er of _dramatis personae_, some of
whose names he discovered in old records and documents, such as
Carpenter, Bishop of Worcester, and Sir Theobald Gorges, a knight of
Wraxhall, near Bristol; together with others entirely of his own
invention--as John a Iscam, whom he represents to have been a canon of
St. Augustine's Abbey in Bristol; and especially one Thomas Rowley,
parish priest of St. John's, employed by Canynge to collect manuscripts
and antiquities. He was his poet laureate and father confessor, and to
him Chatterton ascribed most of the verses which pass under the general
name of the Rowley poems. But Iscam was also a poet and Master Canynge
himself sometimes burst into song. Samples of the Iscam and the Canynge
muse diversify the collection. The great Bristol merchant was a
mediaeval Maecenas, and at his house, "nempned the Red Lodge," were
played interludes--"Aella," "Goddwyn," and "The Parliament of
Sprites"--composed by Rowley, or by Rowley and Iscam collaborating.
Canynge sometimes wrote the prologues; and Rowley fed his patron with
soft dedication and complimentary verses: "On Our Lady's Church," "Letter
to the dygne Master Canynge," "The Account of W. Canynges Feast," etc.
The well-known fifteenth-century poet Lydgate is also introduced into
this literary _cenacle_, as John Ladgate, and made to exchange verse
epistles with Rowley in eighteenth-century fashion. Such is the
remarkable fiction which the marvelous boy erected, as a scaffolding for
the fabric of sham-antique poetry and prose, which he build up during the
years 1767 to 1770, _i.e._, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth year of
his age.

There is a wide distance between the achievements of this untaught lad of
humble birth and narrow opportunities, and the works of the great Sir
Walter, with his matured powers and his stores of solid antiquarian lore.
But the impulse that conducted them to their not dissimilar tasks was the
same. In "Yarrow Revisited," Wordsworth uses, _a propos_ of Scott, the
expression "localized romance." It was, indeed, the absorbing local
feeling of Scott, his patriotism, his family pride, his attachment to the
soil, that brought passion and poetry into his historical pursuits. With
Chatterton, too, this absorption in the past derived its intensity from
his love of place. Bristol was his world; in "The Battle of Hastings,"
he did not forget to introduce a Bristowan contingent, led by a certain
fabulous Alfwold, and