Читать книгу: «Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine – Volume 53, No. 332, June, 1843», страница 13
THE ATTORNEY'S CLERK IN THE MONK'S HOOD
"I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous boy—
The sleepless soul that perish'd in his pride."
Had the "resolution and independence" which dignify the lowly, and strengthen the unhappy, when no visible eye befriends them, been among the rich endowments of Chatterton's wonderful mind—had he possessed and cherished the courage that bears up against obloquy and neglect—had he pursued the rough tenour of his way undaunted, in spite of "solitude, pain of heart, distress, and poverty," how different must have been the fate of the inspired boy of Bristol! He might be alive yet; he would be ninety years old, graced with honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, and all that should accompany old age. He might have achieved some great epic, or some gorgeous historical dramas,—have finished the Fairy Queen, or given us a Fairy King of his own creation.
Among the lighter honours of social distinction, we can fancy his reception as a London "lion," by the fair and noble in proud places. Still pleasanter is the vision of his less public hours of idleness spent among congenial spirits. We can fancy him, the patriarch of living poets, seated as a guest at the breakfast-table of Samuel Rogers, who is about twelve years his junior, and those fine lads, Lisle Bowles, James Montgomery, and William Wordsworth, and those promising children, Tom Moore and Tom Campbell, and that braw chiel John Wilson—(palmam qui meruit ferat)—the youngest of the party something, perhaps, but not much, under seventy, except the bard of the Isle of Palms, who is no chicken; and unless the master of the feast have summoned those pretty babes from the Wood, the two Tennysons. But alas for Chatterton! the vision will not hold: he disappears from his chair at the feast, like Banquo—"and, when all's done, you look but on a stool." The ghost of the slayer of himself, after long haunting Strawberry Hill, to rebuke the senile complacency of the chronicler of royal and noble authors, repaired, after the death of that prosperous man of wit and fashion, to his native town, to prowl in Redcliff church, and about the graves of his fathers in its churchyard, and the graves which they had successively dug there during a century and a half. His bones were left to moulder among those of other pauper strangers in the burial-ground of Shoelane workhouse. We attach no credit to the story of the exhumation of his body, and its mysterious reinterment in Redcliff. His fathers were sextons; and he, too, was in some sort a sexton also—but spiritually and transcendantly. He buried his genius in the visionary grave of Rowley, "an old chest in an upper room over the chapel on the north side of Redcliff church;" and thence, most rare young conjurer, he evoked its spirit in the shape of fragments of law-parchment, quaintly inscribed with spells of verse and armorial hieroglyphics, to puzzle antiquaries and make fools of scholiasts. Puzzle them he did; and they could not forgive a clever stripling, whom hunger had tempted to don an ancient mask, and impose himself on their spectacled eyes as a reverend elder. Rogue!—vagabond! Profligate impostor! The slim, sleek, embroidered juggler of the Castle of Otranto had not a kind word for this ragged orphan of his own craft. He, whose ambition was to shine among writers who have given intellectual grace to their noble lineage—among whom assuredly he does and will shine—but whose acute consciousness of something meretricious in his metal, made him doubt if the public would accept coinage from his mint; and so caused him to wear tentative disguises, whether he elaborated a romance or a keen and playful witticism—and who really did injustice to his own powers,—not from modesty but meanness,—even he, the son of a prime minister and heir to a peerage—a man who was himself always something of a trickster, now mystifying a blind old woman at Paris; now sending open letters, privately nullified, recommending the bearers to his friend the envoy at Florence; now, with the mechanic aid of village carpenters and bricklayers, rearing a frail edifice bristling with false points, and persuading the world that it was all pure Gothic, perhaps chuckling at his assurance—even this shrewd mummer gravely shook his head at Chatterton, and frowned on him as a cheat! True; they were both cheats; Horace Walpole from apprehensive vanity; Chatterton from proud oblique humility. The Bristol boy knew his worth; but, doubting the equity as well as the sagacity of his judges, he did not venture to produce it as his own. He supposed that an obscure and penniless youth, such as he, could have little chance of attention or fair play in the world if he appeared in his proper character; so he painfully assumed another, of a nature that could not long have been supported even had he been a various linguist deeply versed in etymologies, and especially proficient in our extinct idioms, and their several dates of usage, instead of wanting even Latin enough to understand the easiest parts of Skinner's Etymology of the English tongue, one of the books that he consulted and guessed at.
