is pride!"

An inquest was held, and yet though Englishmen--men who could read and
write, and hear--who must have heard of the boy's talents, either as a
poet, a satirist, or a political writer--though these men were guided by
a coroner, one, of course, in a more elevated sphere than those who
usually determine the intentions of the departed soul--yet was there not
one--NOT ONE of them all--with sufficient veneration for the casket
which had contained the diamond--not one with enough of sympathy for the
widow's son--to wrap his body in a decent shroud, and kneel in Christian
piety by his grave!--not one to pause and think that, between genius and
madness,

"What thin partitions do their bounds divide!"

In a letter from Southey to Mr. Britton (dated in 1810, to which we have
already referred, and which Mr. Britton kindly submitted to us with
various other correspondence on the subject), he says, "there can now be
no impropriety in mentioning what could not be said when the collected
edition of Chatterton's works was published,--that there was a taint of
insanity in his family. His sister was once confined; and this is a key
to the eccentricities of his life, and the deplorable rashness of his
death." Of this unhappy predisposition, indeed, he seems to have been
himself conscious, for "in his last will and testament," written in
April, 1770, before he quitted Bristol, when he seems to have meditated
suicide--although, from the mock-heroic style of the document his
serious design may be questioned,--he writes, "If I do a mad action, it
is conformable to every action of my life, which all savored of
insanity." His "sudden fits of weeping, for which no reason could be
assigned," when a mere child, were but the preludes to those gloomy
forebodings which haunted him when a boy. His mother had said, "she was
often apprehensive of his going mad."

And so,--the verdict having been pronounced, he was cast into
the burying-ground of Shoe Lane work-house--the paupers'
burying-ground,--the end, as far as his clayey tabernacle was concerned,
of all his dreamy greatness. When the ear was deaf to the worship of the
charmer, he received his meed of posthumous praise. Malone, Croft, Dr.
Knox, Wharton, Sherwin, Pye, Mrs. Cowley, Walter Scott, Haley,
Coleridge, Dermody, Wordsworth, Shelley, William Howitt, Keats, who
dedicated his "Endymion" to the memory of his fellow-genius; the burly
Johnson, whose praise seemed unintentional; t