erton," testifies one of his early acquaintances, "was fond of
walking in the fields, particularly in Redcliffe meadows, and of talking
of his manuscripts, and sometimes reading them there. There was one spot
in particular, full in view of the church, in which he seemed to take a
peculiar delight. He would frequently lay himself down, fix his eyes
upon the church, and seem as if he were in a kind of trance. Then on a
sudden he would tell me: 'That steeple was burnt down by lightning: that
was the place where they formerly acted plays.'" "Among his early
studies," we are told, "antiquities, and especially the surroundings of
medieval life, were the favorite subjects; heraldry seems especially to
have had a fascination for him. He supplied himself with charcoal,
black-lead, ochre, and other colors; and with these it was his delight to
delineate, in rough and quaint figures, churches, castles, tombs of
mailed warriors, heraldic emblazonments, and other like belongings of the
old world."[5]

Is there not a breath of the cloister in all this, reminding one of the
child martyr in Chaucer's "Prioresse Tale," the "litel clergeon, seven
yeer of age"?

"This litel child his litel book lerninge,
As he sat in the scole at his prymer,
He 'Alma redemptoris' herde singe,
As children lerned hir antiphoner."

A choir boy bred in cathedral closes, catching his glimpses of the sky
not through green boughs, but through the treetops of the Episcopal
gardens discolored by the lancet windows of the clear-stories; dreaming
in the organ loft in the pauses of the music, when

"The choristers, sitting with faces aslant,
Feel the silence to consecrate more than the chant."

Thus Chatterton's sensitive genius was taking the impress of its
environment. As he pored upon the antiquities of his native city, the
idea of its life did sweetly creep into his study of imagination; and he
gradually constructed for himself a picture of fifteenth-century Bristol,
including a group of figures, partly historical and partly fabulous, all
centering about Master William Canynge. Canynge was the rich Bristol
merchant who founded or restored St. Mary Redcliffe's; was several times
mayor of the city in the reigns of Henry VI. and Edward IV., and once
represented the borough in Parliament. Chatterton found or fabled that
he at length took holy orders and became dean of Westbury College. About
Canynge Chatterton arranged a numb