without your learned notes, should
not have been able to comprehend Rowley's text." He asks where Rowley's
poems are to be found, offers to print them, and pronounces the Abbot
John's verses "wonderful for their harmony and spirit." This
encouragement called out a second letter from Chatterton, with another
and longer extract from the "Historie of Peyncteynge yn Englande,"
including translations into the Rowley dialect of passages from a pair of
mythical Saxon poets: Ecca, Bishop of Hereford, and Elmar, Bishop of
Selseie, "fetyve yn Workes of ghastlienesse," as _ecce signum_:

"Nowe maie alle Helle open to golpe thee downe," etc.

But by this time Walpole had begun to suspect imposture. He had been
lately bitten in the Ossian business and had grown wary in consequence.
Moreover, Chatterton had been incautious enough to show his hand in his
second letter (March 30). "He informed me," said Walpole, in his history
of the affair, "that he was the son of a poor widow . . . that he was
clerk or apprentice to an attorney, but had a taste and turn for more
elegant studies; and hinted a wish that I would assist him with my
interest in emerging out of so dull a profession, by procuring him
someplace." Meanwhile, distrusting his own scholarship, Walpole had
shown the manuscripts to his friends Gray and Mason, who promptly
pronounced them modern fabrications and recommended him to return them
without further notice. But Walpole, good-naturedly considering that it
was no "grave crime in a young bard to have forged false notes of hand
that were to pass current only in the parish of Parnassus," wrote his
ingenious correspondent a letter of well-meant advice, counseling him to
stick to his profession, and saying that he "had communicated his
transcripts to much better judges, and that they were by no means
satisfied with the authenticity of his supposed manuscripts." Chatterton
then wrote for his manuscripts, and after some delay--Walpole having been
absent in Parish for several months--they were returned to him.

In 1769 Chatterton had begun contributing miscellaneous articles, in
prose and verse, to the _Town and Country Magazine_, a London periodical.
Among these appeared the eclogue of "Elinoure and Juga,"[10] the only one
of the Rowley poems printed during its author's lifetime. He had now
turned his pen to the service of politics, espousing the side of Wilkes
and liberty. In April, 1770, he left Bristol for London,