Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 10.djvu/157

 the boy hardly ever slept, writing with a sort of fury all through the night. Before his advent to London Chatterton had contributed to several of the leading periodicals. On the first day of his arrival in town he called upon four of these editors or publishers, receiving from them all, as he tells his mother, 'great encouragement.' During the next four months he is known to have written largely in eleven of the principal publications tnen in circulation: the 'Middlesex Journal,' the 'Court and City Journal,' the 'Political Register,' and the 'London Museum;' as well as in the 'Town and Country,' the 'Christian,' the 'Universal,' the 'Gospel,' the 'London,' the 'Lady's,' and the 'Freeholder's' magazines. Such was the rapidity with which he wrote at this time, that of the 444 lines of his satirical poem of 'The Exhibition,' the unpublished manuscript of which yet lies at the Bristol Library, the first line was dated 1 May, and the last line 3 May, the whole of it having been run off at a heat at Shoreditch. The merest fragment of it (fourteen lines in all) has been printed, the rest having been suppressed as unfit for publication. Chatterton's life, however, was not licentious. He retained his affection for his family. He was abstemious in diet, preferring a few cakes and a glass of water for his meals; drinking tea and disliking hot meat. Chatterton's letters to his mother speak of his literary employments, and show that he was still thinking of his Rowley manuscripts. He wrote squibs, tales, and songs, and tried to rival Junius by letters signed 'Decimus' in the 'Middlesex Journal.' He wrote a letter signed 'Probus,' addressed to the Lord-mayor Beckford [q. v.], which procured him a personal interview with Beckford himself. It appeared in June in the 'Political Register.' A second was written, but was never published; for when Chatterton's hopes were at their highest, Beckford's death on 21 June was announced. At the first shock of those tidings Chatterton, according to Mrs. Ballance, 'was perfectly frantic and out of his mind, and said he was ruined.' Walpole eight years afterwards averred, in his attempted vindication of himself (p. 51), that he had seen in Chatterton's handwriting that second letter to lord-mayor Beckford signed 'Probus,' and a letter of his to Lord North signed 'Moderator,' both of them being dated 20 May, the former a denunciation of, the latter a panegyric on, the administration. The imputation, though based solely on Walpole's assertion, tallies with Chatterton's remark to his sister on 30 May, that 'he is a poor author who cannot write on both sides.' A second letter was sent by Chatterton to his friend Gary, with this endorsement: —

Accepted by Bingley, set for and thrown out of the 'North Briton,' 21 June, on account of the lord mayor's death : — Chatterton's change of residence about this time was indicated by the dates attached in the 'London Magazine' to his two 'African Eclogues;' 'Nerva and Mored' being dated 2 May, Shoreditch, and 'The Death of Nicou,' 12 June, Brooke Street. In quitting Shoreditch he bore with him to his new abode near Holborn not only the good opinion of Walmsley and his nephew, but the testimony to his exemplary conduct while under their roof of Mrs. Ballance, his cousin, the plasterer's wife, and her niece, aged 27. Once only during his stay with them, as Crofts states on their testimony (p. 118), did he stay out all night, Mrs. Ballance assuring the author of 'Love and Madness' that on that night to her certain knowledge he lodged at a relation's. There can be no doubt that in removing to Brooke Street he was in search of greater seclusion. There, for the first time in his life, he had a sleeping apartment entirely to himself, in which he could write all through the night. He was by this time beginning to lose heart as to his chances in London. Hamilton, of the 'Town and Country Magazine,' gave him no more than 10l. 6d. for sixteen songs; while Fell, of the 'Freeholder's Magazine,' gave him the same sum for the two hundred and fifty lines of 'The Consuliad.' The whole of his earnings during May and June could not possibly have exceeded 12l.

On 4 July he sent to the 'Town and Country Magazine,' with a brief note, signed with his familiar initials, D. B., the last and one of the most exquisitely finished of all his Rowley poems, 'An Excelente Balade of Charitie.' It was rejected. Fortunately he had just then completed the adaptation and expansion of a musical extravaganza called 'Amphitryon,' which he had begun writing nearly a year before at Bristol. In its improved and enlarged form it appeared now as 'The Revenge: a Burletta. Written for Marylebone Gardens it was there acted, not certainly during its author's lifetime, but some time before 1777. It was first published in 1796, twenty-five years after the death of Chatterton. The original manuscript was accidentally discovered in 1824 by Mr. Upcott, one of the librarians of the London Institution, on the counter of a city cheesemonger. In 1841 it was purchased by the British Museum with the manuscripts of Samuel Butler, the