re and penniless youth, such as he,
could have little chance of attention or fair play in the world if he
appeared in his proper character; so he painfully assumed another, of a
nature that could not long have been supported even had he been a
various linguist deeply versed in etymologies, and especially proficient
in our extinct idioms, and their several dates of usage, instead of
wanting even Latin enough to understand the easiest parts of Skinner's
Etymology of the English tongue, one of the books that he consulted and
guessed at.

Of all modern suicides this youth was the most interesting; of all
literary impostors the least unpardonable, though his ways were,
unhappily for himself, of indefensible crookedness. He neither ascribed
his fictions to a great name as Ireland did, nor did he, like
Macpherson, steal the heart out of national ballads and traditions, to
stuff a Bombastes Penseroso of his own making.

Any competent, yet moderately indulgent reader, who should for the first
time take up Chatterton's works, and beginning at the beginning, in
Tyrwhitt's first edition, for example, peruse no more than sixty or
seventy pages, would probably lay down the volume somewhat disappointed
not to have found the very extraordinary merit he had expected. The
compositions that this partial examination would take in are
three--Eclogues, Elinour and Juga, Verses to Lydgate, with Song to Ella,
Lydgate's Answer, and the Tournament.

The first Eclogue is a conversation between two fugitive shepherds, who
bewail the wretched condition to which the barons' wars have reduced
them. It contains some pleasing lines.

As the rustics discuss their grievances in a valley under cover of

"... Eve's mantle gray,
The rustling leaves do their white hearts affray.
They regret the pleasures of their forsaken home,
... the kingcup decked mees,
The spreading flocks of sheep of lily white,
The tender applings and embodied trees,
The parker's grange, far spreading to the sight,
The gentle kine, the bullocks strong in fight,
The garden whiten'd with the comfrey plant,
The flowers Saint Mary shooting with the light--
...
The far-seen groves around the hermit's cell,
The merry fiddle dinning up the dell,
The joyous dancing in the hostry court--
But now,
high song and every joy farewell,
Farewell the very shade of fair