Page:Life of Edmond Malone.djvu/95

75 Chatterton; the doubts and denials thrown upon their authenticity; their actual merits compared with others of their own or a subsequent age; and the improbability of their forgery by a mere youth, drew a large share of attention. Cool inquirers deemed them not genuine. Easy or less suspicious minds arrived at an opposite conclusion. Poetical imposture was not new. Ossian had already set the watch-dogs of criticism on the alert, ready to fly at any intruder in such questionable shape as Rowley.

Tyrwhitt had published an edition of the poems in 1777, in which and in an appendix, he had arrived at an adverse conclusion. But on the other hand, Dean Milles (of Exeter) and Jacob Bryant, whose learning was unquestionable, had taken the field as champions of their authenticity—the former in a quarto edition of the works; the latter in two octavo volumes of observations.

Against the latter gentleman, Malone, as a tenacious stickler for truth, was not slow in giving battle. His remarks, couched in good-humour and occasional ridicule, appeared first in the Gentleman’s Magazine, shaped afterwards into a pamphlet, Cursory Observations on the Poems attributed to Thomas Rowley, a Priest of the Fifteenth Century.

He contends for their spurious origin on four grounds: their versification, imitations of more modern authors, numerous anachronisms, besides the handwriting of the manuscript and state of the parchments. He considers it—and therefore implies some personal qualification for the task he had undertaken—”a fixed principle that the authenticity or spurious-