family
histories, centering around two characters,--Thomas Rowley, priest and
poet, and William Canynge, merchant of Bristol in the days of Henry VI. It
seems incredible that the whole design of these mediaeval romances should
have been worked out by a child of eleven, and that he could reproduce the
style and the writing of Caxton's day so well that the printers were
deceived; but such is the fact. More and more _Rowley Papers_, as they were
called, were produced by Chatterton,--apparently from the archives of the
old church; in reality from his own imagination,--delighting a large circle
of readers, and deceiving all but Gray and a few scholars who recognized
the occasional misuse of fifteenth-century English words. All this work was
carefully finished, and bore the unmistakable stamp of literary genius.
Reading now his "AElla," or the "Ballad of Charite," or the long poem in
ballad style called "Bristowe Tragedie," it is hard to realize that it is a
boy's work. At seventeen years of age Chatterton went for a literary career
to London, where he soon afterwards took poison and killed himself in a fit
of childish despondency, brought on by poverty and hunger.

THOMAS PERCY (1729-1811). To Percy, bishop of the Irish church, in Dromore,
we are indebted for the first attempt at a systematic collection of the
folk songs and ballads which are counted among the treasures of a nation's
literature.[210] In 1765 he published, in three volumes, his famous
_Reliques of Ancient English Poetry_. The most valuable part of this work
is the remarkable collection of old English and Scottish Ballads, such as
"Chevy Chase," the "Nut Brown Mayde," "Children of the Wood," "Battle of
Otterburn," and many more, which but for his labor might easily have
perished. We have now much better and more reliable editions of these same
ballads; for Percy garbled his materials, adding and subtracting freely,
and even inventing a few ballads of his own. Two motives probably
influenced him in this. First, the different versions of the same ballad
varied greatly; and Percy, in changing them to suit himself, took the same
liberty as had many other writers in dealing with the same material.
Second; Percy was under the influence of Johnson and his school, and
thought it necessary to add a few elegant ballads "to atone for the
rudeness of the more obsolete poems." That sounds queer now, used as we are
to exactness in dealing with historical and literary materia