panic confessed he had written the
verses for a friend; but he had at home, he said, the copy of what was
really the translation of Turgot's Epic--Turgot was a Saxon monk of
the tenth century--by Rowley the secular priest of the fifteenth. This
was the second _Battle of Hastings_ as printed in this book. Again
this strange explanation, so laboured and so patently disingenuous,
was accepted without comment though probably not believed. And if
it appears matter for surprise that there should ever have been any
controversy about the authorship of the Rowley writings, in view of
the lad's admission that he had written three such signal pieces as
the _Bristowe Tragedy_, the first _Battle of Hastings_, and _Onn oure
Ladies Chyrche_, it must be considered that the production of
the greater part of the poems by a poorly educated boy not turned
seventeen would naturally appear a circumstance more surprising than
that such a boy should tell a lie and claim some of them as his own.

With his acknowledged work, as with Rowley, Chatterton by dint of
continued application was making good progress. In 1769 he had become
a frequent contributor to the _Town and Country Magazine_, to which
he sent articles on heraldry, imitations of Ossian (whom he very much
admired) and various other papers; and in December of this year he
wrote to Dodsley, the well-known publisher, acquainting him that
he could 'procure copies of several ancient poems and an interlude,
perhaps the oldest dramatic piece extant, wrote by one Rowley, a
Priest in Bristol, who lived in the reign of Henry the Sixth and
Edward the Fourth * * * If these pieces would be of any service to
Mr. Dodsley copies should be sent.' The publisher returned no answer.
Chatterton waited two months, then wrote again and enclosed a specimen
passage from _AElla_. He could procure a copy of this work, he wrote,
upon payment of a guinea to the present owner of the MS. Again Mr.
Dodsley lay low and said nothing, and so the incident closed.

Dodsley having failed him, Chatterton next took the bolder step of
writing to Horace Walpole, who must have been much in his mind for
some years before his sending the letter. Some one has made the
ingenious suggestion that a consideration of Walpole's delicate
connoisseurship sensibly coloured Chatterton's account of the life
of Mastre William Canynge. More than this, his delight in the
Mediaeval--the Gothic--and his content with what may be termed a
purely