Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 7.djvu/153

 THOMAS CHATTERTON 107 patient and gentle ; he ceased to think with terror of death, and of that which lies beyond death ; and he spoke much of the mercy of God, and of the propitia- tion of Christ. In this serene frame of mind he died, on December 13, 1784. He was laid, a week later, in Westminster Abbey, among the eminent men of whom he had been the historian Cowley and Denham, Dryden and Congreve. Gay, Prior, and Addison. THOMAS CHATTERTON* By Colonel Richard Malcolm Johnston (I752-1770) T among all those of English men of let- ters was the most eccentric, was a posthumous son of a poor man who, besides being a choir- singer, kept the Pyle Street School in the city of Bristol, England. In a small tene- ment-house near by he was born, November 20, 1752. The mother maintained her two children, Thomas and a daughter two years older, by keeping a small school for girls. At the age of five years the boy was sent to the Pyle Street School, where the master, unable to teach him anything and deciding that he was an idiot, dismissed him. For a year and a half afterward he was so regard- ed. During this time he was often sub- jected to paroxysms of grief which were expressed generally in silent tears, but sometimes in cries continued for many hours. By many an expedient of a par- ent who understood him not, from frequent serious affectionate remonstrance to an occasional blow upon his face, he was led or forced along. One day this par- ent, while about to destroy an old manuscript in French, noticed the child look- ing with intense interest at the illuminated letters upon its pages. Withholding the paper from its threatened destruction she briefly succeeded in teaching him therefrom the alphabet, and in time from a black-letter Bible he learned to read Not iong afterward the family removed to a house near the Church of St. Mary Redcliffe, one of the oldest and noblest among the parochial structures in Eng- land. In a room called the Treasury House, over one of the porches of this church, was a pile of ancient documents, muniments of title, parish registers, and other things, which had been removed by the latest Chatterton, and which
 * homas Chatterton, whose career
 * Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.