Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 5.djvu/458

Rh 446 CHATTER TON books that when unrestrained he would read from an early hour till bed-time; and by the time he reached his eleventh year he had become a contributor to Felix Farley s Bristol Journal. A beautiful cross of curious workmanship had adorned the churchyard of St Mary Redcliffe for upwards of three centuries, until, in 1763, it became an object of offence to an over zealous churchwarden, and was swept away. The spirit of veneration was strong in the boy ; and taking up his pen, he sent to the local journal a clever satire on the parish Vandal. Other juvenile productions followed, characteristic of the precocity of their author; and under various disguises he sported with the satiric muse, or in graver mood strove to awake some reverence for the past in the unsympathetic community amid which his lot was cast. He had a bold independent bearing ; and except during his fits of reverie, he was frank and companion able, and manifested a special fondness for female society. But his delight was to lock himself in a little attic which he had appropriated as his study, and there, with books, parchments, and drawing materials, the child already dallied with the muse, and began the strange literary maskings on which his fame depends. On the 3d of August 1760, when in his eighth year, Chatterton was admitted to all the privileges of Colston s Hospital. This charity is popularly styled the Blue-coat School of Bristol, and as such has been referred to as an in stitution of a similar character to that of Christ s Hospital, London. But except in the quaint, half-monkish garb of its inmates, Colston s Hospital bore little resemblance to the foundation where Barnes and Markland acquired their scholarship, and Lamb and Coleridge found culture for their genius. The &quot; great house on St Augustine s Back,&quot; which had been converted to the use of Colston s Charity, was a fine civic mansion erected in Tudor times on the site of a dissolved house of Friars Carmelites. Queen Elizabeth had held court there in 1581 ; and when the Stuarts succeeded to the Tudors, its hospitalities had been exercised by Sire Ferdinand Gorges, one of the merchant princes of the old seaport. But though Edward Colston, as the representa tive of a line of merchant adventurers who had flourished in Bristol in the reign of Edward III., no less deserved that title, the civic mansion when transferred to his care rather resembled the dwelling of the older friars, except in its lack of their redeeming feature of monkish learning. Bristol had its grammar school, with liberal endowments and university exhibitions, for the sons of its more favoured citizens. But the rules of Colston s Hospital provided for the training of its inmates in &quot; the principles of the Christian religion, as laid down in the church catechism,&quot; and in fitting them to be apprenticed in due course to some trade. But Chatterton was too young, as yet, to comprehend the difference between the two schools. He was thirsting for knowledge, and was greatly elated at his election on the foundation, &quot; thinking,&quot; as his foster- mother said, &quot; that he should there get all the learning he wanted.&quot; But he speedily discovered that its meagre cur riculum was inadequate to his cravings, and he indignantly complained that he could not learn so much as at home. Chatterton remained an inmate of Colston s Hospital for upwards of six years, learning little more than the most ordinary elements of a common school education ; and it chief value was that it lightened to his poor mother the burden of his maintenance. Some influences, however, of a more congenial character are traceable to the friendly sympathy of one of its ushers. Thomas Phillips, himself a writer of verse, strove to excite a spirit of emulation among the older of his pupils and found in Chatterton a response to his appeal. Three of his companions are named along with him, as youths whom Phillips s taste for poetry stimulated to rivalry, and ere long enlisted among the aad already conceived more daring literary adventures ; and it was while still an inmate of Colston s Charity that he essayed on Phillips his first serious. attempt to pass off verses of his own as the production of a poet of the 15th century. Except, indeed, in the immaturity and inexperi ence inseparable from his years, Chatterton was the superior of those to whose society he was limited, and was in all essential respects his own teacher. His little pocket-money was spent in borrowing books from a circulating library ; and he early ingratiated himself with book collectors, by whose aid he found access to Weever, Dugdale, and Collins, as well as to Chaucer, Spenser, and other writers strangely out of the line of reading of a charity boy, or indeed of any boy of his age. His holidays were mostly spent at hia mother s house ; and much of them in the favourite retreat of his attic study there. He had already conceived the romance of an imaginary monk of the 15th century, and lived for the most part in an ideal world of his own, relegated to that elder time when Edward IV. was England s king, and Master William Canynge familiar to him among the recumbent effigies in Redcliffe church still ruled in Bristol s civic chair. &quot; The Storie of William Canynge,&quot; a poem of great beauty which constitutes one of the shorter pieces of his ingenious romance, represents the bard endowed by Truth, a heavenly maid, with divine insight, and so translated to those elder times, and that more real poetic life, in which Chatterton had revelled from his own childhood : &quot;Straight was I carried back to times of yore, Whilst Canynge swathed yet in fleshly bed, And saw all actions which had been before. And all the scroll of Fate unravelled ; And when the fate-marked babe acome to sight, I saw him eager gasping after light. In all his simple gambols and child s play, In every merry-making, fair, or wake, I kenn d a perpled light of wisdom s ray ; He ate down learning with the wastel-cake; As wise as any of the aldermen, He d wit enow to make a mayor at ten.&quot; This beautiful picture of the childhood of the ideal patron of Rowley is in reality that of the poet himself, &quot; the fate-marked babe,&quot; with his wondrous child-genius, and all his romantic dreams realized. The first lines are, indeed, referred to by Mr Skeat, in his annotated edition of the poems, as &quot; clearly an oversight,&quot; in which the poet writes in his own person and modern character, and so introduces &quot;an unconscious admission of forgery.&quot; The literary masquerade which thus constituted the life-dream of the boy was wrought out by him with marvellous consistency into a coherent romance, until the credulous scholars and antiquaries of his day were persuaded into the belief that there had lain in the parish chest of Redcliffe church for upwards of three centuries, a collection of poems of rare merit, the work of Thomas Rowley, an unknown priest of Bristol in the days of Henry VI. and his poet laureate, John Lydgate. Among the Bristol patrons of Chatterton, Mr George Catcott and Henry Burgum, his partner in their trade as pewterers, occupy a prominent place. The former was one of the most zealous accreditors of Rowley, the imaginary priest and poet of the times of the Roses, and continued to collect his reputed writings long after the death of their real author. The credulity of the other was subjected to a more severe test. He had come from Gloucestershire to Bristol, a poor friendless boy, and himself owed to one of Colston s charities his first start in life. He had risen, mainly by his own exertions, to the position of a success ful tradesman, and gave full licence to the vanity with which he asserted the claims of his new position. On him, accordingly, the blue-coat boy palmed off the De
 * outributors to Felix Farlej/s Journal. But Chatterton