forms were such as occurred in no old English poet known to
the student of literature. The fact that Rowley used constantly the
possessive pronominal form _itts_, instead of _his_; or the other fact
that he used the termination _en_ in the singular of the verb, was alone
enough to stamp the poems as spurious. Tyrwhitt also showed that the
syntax, diction, idioms, and stanza forms were modern; that if modern
words were substituted throughout for the antique, and the spelling
modernized, the verse would read like eighteenth-century work. "If
anyone," says Scott, in his review of the Southey and Cottle edition,
"resists the internal evidence of the style of Rowley's poems, we make
him welcome to the rest of the argument; to his belief that the Saxons
imported heraldry and gave armorial bearings (which were not known till
the time of the Crusades); that Mr. Robert [_sic_] Canynge, in the reign
of Edward IV., encouraged drawing and had private theatricals." In this
article Scott points out a curious blunder of Chatterton's which has
become historic, though it is only one of a thousand. In the description
of the cook in the General Prologue to the "Canterbury Tales," Chaucer
had written:

"But gret harm was it, as it thoughte me,
That on his schyne a mormal hadde he,
For blankmanger he made with the beste."

_Mormal_, in this passage, means a cancerous sore, and _blankmanger_ is a
certain dish or confection--the modern _blancmange_. But a confused
recollection of the whole was in Chatterton's mind, when among the
fragments of paper and parchment which he covered with imitations of
ancient script, and which are now in the British Museum,--"The Yellow
Roll," "The Purple Roll," etc.,--he inserted the following title in "The
Rolls of St. Bartholomew's Priory," purporting to be old medical
prescriptions; "The cure of mormalles and the waterie leprosie; the rolle
of the blacke mainger"; turning Chaucer's innocent _blankmanger_ into
some kind of imaginary _black mange_.

Skeat believes that Chatterton had read very little of Chaucer, probably
only a small portion of the Prologue to the "Canterbury Tales." "If he
had really taken pains," he thinks, "To _read_ and _study_ Chaucer of
Lydgate or any old author earlier than the age of Spenser, the Rowley
poems would have been very different. They would then have borne some
resemblance to the language of the fifteenth century, whereas they are
rather less like the l