Of all modern suicides this youth was the most interesting; of all literary impostors the least unpardonable, though his ways were, unhappily for himself, of indefensible crookedness. He neither ascribed his fictions to a great name as Ireland did, nor did he, like Macpherson, steal the heart out of national ballads and traditions, to stuff a Bombastes Penseroso of his own making.
Any competent, yet moderately indulgent reader, who should for the first time take up Chatterton's works, and beginning at the beginning, in Tyrwhitt's first edition, for example, peruse no more than sixty or seventy pages, would probably lay down the volume somewhat disappointed not to have found the very extraordinary merit he had expected. The compositions that this partial examination would take in are three—Eclogues, Elinour and Juga, Verses to Lydgate, with Song to Ella, Lydgate's Answer, and the Tournament.
The first Eclogue is a conversation between two fugitive shepherds, who bewail the wretched condition to which the barons' wars have reduced them. It contains some pleasing lines.
As the rustics discuss their grievances in a valley under cover of
"… Eve's mantle gray,
The rustling leaves do their white hearts affray.
They regret the pleasures of their forsaken home,
… the kingcup decked mees,
The spreading flocks of sheep of lily white,
The tender applings and embodied trees,
The parker's grange, far spreading to the sight,
The gentle kine, the bullocks strong in fight,
The garden whiten'd with the comfrey plant,
The flowers Saint Mary shooting with the light—
…
The far-seen groves around the hermit's cell,
The merry fiddle dinning up the dell,
The joyous dancing in the hostry court—
But now,
high song and every joy farewell,
Farewell the very shade of fair disport."
In the second Eclogue, a good son invokes blessings on his father, who is gone with the crusaders to Palestine. He describes with much animation the voyage, the landing in Syria, the warring Saracens, King Richard of lion's heart, and anticipates victory and the return to England.
"Thus Nigel said, when from the azure sea
The swollen sail did dance before his eyne.
Swift as the wish he to the beach did fly,
And found his father stepping from the brine.
Sprites of the blest, the pious Nigel said,
Pour out your pleasance on my father's head!"
The third Eclogue, if divested of certain exuberances—for Chatterton was precocious in every thing, and many of his fancies want the Bowdler pruning-knife—might be seasonably transferred to some of the penny publications for the benefit of Mr Frost's disciples. A poor man and woman, on their way to the parson's hayfield, complain to each other of their hard lot in being obliged to earn their bread by the sweat of their brows. "Why," asks the woman, "should I be more obligated to work than the fine Dame Agnes? What is she more than me? The man, unable to solve so knotty a point, says he doesn't see how he himself is not as good as a lord's son, but he will ask Sir Roger the parson, whom he consults accordingly.
"Man.—
By your priestship now say unto me,
Sir Godfrey the knight, who liveth hard by,
Why should he than me
Be more great
In honour, knighthood, and estate?
"Sir Roger.—
If thou hast ease, the shadow of content,
Believe the truth, none happier is than thee.
Thou workest well; can that a trouble be?
Sloth more would jade thee than the roughest day.
Could'st thou the secret minds of others see,
Thou would'st full soon see truth in what I say.
But let me hear thy way of life, and then
Hear thou from me the lives of richer men.
"Man.—
I rise with the sun,
Like him to drive the wain,
And, ere my work is done,
I sing a song or twain.
I follow the plough-tail
With a bottle of ale.
On every saint's day
With the minstrel I'm seen,
All footing away
With the maids on the green.
But oh, I wish to be more great,
In honour, station, and estate!
"Sir Roger.—
Hast thou not seen a tree upon a hill,
Whose ample boughs stretch wide around to sight?
