and cast
himself upon the hazardous fortunes of a literary career. Most tragical
is the story of the poor, unfriended lad's struggle against fate for the
next few months. He scribbled incessantly for the papers, receiving
little or no pay. Starvation confronted him; he was too proud to ask
help, and on August 24 he took poison and died, at the age of seventeen
years and nine months.

With Chatterton's acknowledged writings we have nothing here to do; they
include satires in the manner of Churchill, political letters in the
manner of Junius, squibs, lampoons, verse epistles, elegies, "African
eclogues," a comic burletta, "The Revenge"--played at Marylebone Gardens
shortly after his death--with essays and sketches in the style that the
_Spectator_ and _Rambler_ had made familiar: "The Adventures of a Star,"
"The Memoirs of a Sad Dog," and the like. They exhibit a precocious
cleverness, but have no value and no interest today. One gets from
Chatterton's letters and miscellanies an unpleasant impression of his
character. There is not only the hectic quality of too early ripeness
which one detects in Keats' correspondence; and the defiant swagger, the
affectation of wickedness and knowingness that one encounters in the
youthful Byron, and that is apt to attend the stormy burst of irregular
genius upon the world; but there are things that imply a more radical
unscrupulousness. But it would be harsh to urge any such impressions
against one who was no more than a boy when he perished, and whose brief
career had struggled through cold obstruction to its bitter end. The
best traits in Chatterton's character appear to have been his proud
spirit of independence and his warm family affections.

The death of an obscure penny-a-liner, like young Chatterton, made little
noise at first. But gradually it became rumored about in London literary
coteries that manuscripts of an interesting kind existed at Bristol,
purporting to be transcripts from old English poems; and that the finder,
or fabricator, of the same was the unhappy lad who had taken arsenic the
other day, to anticipate a slower death from hunger. It was in April,
1771, that Walpole first heard of the fate of his would-be _protege_.
"Dining," he says, "at the Royal Academy, Dr. Goldsmith drew the
attention of the company with an account of a marvelous treasure of
ancient poems lately discovered at Bristol, and expressed enthusiastic
belief in them; for which he was l