earned to
read. Not long afterward the family removed to a house near the Church
of St. Mary Redcliffe, one of the oldest and noblest among the
parochial structures in England. In a room called the Treasury House,
over one of the porches of this church, was a pile of ancient
documents, muniments of title, parish registers, and other things,
which had been removed by the latest Chatterton, and which were kept
in the house now occupied by the family. The boy when eight years old
was sent to the Blue Coat, a charity school, where he learned with
rapidity the elements taught thereat. The time not occupied with
school tasks he devoted to reading whatever books he could borrow or
obtain from a circulating library. While engaged in study he seemed
unaware of everything passing around him. At twelve years of age he
probably had read a larger number of books than any child who ever
lived.

It is curious to study how the genius of some persons is developed and
their destiny determined by the conditions of their childhood. The
Chattertons for a hundred and fifty years had been sextons in St. Mary
Redcliffe, the last being John, uncle of the poet. Whatever might have
been in the transmission through several generations of ghostly
interest in this monument of the Middle Ages, it is known that to
Thomas Chatterton it was of all earthly objects the one most
interesting. For the sports of other lads he had no heart; his leisure
time was spent in the church, and in the study of its history and its
varied quaint literature. In time he began to imitate the ancient
manuscripts now in his mother's house, and with ochre, charcoal, and
black lead, his success in that line was marvellous. These habits
induced others kindred, among them absence of mind, under whose
influence, sometimes, when in the company of others, he gazed silently
at and about them with dreaminess, as if he was thinking how to
connect contemporary things strange to him with those, his only
familiars, two centuries before. It seems a pity for such a spirit to
be without other guides than a weak, toiling mother, and a teacher
dull and despotic as the head-master of the Blue Coat School. Of other
things than books he had opportunities to learn little. The sense of
honorable duty, either he had not been taught or its principles had
been inculcated in ways too meaningless to make enduring impression
upon his being. Under influences more benign he might have made a
career, if n