When angry tempests do the heavens fill,
It shaketh drear, in dole and much affright:
While the small flower in lowly graces deck'd
Standeth unhurt, untroubled by the storm.
The picture such of life. The man of might
Is tempest-chafed, his woe great as his form;
Thyself, a floweret of small account,
Would harder feel the wind as higher thou didst mount."
Sir Roger's moral is trite enough, yet it seems to have escaped the consideration of our Chartists and Socialists.
Elinour the nut-brown, and Juga the fair, are two pining maidens, who, seated on the banks of the Redbourne, a river near St Alban's, are each bemoaning their lovers, gone to fight in that neighbourhood for the Rose of York. Presently, racked with suspense, they hasten nearer to the scene of action.
"Like twain of clouds that hold the stormy rain,
They moved gently o'er the dewy meads
To where Saint Alban's holy shrines remain.
There did they find that both their knights were slain.
Distraught they wander'd to swoln Redbourne's side,
Yell'd there their deadly knell, sank in the waves, and died."
The verses to Lydgate consist of ten lines of no merit at all, and supposed to be sent to him by Rowley, with the Ode to Ella, which has a movement that recalls Collins, a lyrical artist perhaps unexcelled in our language, and in whose manner Chatterton so obviously and frequently composes, that the fact alone might have settled the Rowley question, though we are not aware that it was ever particularly insisted on in the controversy.
"Oh Thou, or what remains of Thee,
Ella! the darling of futurity,
Let this my song bold as thy courage be,
As everlasting to posterity—
"When Dacia's sons, with hair of blood-red hue,
Like kingcups glittering with the morning dew,
Arranged in drear array,
Upon the fatal day,
Spread far and wide on Watchet's shore,
Then didst thou furious stand,
And by thy valiant hand
Besprinkle all the meads with gore.
"Driven by thy broadsword fell,
Down to the depths of hell,
Thousands of Dacians went.
…
"Oh Thou, where'er, thy bones at rest,
Thy sprite to haunt delighteth best,
Whether upon the blood-embrued plain—
Or where thou ken'st from far,
The dismal cry of war,
Or see'st some mountain made of corses slain,
"Or see'st the war-clad steed
That prances o'er the mead,
And neighs to be among the pointed spears—
Or in black armour stalk around
Embattled Bristol, once thy ground,
Or haunt with lurid glow the castle stairs,
"Or, fiery, round the Minster glare!
Let Bristol still be made thy care;
Guard it from foeman and consuming fire;
Like Avon's stream embrace it round,
Nor let a sparkle harm the ground,
Till in one flame the total world expire."
The quatrains entitled Lydgate's answer, are amply complimentary on the foregoing song, but otherwise as prosaic as the lines that introduce it.
"Among the Grecians Homer was
A poet much renown'd;
Among the Latins Virgilius
Was best of poets found.
"The British Merlin often had
The gift of inspiration;
And Afled to the Saxon men
Did sing with animation.
"In Norman times Turgotus and
Good Chaucer did excel;
Then Stowe, the Bristol Carmelite,
Did bear away the bell.
"Now Rowley, in these murky days,
Sends out his shining lights,
And Turgotus and Chaucer live
In every line he writes."
The next is the Tournament, an interlude. Sir Simon de Burton, its hero, is supposed to have been the first founder, in accomplishment of a vow made on the occasion, of a church dedicated to Our Lady, in the place where the church of St Mary Redcliff now stands. There is life and force in the details of this tourney; and the songs of the minstrel are good, especially the first, which is a gallant hunting stave in honour of William the Red King, who hunts the stag, the wolf, and "the lion brought from sultry lands." The sentiment conveyed in the burden of this spirited chorus sounds oddly considerate, as the command issued by William Rufus:—
"Go, rouse the lion from his hidden den,
Let thy darts drink the blood of any thing but men."
