itten
by a boy of seventeen, and, in judging of their place in poetry, one is
apt to be influenced by one's first feeling of amazement. Is it possible
that the Rowley poems may owe much of their present distinction to the
early astonishment that a boy should have written them, albeit they have
great intrinsic excellencies such as may insure them a high place when
the romance, intertwined with their history, has been long forgotten?
But Chatterton is more talked of than read, and this has been so from
the first. The antiques are all but unknown; certain of the acknowledged
poems are remembered, and regarded as fervid and vigorous, and many of
the lesser pieces are thought slight, weak, and valueless. People do not
measure the poorer things in Chatterton with his time and opportunities,
or they would see only amazing strength and knowledge of the world in
all he did. Those lesser pieces were many of them dashed off to answer
the calls of necessity, to flatter the egotism of a troublesome friend,
or to wile away a moment of vacancy. Certainly they must not be set
against his best efforts. As for Chatterton's life, the tragedy of it
is perhaps the most moving example of what Coleridge might have
termed the material pathetic. Pathetic, however, as his life was, and
marvellous as was his genius, I miss in him the note of personal purity
and majesty of character. I told Rossetti that, in my view, Chatterton
lacked sincerity, and on this point he wrote:

I must protest finally about Chatterton, that he lacks
nothing because lacking the gradual growth of the emotional
in literature which becomes evident in Keats--still less its
excess, which would of course have been pruned, in Oliver.
The finest of the Rowley poems--_Eclogues, Ballad of
Charity, etc_., rank absolutely with the finest poetry in
the language, and gain (not lose) by moderation. As to what
you say of C.'s want of political sincerity (for I cannot
see to what other want you can allude), surely a boy up to
eighteen may be pardoned for exercising his faculty if he
happens to be the one among millions who can use grown men
as his toys. He was an absolute and untarnished hero, but
for that reckless defying vaunt. Certainly that most
vigorous passage commencing--

"Interest, thou universal God of men," etc.

reads startlingly, and comes in a questionable shape. What
is the answe