Rowley a myth.[11] These reasons are convincing
to any modern scholar. Tyrwhitt's opinion was shared at the time by all
competent authorities--Gray, Thomas Warton, and Malone, the editor of the
_variorum_ Shakspere, among others. Nevertheless, a controversy sprang
up over Rowley, only less lively than the dispute about Ossian, which had
been going on since 1760. Rowley's most prominent champions were the
Rev. Dr. Symmes, who wrote in the _London Review_; the Rev. Dr. Sherwin,
in the _Gentleman's Magazine_; Dr. Jacob Bryant,[12] and Jeremiah Milles,
D.D., Dean of Exeter, who published a sumptuous quarto edition of the
poems in 1782.[13] These asserters of Rowley belonged to the class of
amateur scholars whom Edgar Poe used to speak of as "cultivated old
clergymen." They had the usual classical training of Oxford and
Cambridge graduates, but no precise knowledge of old English literature.
They had the benevolent curiosity of Mr. Pickwick, and the
gullibility--the large, easy swallow--which seems to go with the
clerico-antiquarian habit of mind.

Nothing is so extinct as an extinct controversy; and, unlike the Ossian
puzzle, which was a harder nut to crack, this Rowley controversy was
really settled from the start. It is not essential to our purpose to
give any extended history of it. The evidence relied upon by the
supporters of Rowley was mainly of the external kind: personal
testimony, and especially the antecedent unlikeliness that a boy of
Chatterton's age and imperfect education could have reared such an
elaborate structure of deceit; together with the inferiority of his
acknowledged writings to the poems that he ascribed to Rowley. But
Tyrwhitt was a scholar of unusual thoroughness and acuteness; and, having
a special acquaintance with early English, he was able to bring to the
decision of the question evidence of an internal nature which became more
convincing in proportion as the knowledge necessary to understand his
argument increased; _i.e._, as the number of readers increased, who knew
something about old English poetry. Indeed, it was nothing but the
general ignorance of the spelling, flexions, vocabulary, and scansion of
Middle English verse, that made the controversy possible.

Tyrwhitt pointed out that the Rowleian dialect was not English of the
fifteenth century, nor of any century, but a grotesque jumble of archaic
words of very different periods and dialects. The orthography and
grammatical