t performance, twenty-two
years before.

"The parterre before which Chatterton declaimed was full of pale,
long-haired youths, who firmly believed that there was no other worthy
occupation on earth but the making of verses or of pictures--art, as they
called it; and who looked upon the bourgeois with a disdain to which the
disdain of the Heidelberg or Jena 'fox' for the 'philistine' hardly
approaches. . . As to money, no one thought of it. More than one, as in
that assembly of impossible professions which Theodore de Banville
describes with so resigned an irony, could have cried without falsehood
'I am a lyric poet and I live by my profession.' One who has not passed
through that mad, ardent, over-excited but generous epoch, cannot imagine
to what a forgetfulness of material existence the intoxication, or, if
you prefer, infatuation of art pushed the obscure and fragile victims who
would rather have died than renounce their dream. One actually heard in
the night the crack of solitary pistols. Judge of the effect produced in
such an environment by M. Afred Vigney's 'Chatterton'; to which, if you
would comprehend it, you must restore the contemporary atmosphere."[31]

[1] Wordsworth, "Resolution and Independence."

[2] January 1, 1753.

[3] "The Poetical Works of Thos. Chatterton. With an Essay on the Rowley
Poems by the Rev. Walter W. Skeat and a Memoir by Edward Bell"; in two
volumes. London, 1871, Vol. I. p. xv.

[4] Willcox's edition of "Chatterton's Poetical Works," Cambridge, 1842,
Vol. I. p. xxi.

[5] "Memoir by Edward Bell," p. xxiv.

[6] _Cf._ ("Battle of Hastings," i. xx)

"The grey-goose pinion, that theron was set,
Eftsoons with smoking crimson blood was wet"

With the lines from "Chevy Chase" (_ante_, p. 295). To be sure the
ballad was widely current before the publication of the "Reliques."

[7] See _ante_, p. 237.

[8] Walter Scott quotes this passage in his review of Southey and Cottle's
edition of Chatterton in the Edinburgh _Review_ for April, 1804, and
comments as follows: "While Chatterton wrote plain narrative, he imitated
with considerable success the dry, concise style of an antique annalist;
but when anything required a more dignified or sentimental style, he
mounted the fatal and easily recognized car of the son of Fingal."

[9] Publication begun 1761: 2d edition 1768. Chatterton's letter was
dated March 25 [1769].

[10] See _ante_, p. 346.

[11] "Poems suppose