To the paternity of the next in order—the Bristol Tragedy, or Death of Sir Charles Baldwin—Chatterton confessed; and such an admission might have satisfied any one but Dean Milles. The language is modern—the measure flowing without interruption; and, though the orthography affects to be antiquated, there is but one word (bataunt) in the whole series of quatrains, ninety-eight in number, that would embarrass any reader in his teens; though a boy that could generate such a poem as that, might well be believed the father of other giants whom he chose to disown. It is a masterpiece in its kind, almost unexceptionable in all its parts. The subject is supposed to have been suggested by the fate of Sir Baldwin Fulford, a zealous Lancastrian, beheaded at Bristol in 1461, the first year of the reign of Edward IV., who, it is believed, was actually present at the execution.
Now comes Ella, a tragical interlude, or discoursing tragedy, by Thomas Rowley, prefaced by two letters to Master Canning, and an introduction. In the first letter, among various sarcasms on the age, is one, complaining that
"In holy priest appears the baron's pride."
A proposition, we fear, at least as true in our day as in the fifteenth century. From the same epistle we would recommend to the consideration of the Pontius Pilates of our era, the numerous poets who choose none but awfully perilous themes, and who re-enact tremendous mysteries more confidently than if they were all Miltons, the annexed judicious admonition:—
"Plays made from holy tales I hold unmeet;
Let some great story of a man be sung;
When as a man we God and Jesus treat,
In my poor mind we do the Godhead wrong."
And the following piece of advice, from the same letter, would not be ill bestowed on modern shopocracy:—
"Let kings and rulers, when they gain a throne,
Show what their grandsires and great-grandsires bore;
Let trades' and towns'-folk let such things alone,
Nor fight for sable on a field of ore."
Yet he who could give this sensible counsel did by no means follow it. Chatterton, who really could trace back his ancestors for 150 years as a family of gravediggers, drew out for himself a pedigree which would have astonished Garter king-at-arms, and almost abashed a Welsh or German genealogy. He derived his descent from Sire de Chasteautonne, of the house of Rollo, the first Duke of Normandy, who made an incursion on the coast of Britain in the ninth century, and was driven away by Alfred the Great! Nine shields, exhibiting the family arms, were carefully prepared by him, and are preserved, with many other and very various inventions by the same hand, in the British Museum; and neat engravings of those Chatterton escutcheons are furnished by Mr Cottle, in his excellent essays on this tortuous genius. He was equally liberal in providing a pedigree for his friend Mr Burgham, a worthy and credulous pewterer in his native town, convincing him, by proofs that were not conclusive at the Herald's College, that he was descended from the De Burghams, who possessed the estate and manor of Brougham in the reign of Edward the Confessor, and so allying the delighted hearer with the forefathers of an illustrious Ex-Chancellor of our day. No less a personage, too, than Fitz-Stephen, son of Stephen Earl of Ammerle in 1095, grandson of Od, Earl of Bloys and Lord of Holderness, was the progenitor gravely assigned to Chatterton's relative, Mr Stephens, leather-breeches-maker of Salisbury. Evidence of all sorts was ever ready among the treasures in the Redcliff muniment room, the Blue-Coat boy's "Open Sesame!"
The plot of Ella may be told in a few words. Ella, a renowned English warrior, the same who is invoked in the fine song already quoted, marries Bertha, of whom his friend and fellow warrior, Celmond, is secretly enamoured. On the wedding-day he is called suddenly away to oppose a Danish force, which he defeats, but not without receiving wounds severe enough to prevent his immediate return home. Celmond takes advantage of this circumstance, and under pretence of conducting Bertha to her husband, betrays her into a forest that chances to be the covert of Hurra, the Danish general, and other of the discomfited invaders. Her shrieks bring Hurra and his companions to her aid. They kill Celmond, and generously resolve to restore Bertha to her lord. He in the mean time, impatient to rejoin his bride, has contrived to get home, where, when he hears of her ill-explained departure, believing her false, he stabs himself. She arrives only in time to see him die.
Celmond, soliloquizing on the charms of Bertha, exclaims,—
"Ah, Bertha, why did nature frame thee fair?
Why art thou not as coarse as others are?
But then thy soul would through thy visage shine;
Like nut-brown cloud when by the sun made red,
So would thy spirit on thy visage spread."
