrant's welcome means I shall resign my life, The God I serve will soon provide For both my sons and wife. Before I saw the lightsome sun, Shall mortal man repine or grudge How oft in battle have I stood, When thousands died around; Ah, godlike Henry! God forefend, My honest friend, my fault has been I make no doubt but he is gone And eke he taught me how to know And summed the actions of the day I have a spouse, go ask of her I have a king, and none can lay Why should I then appear dismayed 1 Exchange. What though I on a sledge be drawn, And mangled by a hind, I do defy the traitor's power, He cannot harm my mind: Yet in the holy book above, Then welcome death! for life eterne Now death as welcome to me comes Nor would I even wish to live, And from this world of pain and grief And now the bell began to toll, And clarions to sound; Sir Charles he heard the horses' feet And just before the officers His loving wife came in, Pray God that every Christian soul Sweet Florence! why these briny tears! And almost make me wish for life, "Tis but a journey I shall go Then Florence, faltering in her say, Ah, sweet Sir Charles! why wilt thou go The cruel axe that cuts thy neck, It eke shall end my life.' And now the officers came in To bring Sir Charles away, Teach them to run the noble race Florence! should death thee take-adieu! Then Florence raved as any mad, And did her tresses tear; 'Oh stay, my husband, lord, and life!"Sir Charles then dropped a tear. |