Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 10.djvu/156

 time that he was the son of a poor widow who supported himself with much difficulty, and that he was clerk to an attorney, but had a taste for more elegant studies. The revelation changed Walpole's whole manner; moreover, shortly after the receipt of this second letter, Walpole showed the enclosures to Mason and Gray (Cole MSS. vol. xxv. fol. 50 b), both of whom at once pronounced them fabrications, and advised their being returned without delay to Chatterton. Walpole, while retaining the manuscripts, wrote to Chatterton, saying that when he had made a fortune he might unbend in his favourite studies. Chatterton, in a brief note dated 8 April, begged for the immediate return of his manuscripts. Receiving no answer to this, he consulted Barrett as to what further reply should be made. He wrote on 14 April, insisting upon the genuineness of the Rowley papers, and requesting their return as documents likely to be of use to his friend the intending historian of Bristol. At the moment of the arrival of this communication Walpole was starting for Paris, and paid no attention to Chatterton's wish. Having been detained in France six weeks, and having then returned to London, more than three months had elapsed when Walpole received from Chatterton a final and haughty letter on 24 July demanding the papers. Walpole calls this note singularly impertinent, while Southey pronounces it ‘dignified and spirited.’ Walpole now returned all the papers to Chatterton, and ‘thought no more of him or them.’ Chatterton's feelings are expressed in his lines ‘To Horace Walpole,’ written in August 1769. Walpole's defence of his conduct, in answer to an attack in Warton's ‘History of English Poetry’ (vol. ii. § 8), was privately printed at Strawberry Hill in 1779, and afterwards published in the ‘Gentleman's Magazine’ in 1782.

Chatterton was embittered by the repulse. He satirised all the leading people of Bristol, even those who were the most intimately associated with himself, and to whom he was under some small personal obligations. His derisive poetical ‘Epistle to the Rev. Alexander Catcott,’ written on 6 Dec. 1769, and his prose ‘Postscript to the Epistle,’ dated the 20th of the same month, brought their hitherto friendly acquaintance abruptly to a close. One Bristolian alone never had from him other than the most respectful treatment. This was Michael Clayfield, a distiller, of Castle Street, to whom he was first introduced in the autumn of 1769. He it was who lent Chatterton Martin's ‘Philosophical Grammar’ and one of the volumes of Martin's ‘Philosophy.’ Thanks to him also, he obtained access to books on astronomy, out of his study of which came his fine metrical celebration of ‘The Copernican System.’ This appeared in the ‘Town and Country Magazine,’ to which in 1769 he had supplied in all no less than sixteen contributions. Among these, in the October number, was his affecting ‘Elegy on Thomas Phillips,’ then recently deceased, formerly junior usher at Colston's Hospital.

Chatterton's position at Lambert's had become at last intolerable. The attorney burnt any manuscripts not on business, calling them ‘stuff.’ Chatterton at last wrote to Clayfield, avowing an intention of suicide. Lambert intercepted the letter, and at once forwarded it to Barrett, who so earnestly remonstrated with Chatterton, that the boy was moved to tears. It was after this interview that Chatterton wrote to Barrett perhaps the most characteristic letter he ever penned. It is facsimiled (i. cxvii) in the 1842 edition of Chatterton's ‘Works,’ and may be turned to in the original manuscript in Chatterton's handwriting at the British Museum (5766 B, 75). He says in it that nineteen-twentieths of his composition is pride. The editor of the 1842 edition of his ‘Works’ (i. cxvi) says that one day he snatched a pistol from his pocket, and, holding it to his forehead, exclaimed, ‘Now, if one had but the courage to pull the trigger.’ His seven fatalistic lines on suicide were without doubt written about this period. One morning, in the spring of 1770, Lambert found conspicuously placed on Chatterton's desk a document in the boy's handwriting, which is still preserved under a glass case in the library of the Bristol Institution. It is entitled ‘The last Will and Testament of me, Thomas Chatterton of Bristol,’ and begins thus: ‘All this wrote between eleven and two o'clock on Saturday, in the utmost distress of mind, 14 April 1770.’ It is a bitter expression of his misery, with sarcastic bequests to his acquaintance.

On Lambert's reading this extraordinary document Chatterton's indentures were at once cancelled. A guinea subscription was got up among a few friends. With barely five pounds in his pocket after paying his fare, Chatterton left Bristol for London by coach on 24 April. His first letter to his mother, dated two days later, gives a graphic description of his journey. Through a cousin, Mrs. Ballance, he obtained shelter in a house in Shoreditch where she was lodging, and the tenant of which was one Walmsley, a plasterer. There he remained for the first seven weeks of his life in town, sharing the bed of the plasterer's nephew, a young man of twenty-four years of age, according to whose evidence