The Rowley Poems | Page 5

Chatterton could not
remember[4], but if it was the first of the two printed in this edition (p.
275) it was a strange coincidence indeed that led him to repudiate the
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 _Ælla_. 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
Mediæval--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 mediæval
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