fathers in its churchyard, and the graves which they had
successively dug there during a century and a half. His bones were left
to moulder among those of other pauper strangers in the burial-ground of
Shoelane workhouse. We attach no credit to the story of the exhumation
of his body, and its mysterious reinterment in Redcliff. His fathers
were sextons; and he, too, was in some sort a sexton also--but
spiritually and transcendantly. He buried his genius in the visionary
grave of Rowley, "an old chest in an upper room over the chapel on the
north side of Redcliff church;" and thence, most rare young conjurer, he
evoked its spirit in the shape of fragments of law-parchment, quaintly
inscribed with spells of verse and armorial hieroglyphics, to puzzle
antiquaries and make fools of scholiasts. Puzzle them he did; and they
could not forgive a clever stripling, whom hunger had tempted to don an
ancient mask, and impose himself on their spectacled eyes as a reverend
elder. Rogue!--vagabond! Profligate impostor! The slim, sleek,
embroidered juggler of the Castle of Otranto had not a kind word for
this ragged orphan of his own craft. He, whose ambition was to shine
among writers who have given intellectual grace to their noble
lineage--among whom assuredly he does and will shine--but whose acute
consciousness of something meretricious in his metal, made him doubt if
the public would accept coinage from his mint; and so caused him to wear
tentative disguises, whether he elaborated a romance or a keen and
playful witticism--and who really did injustice to his own powers,--not
from modesty but meanness,--even he, the son of a prime minister and
heir to a peerage--a man who was himself always something of a
trickster, now mystifying a blind old woman at Paris; now sending open
letters, privately nullified, recommending the bearers to his friend the
envoy at Florence; now, with the mechanic aid of village carpenters and
bricklayers, rearing a frail edifice bristling with false points, and
persuading the world that it was all pure Gothic, perhaps chuckling at
his assurance--even this shrewd mummer gravely shook his head at
Chatterton, and frowned on him as a cheat! True; they were both cheats;
Horace Walpole from apprehensive vanity; Chatterton from proud oblique
humility. The Bristol boy knew his worth; but, doubting the equity as
well as the sagacity of his judges, he did not venture to produce it as
his own. He supposed that an obscu