The Rowley Poems | Page 5

antiquity of the only two Rowley poems which are really at all like 'antiques'--Professor Skeat's convenient expression. The two Battles of Hastings were written during this period, and it appears that Barrett the surgeon, on being shown the first poem, was for once very insistent in asking for the original, whereupon Chatterton in a momentary panic confessed he had written the verses for a friend; but he had at home, he said, the copy of what was really the translation of Turgot's Epic--Turgot was a Saxon monk of the tenth century--by Rowley the secular priest of the fifteenth. This was the second Battle of Hastings as printed in this book. Again this strange explanation, so laboured and so patently disingenuous, was accepted without comment though probably not believed. And if it appears matter for surprise that there should ever have been any controversy about the authorship of the Rowley writings, in view of the lad's admission that he had written three such signal pieces as the Bristowe Tragedy_, the first _Battle of Hastings_, and Onn oure Ladies Chyrche_, it must be considered that the production of the greater part of the poems by a poorly educated boy not turned seventeen would naturally appear a circumstance more surprising than that such a boy should tell a lie and claim some of them as his own.
With his acknowledged work, as with Rowley, Chatterton by dint of continued application was making good progress. In 1769 he had become a frequent contributor to the Town and Country Magazine, to which he sent articles on heraldry, imitations of Ossian (whom he very much admired) and various other papers; and in December of this year he wrote to Dodsley, the well-known publisher, acquainting him that he could 'procure copies of several ancient poems and an interlude, perhaps the oldest dramatic piece extant, wrote by one Rowley, a Priest in Bristol, who lived in the reign of Henry the Sixth and Edward the Fourth * * * If these pieces would be of any service to Mr. Dodsley copies should be sent.' The publisher returned no answer. Chatterton waited two months, then wrote again and enclosed a specimen passage from _?lla_. He could procure a copy of this work, he wrote, upon payment of a guinea to the present owner of the MS. Again Mr. Dodsley lay low and said nothing, and so the incident closed.
Dodsley having failed him, Chatterton next took the bolder step of writing to Horace Walpole, who must have been much in his mind for some years before his sending the letter. Some one has made the ingenious suggestion that a consideration of Walpole's delicate connoisseurship sensibly coloured Chatterton's account of the life of Mastre William Canynge. More than this, his delight in the Medi?val--the Gothic--and his content with what may be termed a purely impressionistic view of the past, was singularly akin to the Bristol poet's own outlook on these matters. Walpole had further some three years before this time indulged in the very harmless literary fraud of publishing his Castle of Otranto as a translation from a medi?val Italian MS., only confessing his own authorship upon the publication of the second edition. To Walpole then Chatterton addressed a short letter enclosing some verses by John à Iscam and a manuscript on the _Ryse of Peyncteyning yn Englande wroten by T. Rowleie 1469 for Mastre Canynge_[5] with the suggestion that it might be of service to Mr. Walpole 'in any future edition of his truly entertaining anecdotes of painting.' This drew from the connoisseur one of the politest letters[6] that have been written in English, in which the simple and elegant sentences expressed with a very charming courtesy the interest and curiosity of its author. He gave his correspondent 'a thousand thanks'; 'he would not be sorry to print' (at his private press) 'some of Rowley's poems'; and added--which reads strangely in the light of what follows--'I would by no means borrow and detain your MS.' Now Chatterton's _Peyncteyning yn Englande_ is the clumsiest fraud of all the Rowley compositions, with the single exception of a letter from the secular Priest which exhibits the exact style and language of de Foe's _Robinson Crusoe_.[7] Professor Skeat has pointed out that the Anglo-Saxon words, which occur with tolerable frequency in the Ryse, begin almost without exception with the letter _A_, and concludes that Chatterton had read in an old English glossary, probably Somners, no farther than Ah. Walpole however 'had not the happiness of understanding the Saxon language,' and it was not until after he had received a second letter from Chatterton, enclosing more Rowleian matter both prose and verse, that he consulted his friends Gray and Mason, who at once detected the forgery. If, as seems certain, Elinoure and Juga was among the