le it seems not unlikely that Chatterton was
moved to take a hint from the disguise--slight as it was--assumed by
Walpole in the preface to his romance.[7] But perhaps this was not
needed to suggest to Chatterton that the surest way to win attention to
his poems would be to ascribe them to some fictitious bard of the Middle
Ages. It was the day of literary forgery; the Ossian controversy was
raging, and the tide of popular favor set strongly toward the antique. A
series of avowed imitations of old English poetry, however clever, would
have had small success. But the discovery of a hitherto unknown
fifteen-century poet was an announcement sure to interest the learned and
perhaps a large part of the reading public. Besides, instances are not
rare where a writer has done his best work under a mask. The poems
composed by Chatterton in the disguise of Rowley--a dramatically imagined
_persona_ behind which he lost his own identity--are full of a curious
attractiveness; while his acknowledged pieces are naught. It is not
worth while to bear down very heavily on the moral aspects of this kind
of deception. The question is one of literary methods rather than of
ethics. If the writer succeeds by the skill of his imitations, and the
ingenuity of the evidence that he brings to support them, in actually
imposing upon the public for a time, the success justifies the attempt.
The artist's purpose is to create a certain impression, and the choice of
means must be left to himself.

In the summer of 1764 Chatterton was barely twelve, and wonderful as his
precocity was, it is doubtful whether he had got so far in the evolution
of the Rowley legend as Thistlethwaite's story would imply. But it is
certain that three years later, in the spring of 1767, Chatterton gave
Mr. Henry Burgum, a worthy pewterer of Bristol, a parchment emblazoned
with the "de Bergham," coat-of-arms, which he pretended to have found in
St. Mary's Church, furnishing him also with two copy-books, in which were
transcribed the "de Bergham," pedigree, together with three poems in
pseudo-antique spelling. One of these, "The Tournament," described a
joust in which figured one Sir Johan de Berghamme, a presumable ancestor
of the gratified pewterer. Another of them, "The Romaunte of the
Cnyghte," purported to be the work of this hero of the tilt-yard, "who
spent his whole life in tilting," but notwithstanding found time to write
several books and translate "some pa