ot more brilliant, more felicitous. At the age of ten
years he wrote some verses entitled "On the Last Epiphany," which,
printed in _Farley's Journal_, showed that he had, if not high poetic
genius, at least extraordinary sensibility of rhythm. Unfortunately
his mind conceived for most of what he saw around him a hostility
which drove him to express it in satirical phrase. A church-warden,
whose name of Joseph Thomas would not have survived but for
Chatterton's verses, was made immortal for the changes made by him
while intent upon destroying ancient monuments, interfering with his
own ideas of churchyard regularities. Some of the levellings of this
man, particularly of an ancient cross mentioned by William of
Worcester three centuries back, were scourged with a lash much
imitating that of Alexander Pope, perhaps the only really existing
poet whom he sought to imitate. Praises accorded to him inspired the
feeling that if he could meet opportunities entirely favorable, he
could become illustrious; and it is touching to note that in this
ambition his leading thought was to be able to lift his mother and
sister far above their lowly estate. Insufficiently taught in
principles of personal rectitude, persuaded that greatest possessions
were obtainable mainly through fraud, he commenced that strange career
which none but a mind so little instructed could have failed to see
must end in disaster. There can hardly be a doubt that insanity, if
not born with him, was settling upon his understanding and that no
degree of careful guidance or successful venture would have imparted
entire relief.

In his fifteenth year he was apprenticed to John Lambert, an attorney
of Bristol, by whom he was set to copying legal documents, an
employment that lent many hours of leisure, which he devoted to study
in heraldry and Old English. With these he became familiar, and then
he began those impostures that were the bane of his short remnant of
life. The first of these had for its victim, one Burgum, a pewterer,
whose ignorance and vanity exposed him to the lad's designs to obtain
money from him by flattery. Like many others in such conditions, the
pewterer had eager desire to be thought a descendant of ancestry
formerly of high lineage. One day he was told by Chatterton that among
the ancient parchments appertaining to Saint Mary Redcliffe, he had
discovered one with blazon of the De Bergham arms, and he intimated
that from that noble family he,