At the wedding-feast, so unexpectedly interrupted by news of the Danes, the following pretty stanzas are sung by minstrels representing a young man and woman.
"Man.—
Turn thee to thy shepherd swain;
Bright sun has not drunk the dew
From the flowers of yellow hue;
Turn thee, Alice, back again.
Woman.—
No, deceiver, I will go,
Softly tripping o'er the mees,
Like the silver-footed doe
Seeking shelter in green trees.
Man.—
See the moss-grown daisied bank
Peering in the stream below;
Here we'll sit in dewy dank,
Turn thee, Alice: do not go.
Woman.—
I've heard erst my grandam say
That young damsels should not be,
In the balmy month of May,
With young men by the greenwood tree.
Man.—
Sit thee, Alice, sit and hark
How the blackbird chants his note,
The goldfinch and the gray-morn lark,
Shrilling from their little throat.
Woman.—
I hear them from each greenwood tree
Chanting out so lustily,
Telling lectures unto me,
Mischief is when you are nigh.
Man.—
See, along the mends so green
Pièd daisies, kingcups sweet,
All we see; by none are seen;
None but sheep set here their feet.
Woman.—
Shepherd swain, you tear my sleeve;
Out upon you! let me go;
Keep your distance, by your leave,
Till Sir Priest make one of two.
Man.—
By our lady and her bairn,
To-morrow, soon as it is day,
I'll make thee wife, nor be forsworn,
So may I live or die for aye.
Woman.—
What doth hinder but that now
We at once, thus hand in hand,
Unto a divine do go,
And be link'd in wedlock-band?
(Sensible woman!)
Man.—
I agree, and thus I plight
Hand and heart and all that's mine.
Good Sir Herbert do us right,
Make us one at Cuthbert's shrine.
Both.—
We will in a cottage live,
Happy though of no estate;
Every hour more love shall give;
We in goodness will be great."
The two Danish generals, Hurra and Magnus, warm their blood to the fighting temperature before the battle by quarreling with and abusing each other, like Grecian heroes. They are both bullies, but Hurra is brave and Magnus a craven. Chatterton's sarcastic humour plays them off admirably. The result of the struggle between the two armies is pithily announced by one of the fugitives:—
"Fly, fly, ye Danes! Magnus the chief is slain;
The Saxons come with Ella at their head:
Fly, fly, this is the kingdom of the dead."
In this drama is the exquisite melody, "O, sing unto my roundelay!" with which every one is familiar, as it is introduced into all our popular selections from the poets.
Here is a cunning description of dawn.
"The morn begins along the east to sheen,
Darkling the light doth on the waters play;
The faint red flame slow creepeth o'er the green,
To chase the murkiness of night away,
Swift flies the hour that will bring out the day.
The soft dew falleth on the greening grass;
The shepherd-maiden, dighting her array,
Scarce sees her visage in the wavy glass."
Such extracts do not, and are not intended to, convey any notion of Chatterton's dramatic power in this play. Mere extracts would not do justice to that, and therefore we confine ourselves to selections of a few out of many passages that can stand independent of plot or action, without detriment to their effect. The same remark will not apply to the next piece, or rather fragment. Godwin, a Tragedy, by Thomas Rowley. It is short, and the dramatic interest weak. In the following noble chorus, however, we recognise the genius of Chatterton:—
"When Freedom, drest in blood-stained vest,
To every knight her war-song sung,
Upon her head wild weeds were spread,
A gory broadsword by her hung.
She paced along the heath,
She heard the voice of death.
"Pale-eyed Affright, his heart of silver hue,
In vain essay'd her bosom to congeal:
She heard inflamed the shrieking voice of Woe,
And cry of owls along the sadden'd vale.
She shook the pointed spear,
On high she raised her shield;
Her foemen all appear,
And fly along the field.
"Power, with his head uplifted to the skies,
His spear a sunbeam and his shield a star,
Like two bright-burning meteors rolls his eyes,
Stamps with his iron feet, and sounds to war.
She sits upon a rock,
She bends before his spear,
She rises from the shock,
Wielding her own in air.
