Page:Cursory Observations on the Poems Attributed to Thomas Rowley (1782).pdf/22

Rh as Chatterton's, could scarcely impose on a boy of fifteen at Westminster School.

In the Battle of Hastings we meet

from Dryden's Virgil–

and in Sir Charles Bawdin, “And tears began to flow;" Dryden's very words in Alexander's Feast. But it was hardly possible, says the learned Commentator, for these thoughts to be expressed in any other words. Indeed! I suppose five or six different modes of expressing the latter thought will occur to every reader.

Can it be believed, that every one of the lines I have now quoted, this gentleman maintains to have been written by a poet of the fifteenth century (for all that Chatterton ever did, according to his system, was supplying lacunæ, if there were any in the Mss., or modernizing a few antiquated phrases)? He argues indeed very rightly, that the whole of these poems must have been written by one person. “Two poets, (he observes, p. 81,) so distant in their æra [as Rowley and Chatterton], so different from each other in Rh