a curate in Somersetshire, and was ordained in 1756. He came up to London in

Charles Churchill

After the Portrait by J. S. C. Schaak

1758, and his life became a tissue of rowdy irregularities. In 1761 he published anonymously the first of his poems, The Rosciad, a satire on the actors of his time. This enjoying an amazing success, Churchill flung his cassock to the winds, and adopted verse-writing as a profession. During the next three years he published an incredible. number of violent personal satires, most of which were highly successful, since people "liked to see the bludgeon's dint, when Churchill wrote." He threw himself with vehemence into the cause of Wilkes, whom he followed to Boulogne-sur-Mer in October 1764. Here he caught a fever, and died on the 4th of November. In the hour of Churchill's highest popularity Johnson saw through him, and said that he was a tree

that would never produce good fruit, but only crabs. The image admirably suits the profuse, tart, and peevish verse of Churchill.

The close of this central period of the eighteenth century was stilted and inefficient in poetry. The rigidity of the classical system, now outworn after the exercise of one hundred years and more, strangled thought and expression, and forced those who desired to write to use mere centos of earlier and freer masters. The elegiac school had lasted but a very few years; its successes are dated almost exclusively between 1742 and 1760. The new poetic feeling, however, never fell into complete desuetude, for at the very moment when Gray and Young were becoming silent, several new forces asserted themselves, all moving in the direction of reform in taste. Of these the earliest was the revelation, between 1760 and 1763, of the mysterious paraphrases of Ossian; in 1765 Bishop Percy issued his Reliques of primitive English poetry; in 1770 the untimely death of CHATTERTON revealed an extraordinary genius of a novel kind; and from 1777 onwards Thomas Warton, in his History of English Poetry, was recalling readers to masterpieces of art and passion that were not bound down to the rules nor

OSSIAN

297 dwarfed by the classical tradition. Of all these elements the least genuine was undoubtedly the first mentioned, but it is equally certain that it was the strongest. The vogue of OSSIAN through all Europe became immense; no real British writer, not Shakespeare himself, enjoyed the respect of Europe so universally as the shadowy Ossian did at the close of the eighteenth century. Critics of high position gravely discussed the relative magnitude of Homer and of the author of Fingal, and by no means invariably gave the crown to the Greek. The key to the extraordinary success of these Caledonian forgeries is, that they boldly offered to release the spirit of Europe from its pedagogic bondage. No one, not even Goethe, was anxious to inquire too closely concerning the authority of fragments which professed to come to us from an extreme antiquity, tinged with moonlight and melancholy, exempt from all attention to the strained rules and laws of composition, dimly primitive and pathetically vague, full of all kinds of plaintive and lyrical suggestiveness. When Napoleon in 1804 desired to give the highest possible praise to a new, modern, brilliantly emancipated, literary production, he could find no better epithet for it than "vraiment Ossianique." And this suggests in what light we have to regard MacPherson's forgeries, so irritating to our cultivated taste in their bombastic pretentiousness. It was not what they were that fascinated Europe, it was what they suggested, and the product is what we read in Goethe, Byron, Chateaubriand.

FROM GOLDSMITH'S "DESERTED VILLAGE."
Sweet was the sound, when oft at evening's close
Up yonder hill the village murmur rose ;
There, as I past with careless steps and slow,
The mingling notes came softened from below;
The swain responsive as the milkmaid sung,
The sober herd that lowed to meet their young;
The noisy geese that gabbled o'er the pool,
The playful children just let loose from school;
The watchdog's voice that bayed the whispering wind
And the loud laugh that spoke the vacant mind;
There all in sweet confusion sought the shade,
And filled each pause the nightingale had made.

But now the sounds of population fail,
No cheerful murmurs fluctuate in the gale,
No busy steps the grass-grown footway tread,
For all the bloomy flush of life is fled.

All but yon widowed, solitary thing,

That feebly bends beside the plashy spring ;
She, wretched matron, forced in age, for bread,
To strip the brook with mantling cresses spread,
To pick her wintry faggot from the thorn,
To seek her nightly shed, and weep till morn;
She only left of all the harmless train,

The sad historian of the pensive plain.

Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) was the posthumous son of a writing-master and "sub-chaunter" in Bristol, where he was born, in extremely indigent circumstances, on the 20th of November 1752. His mother kept a small dame's school, close to the

Thomas Chatterton

church of St. Mary Redcliffe. Curiously enough, although Chatterton was to become the very type of precocious maturity, while a little child he was dull and backward; he could scarcely be taught his letters, and "a fear was aroused that he was deficient in intellect." At the age of eight a sudden change took place, and he began to read from morning to night; in this year, 1760, he became a scholar at Colston's Hospital, the Blue-Coat School of Bristol. Here Chatterton remained for seven years, forming few friendships, living apart from the other boys, and cultivating in the great church of St. Mary-"that wonder of mansions," as he called it -a passion for all the neglected arts of the Middle Ages. In his mother's house were various mediæval parchments without value, which had been stolen from the church, and others were

From the authentic Portrait in Dix's "Life of Chatterton" left carelessly within his reach. It is not known exactly at what date he began to hoard these documents, to puzzle over their writing, and then to imitate it. Quite in early boyhood, however, he had created a group of imaginary fifteenth-century figures, clustered around a Thomas Rowley, priest and poet, and a William Canynge, merchant of Bristol. In illustration of the adventures of these dream-personages, Chatterton began to write prose and poetry in what he believed to be Early or Middle English. Extraordinary as it seems, there is no doubt that a great part of this complicated design had taken shape in his brain, without help or suggestion from a single associate, before Chatterton was eleven years of age. He was not twelve when he showed the MS. of his eclogue of Elinour and Juga to a friend. Not until 1767, however, did he begin to circulate his forgeries among adult persons, professing that he had found these writings in the muniment room of St. Mary Redcliffe. They were accepted by the antiquaries of Bristol with greedy credulity, and Chatterton continued to produce more and more "Rowley" papers. The best of these belong to the year 1768, when the poet was between fifteen and sixteen. He sent some copies, however, to Horace Walpole, who submitted them to Gray, and Gray instantly pronounced them forgeries. In 1769 the restless and unhappy boy formed the design of coming up to London to try his fortune as a journalist. He had been apprenticed in 1767 to an attorney, but he got his indentures cancelled, and in April 1770 he arrived in town. At first he obtained a little ill-paid work as a political writer, but the death of Beckford in June closed this source of revenue. He now produced a very lively burletta, The Revenge, for which he received five guineas, but these were soon exhausted. He found himself

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A page from the Rowley Forgeries

299

alone, face to face with starvation, and to end his intolerable miseries he drank arsenic on the night of the 24th of August 1770, being seventeen years and ten months of age, and the most extraordinary genius of his years whom the world has ever seen.

FROM CHATTERTON'S "ÆLLA.”

First Minstrel.

The budding floweret blushes at the light:

The meads are sprinkled with the yellow hue;

In daisied mantles is the mountain dight;

The slim young cowslip bendeth with the dew;

The trees enleafèd into heaven straught,

When gentle winds do blow, to whistling din are brought.

The evening comes and brings the dew along ;
The ruddy welkin sheeneth to the eyne;
Around the ale-stake minstrels sing the song ;
Young ivy round the doorpost doth entwine;
I lay me on the grass; yet to my will,
Albeit all is fair, there lacketh something still.

Second Minstrel.

So Adam thought, what time, in Paradise,
All heaven and earth did homage to his mind.
In woman and none else man's pleasaunce lies,
As instruments of joy are kind with kind.
Go, take a wife unto thine arms, and see,
Winter and dusky hills will have a charm for thee.

Third Minstrel.

When Autumn stript and sunburnt doth appear,
With his gold hand gilding the fallen leaf,

Bringing up Winter to fulfil the year,

Bearing upon his back the ripened sheaf;

When all the hills with woody seed are white;

When levin-fires and gleams do meet from far the sight;

When the fair apples, red as even-sky,

Do bend the tree unto the fruitful ground;
When juicy pears and berries of black dye

Do dance in air and call the eyes around;

Then, be it evening foul or evening fair,

Methinks my joy of heart is shadowed with some care.

There was no conscious rebellion against fashion in the sentimental William Shenstone (1714-1763), yet his artifice and graces were links in the transition of style. He is remembered for the fantastic little estate of Leasowes, in Salop, where he devoted the whole of his leisure in dreams of how best "to diversify his surface, to entangle his