Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 7.djvu/155

 THOMAS CHATTERTON 109 tie instructed could have failed to see must end in disaster. There can hardly be a doubt that insanity, if not born with him, was settling upon his understanding and that no degree of careful guidance or successful venture would have im- parted entire relief. In his fifteenth year he was apprenticed to John Lambert, an attorney oi Bristol, by whom he was set to copying legal documents, an employment that lent many hours of leisure, which he devoted to study in heraldry and Old Eng- lish. With these he became familiar, and then he began those impostures that were the bane of his short remnant of life. The first of these had for its victim, one Burgum, a pewterer, whose ignorance and vanity exposed him to the lad's designs to obtain money from him by flattery. Like many others in such condi- tions, the pewterer had eager desire to be thought a descendant of ancestry for- merly of high lineage. One day he was told by Chatterton that among the an- cient parchments appertaining to Saint Mary Redcliffe, he had discovered one with blazon of the De Bergham arms, and he intimated that from that noble family he, the pewterer, may have descended. The document was made out wholly by Chatterton. Investigation satisfied Burgum fully, and in return for the discovery he gave the boy a crown-piece. This compensation seemed so in- adequate that the discoverer afterward celebrated it thus : " Gods ! What would Burgum give to get a name And snatch the blundering dialect from shame ' What would he give to hand his memory down To time's remotest boundary ? A crown ! " A year afterward, on occasion of the completion of the new bridge over the river Avon, he astonished the whole town by a paper printed in the Bristol Weekly Journal, with the signature of " Dunelmus Bristoliensis," which was pre- tended to have been discovered among those multitudinous papers of the Treas- ury House, and which gave account of the city mayor's first passage over the old bridge that had been dedicated to the Assumption oftht Blessed Virgin by King Edward III. and his queen, Philippa. Search for the sender was expedited by his offer of further contributions on the same line, and wonderful was the success attending his devices. No less than the other citizens was misled William Bar- rett, a learned surgeon and antiquary then engaged upon a history of BristoL This man, who had been signally kind to the orphan, availed himself freely of his pretended findings, paid for them liberally, and used them in the preparation of his book. What pleased him most was the discovery that Bristol, among other notables two centuries back, had a great poet in the person of Thomas Rowlie, a priest, who, among other things, had written a great poem entitled " The Bris- towe Tragedie ; or, the Dethe of Syr Charles Bawdin," founded upon the execu- tion of Sir Baldwin Fulford, in 1461, by order of Edward IV. This was indeed a great poem. The muse of tragedy had inspired the young maniac with much of her consuming fervor. The verses containing the intercession of Canynge,