sititious passage in a tragedy of Euripides, was at first a dupe to
the imposture of Chatterton, and treated the poems as so decidedly
genuine, that he cited them for the elucidation of Chaucer; but seeing
good grounds for changing his opinion, as Mr. Nichols[1] informs us, he
cancelled several leaves before his volume was published. Walpole was
equally deceived; though his vanity afterwards would not suffer him to
own that he had been so. Mr. Tyson, in a letter to Dr. Glynn,[2] well
observed, that he could as soon believe that Hogarth painted the
cartoons, as that Chatterton wrote Rowley's poems: yet (he adds) they
are as unlike any thing ancient, as Sir Joshua's flowing contour is
unlike the squares and angles of Albert Durer.

The poems that were written after his arrival in London, when his mind
was agitated by wild speculations, and thrown off its balance by noise
and bustle, were, as might be expected, very unequal to those which he
had produced in the retirement of his native place. Yet there is much
poignancy in the satires. The three African eclogues have a tumid
grandeur. Heccar and Gaira is the best of them.

The following verses are strong and impassioned:

The children of the wave, whose pallid race
Views the faint sun display a languid face,
From the red fury of thy justice fled,
Swifter than torrents from their rocky bed.
Fear with a sicken'd silver tinged their hue,
The guilty fear where vengeance is their due.

Many of the pieces, confessedly his own, furnish descriptions of
natural objects, equally happy with those so much admired in the
Rowleian poems.

When golden Autumn, wreath'd in ripen'd corn,
From purple clusters pour'd the foamy wine,
Thy genius did his sallow brows adorn,
And made the beauties of the season thine.
With rustling sound the yellow foliage flies,
And wantons with the wind in rapid whirls,
The gurgling rivulet to the vallies hies,
Whilst on its bank the spangled serpent curls.
* * * * *
Pale rugged Winter bending o'er his tread;
His grizzled hair bedropt with icy dew;
His eyes a dusky light congeal'd and dead,
His robe a tinge of bright ethereal blue.

His train a motley'd, sanguine, sable cloud,
He limps along the russet dreary moor,
Whilst rising whirlwinds, blasting keen and loud,
Roll the white surges to the sounding shore.

The lofty elm, the oak of lordly look,
The willow shadowing