Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 10.djvu/158

 bishop of Lichfield. On one of its last leaves is written, in Chatterton’s handwriting, a receipt for 5l. 5s. paid for the copyright by Lutfman Atterbury. Chatterton immediately sent a box of presents to his family, including a china tea-service, a cargo of patterns, a curious French snutilbox, and a tan for his mother, another fan for his sister, some British herb tobacco for his grandmother, and some trifles for Thorne. Two more of Chatterton's home letters have been preserved, both to his sister. On 20 July he tells her besides, ‘Almost all the next "Town and Country Magazine” is mine.’ On its publication, eleven days afterwards, however, he finds that Hamilton has held almost all his contributions over, and for the few that appear he receives no payment. On 12 Aug. Chatterton addresses to George Catcott the last letter he is known for certain to have addressed to any one. He writes: ‘I intend going abroad as a surgeon. Mr. Barrett has it in his power to assist me greatly by his giving me a physical character. I hope he will.’ He speaks of a roposal for building a new spire for St. Mary Radcliffe, and concludes: ‘Heaven send you the comforts of christianity! I request them not, for I am no christian.' His narrow resources were now rapidly drawing to an end. In his Brooke Street lodgings he had won the affection of all who knew him. Though literally starving he could never be persuaded to accept of invitations, which were fretpnent, to dine or sup. ‘One evening, however, according to Warton, ‘human frailty so far prevailed over his dignity as to tempt him to partake of a regale of a barrel of oysters, when Mr. Cross observed him to eat most voraciously,' 'Three days afterwards Mrs. Angel. knowing that during those three days he had eaten nothing, begged him, on 24 Aug., to take some dinner with her, ‘but’ (see, p. 121) ‘he was offended at her expressions, which seemed to hint- that he was in want, and assured her he was not hungry,' Withdrawing into his garret at nightfall and quietly locking himself in, death came to him before daybreak on 25 Aug. 1770. When, on his continued non-appearance in the morning, the attic door was broken open, it was fiiund, from the contents of a nearly empty phial still grasped in his hand, that he had died from the effects of arsenic. Barrett, in his ‘History of Bristol,’ nearly 'twenty years later, says (p. 647) that the drug with which he poisoned himself was opium. But Croft, who nine years before had stated that it was arsenic (Love and Madness, p. 122), had heard the facts from the coroner. Covering the floor of the garret were minute fragments of paper which were the torn-up atoms of all the manuscripts that had remained at the last in his possession. Among them in all probability was his manuscript ‘Glossary.’ It remains still doubtful, however, whether those Chatterton or Rowley poems which are known to have been at one time in existence, but which have never yet been published, such as ‘The Justice of the Peace,’ ‘The Flight; the unfinished tragedy of ‘The Dowager,’ and that other complete tragedy, a mere fragment of which reached the hands of Barrett, entitled ‘The Apostate,’ perished on this occasion, or were torn up as ‘stuff’ by Lambert. Chatterton’s remains, enclosed in a shell, were interred in the Shoe Lane workhouse burying-ground on 28 Aug. 1770, as appears from the register of burials at St. Andrew’s, Holborn, where the name is entered as ‘William Chatterton,’ to which another hand has added ‘the poet.’ Years afterwards, when that site had to be cleared for the building up of the new Farringdon Market, the pausers’ bones, all huddled together, were remove to the old graveyard in the Gray's Inn Road. A wildly improbable story about the exhumation and reinterment of his remains at Bristol was first told by George Cumberland in Dix`s Appendix A (p. 299), and afterwards reiterated more in detail by Joseph Cottle in Pryce’s ‘Memorials of the Canynges Family’ (p. 293). A still wilder story was put forth in 1853 by Mr. Gutch in ‘Notes and Queries' (vii. 138, l39), and which purported to be an authentic record of the coroncr’s inquest. on the occasion of Chatterton's suicide. 1*`our years afterwards, however, Mr. Moy Thomas was able to demonstrate, from the parish books of St. Andrew’s, Holborn, in the ‘Athenæum ’ of 5 Dec. 1857, the spurious character of the whole narrative. The books also showed that Chattert on died in the first. house from Holborn on the lefthand side, the last number of all in Brooke Street, No. 39. It is shown by an entry in Chat terton's pocket-book that there were st ill owing to him by the publishers more than eleven guineas for writings of his already in their possession and accepted. Three of his contrfiiutions appeared in the ‘Town and Country Magazine’ for September, and others in the numbers for October and November, among these latter being his friend Cary's simple but afiecting ‘Elegy on Chatterton.' Nearly a year after Chatterton’s death, at the first. banquet of the Royal Academy, Horace Walpole heard for the first time from Goldsmith, on 23 April 1771, of the tragic close of the boy’s career. Tyrwhitt, the editor of Chaucer, gave to the world in 1777 the first edition of Rowley. Warton, the