"Hard as the thunder doth she drive it on;
Keen wit, cross muffled, guides it to his crown;
His long sharp spear, his spreading shield are goe;
He falls, and falling rolleth thousands down."
A short prologue by Master William Canning, informs us that this tragedy of Godwin was designed to vindicate the Kentish earl's memory from prejudices raised against him by monkish writers, who had mistaken his character, and accused him of ungodliness "for that he gifted not the church." There are but three scenes in the play. In the first, Godwin and Harold confer together on the distressed state of the nation, and the weakness of the king, whose court is overrun with Norman favourites to the exclusion of the English knights, and the great oppression of the people. Harold, young and impetuous, is for instant rebellion; but the father tries to moderate his rage, recommending patience and calm preparation.
"Godwin.—
What tidings from the king?
Harold.—
His Normans know.
Godwin.—
What tidings of the people?
Harold.—
Still murmuring at their fate, still to the king
They roll their troubles like a surging sea.
Has England, then, a tongue but not a sting?
Do all complain, yet will none righted be?
Godwin.—
Await the time when God will send us aid.
Harold.—
Must we, then, drowse away the weary hours?
I'll free my country, or I'll die in fight.
Godwin.—
But let us wait until some season fit.
My Kentishmen, thy Somertons shall rise,
Their prowess warmer for the cloak of wit,
Again the argent horse shall prance in skies."
An allusion, says Chatterton, to the arms of Kent, a horse salient, argent. As to the cloak of wit, it may possibly be preserved in Somersetshire; but the mantle certainly was not tied as an indefeasible heirloom over the broad shoulders of the county of Kent. No ancient Saxons, or even Britons, ever displayed prowess so stolid as those brave wild-wood savages of Boughton Blean, near Canterbury, who recently fell in battle with her Majesty's 45th regiment, opposing sticks to balls and bayonets, under their doughty leader Sir William Courtenay, Earl of Devonshire, Knight of Malta, King of Jerusalem, and much more. And there were other blockheads, substantial dunces, of respectable station in East Kent, among this ignorant and ambitious madman's supporters; men who had been at school to little purpose. Such an insurrection of satyrs, and such a Pan, in the middle of the nineteenth century, within earshot of the bells of Christchurch! But this by the bye.
The next poem is styled English Metamorphosis, by T. Rowley. It consists of eleven stanzas of ten lines each, all fluent and spirited, and some of very superior merit. It is the fable of Sabrina, Milton's "daughter of Locrine," transliquefied to the river Severn, while her mother, Elstrida, was changed to the ridge of stones that rises on either side of it, Vincent's rocks at Clifton, and their enemy, the giant, was transformed to the mountain Snowdon. This giant was a very Enceladus.
"He tore a ragged mountain from the ground;
Hurried up nodding forests to the sky:
Then with a fury that might earth astound,
To middle air he let the mountain fly,
The flying wolves sent forth a yelling cry."
In illustration of Elstrida's beauty,—
"The morning tinge, the rose, the lily flower,
In ever-running race on her did paint their power."
The most vulgar and outworn simile is refreshed with a grace by the touch of Chatterton.
Of the next poem—An excellent ballad of Charity, by the good priest, Thomas Rowley, 1454—it is clear that the young author thought highly, by a note that he transmitted with it to the printer of the "Town and Country Magazine," July 4, 1770, the month preceding that of his death. Unlike too many bearers of sounding appellations, it has certainly something more than its title to recommend it.
The octosyllabic lines—twenty only—on Redcliff Church, by T.R., show what nice feeling Chatterton had for the delicacies of that florid architecture:—
"The cunning handiwork so fine,
Had wellnigh dazzled mine eyne.
Quoth I, some artful fairy hand
Uprear'd this chapel in this land.
Full well I know so fine a sight,
Was never raised by mortal wight."
Of its majesty he speaks in another measure:—
"Stay, curious traveller, and pass not by
Until this festive pile astound thine eye.
