op of
Exeter has found a line of Rowley in "Hudibras"--the monk might foresee
that too! The prematurity of Chatterton's genius is, however, full as
wonderful, as that such a prodigy as Rowley should never have been heard
of till the eighteenth century. The youth and industry of the former are
miracles, too, yet still more credible. There is not a symptom in the
poems, but the old words, that savours of Rowley's age--change the old
words for modern, and the whole construction is of yesterday.

[Footnote 1: Macpherson was a Scotch literary man, who in 1760 published
"Fingal" in six books, which he declared he had translated from a poem
by Ossian, son of Fingal, a Gaelic prince of the third century. For a
moment the work was accepted as genuine in some quarters, especially by
some of the Edinburgh divines. But Dr. Johnson denounced it as an
imposture from the first. He pointed out that Macpherson had never
produced the manuscripts from which he professed to have translated it
when challenged to do so. He maintained also that the so-called poem had
no merits; that "it was a mere unconnected rhapsody, a tiresome
repetition of the same images;" and his opinion soon became so generally
adopted, that Macpherson wrote him a furious letter of abuse, even
threatening him with personal violence; to which Johnson replied "that
he would not be deterred from exposing what he thought a cheat by the
menaces of a ruffian"--a reply which seems to have silenced Mr.
Macpherson (Boswell's "Life of Johnson," i. 375, ii. 310).]

[Footnote 2: Chatterton's is a melancholy story. In 1768, when a boy of
only sixteen, he published a volume of ballads which he described as the
work of Rowley, a priest of Bristol in the fifteenth century, and which
he affirmed he had found in an old chest in the crypt of the Church of
St. Mary Redcliffe at Bristol, of which his father was sexton. They gave
proofs of so rich and precocious a genius, that if he had published them
as his own works, he would "have found himself famous" in a moment, as
Byron did forty years afterwards. But people resented the attempt to
impose on them, Walpole being among the first to point out the proofs of
their modern composition; and consequently the admiration which his
genius might have excited was turned into general condemnation of his
imposture, and in despair he poisoned himself in 1770, when he was only
eighteen years old.]

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