ng of this paragraph stamps the littleness of
the man's mind. A slight--a very slight effort on his part might have
turned the current of the boy's thoughts, and saved him from misery and
death. We do not call Chatterton "his victim," because we do not think
him so; but he, or any one in his position, might have turned him from
the love of an unworthy notoriety to the pursuit of a laudable ambition.
Following in the world's track (which he was ever careful not to
outstep), when the boy was dead, Walpole bore eloquent testimony to his
genius. The words of praise he gives his memory are like golden grains
amid the chaffy _verbiage_ with which he defends himself. If he
perceived this at first, why not have come forward hand and heart, and
shouted him on to honest fortune? But, like all _clique kings_, he made
no general cause with literature; he only smiled on his individual
worshippers, who could applaud when he said, with cruel playfulness,
"that singing birds should not be too well fed!"

His master, Lambert, dismissed the youth from his service, because he
had reason to suppose he meditated self-destruction; and then he
proceeded to London. How buoyant and full of hope he was during his
probationary days there, his letters to his mother and sister testify;
his gifts, also, extracted from his necessities, are evidences of the
bent of his mind--fans and china--luxuries rather than necessaries; but
in this, it must be remembered, his judgment was in fault, not his
affections. In all things he was swayed and guided by his pride,--his
indomitable pride. The period, brief as it was, of his sojourn in the
great metropolis proved that Walpole, while he neglected him so cruelly,
understood him perfectly, when he said that "nothing in Chatterton could
be separated from Chatterton--that all he did was the effervescence of
ungovernable impulse, which, chameleon-like, imbibed the colours of all
it looked on it was Ossian, or a Saxon monk, or Gray, or Smollett, or
Junius." His first letter to his mother is dated, April the 26th, 1770.
He terminated his own existence on the 24th of August in the same year.
He battled with the crowded world of London, and, what was in his case a
more dire enemy than the world, his overwhelming pride, for nearly four
months. Alas! how terrible are the reflections which these few weeks
suggest! Now borne aloft upon the billows of hope, sparkling in the
fitful brightness of a feverish sun, and then plunge