trayed to the
servants an intention of committing suicide; and at length a paper,
entitled the last Will and Testament of Thomas Chatterton, which was
found lying on his desk, manifested a design of perpetrating this act on
the ensuing day, Easter Sunday, April 15th, 1770. On so unequivocal a
proof as this appeared to be of his desperate resolution, his master no
longer thought it safe to retain him.

A few months before, he had written letters to several booksellers and
printers in London, and from them received assurances of protection and
employment if he should remove to the capital. This decided him as to
his future course. When he was questioned by Thistlethwaite as to the
plan of life he intended to pursue, if the prospect which was thus held
out, should fail him, he answered: "The promises I have had are
sufficient to dispel doubt; but should I be deceived I will turn
Methodist preacher. Credulity is as potent a deity as ever, and a new
sect may easily be devised. But if that too should fail me, my last and
final resource is a pistol." It is almost unnecessary to observe, that
when he thus speculated on his future proceedings, his mind had been
strongly tainted with infidelity.--Towards the conclusion of April he
set forth on his ill-omened journey. He had never yet gone farther than
a Sunday's walk from his native city; and at the age of seventeen,
equally inexperienced and confident, without a friend or a guide, and
with principles shaken and perverted, he was about to enter on a new and
perilous theatre; nor could it have been difficult to divine what the
event must soon be. On the 26th of April 1770, immediately after his
arrival in London, he writes to his mother, and speaks in high spirits
of the encouragement he has met with from the booksellers to whom he has
applied, "who," says he, "all approve of my design." On the sixth of the
next month, he informs her that "he gets four guineas a month by one
Magazine, and that he shall engage to write a history of England and
other pieces, which will more than double that sum." "Mr. Wilkes had
known him by his writings, since he first corresponded with the
booksellers. He is to visit him the following week, and by his interest
would ensure Mrs. Ballance the Trinity House." In short he is in
raptures at the change in his condition and views; and talks as if his
fortune were already made. He now inhabited the house of Walmsley, a
plasterer, in Shoreditch, where his