Whole rocks on rocks, with iron join'd, survey;
And oaks with oaks that interfitted lie;
This mighty pile that keeps the winds at bay,
And doth the lightning and the storm defy,
That shoots aloft into the realms of day,
Shall be the record of the builder's fame for aye.
Thou see'st this mastery of a human hand,
The pride of Bristol, and the western land.
Yet is the builder's virtue much more great;
Greater than can by Rowley's pen be scann'd.
Thou see'st the saints and kings in stony state,
As if with breath and human soul expand.
Well may'st thou be astounded—view it well;
Go not from hence before thou see thy fill,
And learn the builder's virtues and his name.
Of this tall spire in every country tell,
And with thy tale the lazy rich men shame;
Show how the glorious Canning did excel;
How he, good man, a friend for kings became,
And glorious paved at once the way to heaven and fame."
The "Battle of Hastings" is the longest of Chatterton's poems, and the reader who arrives at its abrupt termination will probably not grieve that it is left unfinished. The whole contains about 1300 lines in stanzas of ten, describing archery fights and heroic duels that are rather tedious by their similarity, and offensive from the smell of the shambles; and which any quick-witted stripling with the knack of rhyming might perhaps have done as well, and less coarsely, after reading Chapman's or Ogilby's Homer, or the fighting scenes in Spenser, the Border Ballads, &c. But even this composition is not unconscious of the true afflatus, such as is incommunicable by learning, not to be inhaled by mere imitative powers, and which might be vainly sought for in hundreds of highly elaborated prize poems.
There is nothing more interesting in British history than the subject; and it is one which Chatterton, with all his genius, was much too young to treat in a manner at all approaching to epic completeness. Yet a few specimens might show that he is not deficient in the energy of the Homeric poetry of action. But here is metal more attractive, a young Saxon wife:—
"White as the chalky cliffs of Britain's isle,
Red as the highest-coloured Gallic wine,
Gay as all nature at the morning smile,
Those hues with pleasance on her lips combine;
Her lips more red than summer evening's skies,
Or Phœbus rising in a frosty morn;
Her breast more white than snow in fields that lies,
Or lily lambs that never have been shorn,
Swelling like bubbles in a boiling well,
Or new-burst brooklets gentling whispering in the dell,
"Brown as the filbert dropping from the shell,
Brown as the nappy ale at Hocktide game—
So brown the crooked rings that neatly fell
Over the neck of that all-beauteous dame.
Grey as the morn before the ruddy flame
Of Phœbus' chariot rolling through the sky;
Grey as the steel-horn'd goats Conyan made tame—
So grey appear'd her featly sparkling eye.
"Majestic as the grove of oaks that stood
Before the abbey built by Oswald king;
Majestic as Hibernia's holy wood,
Where saints, and souls departed, masses sing—
Such awe from her sweet look far issuing,
At once for reverence and love did call.
Sweet as the voice of thrushes in the spring,
So sweet the words that from her lips did fall.
"Taper as candles laid at Cuthbert's shrine,
Taper as silver chalices for wine,
So were her arms and shape.—
As skilful miners by the stones above
Can ken what metal is inlaid below,
So Kennewalcha's face, design'd for love,
The lovely image of her soul did show.
Thus was she outward form'd; the sun, her mind,
Did gild her mortal shape and all her charms refined."
The next poem, and the last of the modern-antiques that it may be worth while to note, is the story of William Canning, the illustrious founder of Redcliff Church, and is worthy of the author and his subject.
"Anent a brooklet as I lay reclined,
Listening to hear the water glide along,
Minding how thorough the green meads it twined,
While caves responded to its muttering song,
To distant-rising Avon as it sped,
Where, among hills, the river show'd his head.
Engarlanded with crowns of osier-weeds,
And wreaths of alders of a pleasant scent.
"Then from the distant stream arose a maid,
Whose gentle tresses moved not to the wind.
Like to the silver moon in frosty night,
The damsel did come on so blithe and bright.
No broider'd mantle of a scarlet hue,
No peakèd shoon with plaited riband gear,
No costly paraments of woaden blue;
Nought of a dress but beauty did she wear;
Naked she was, and looked sweet of youth,
And all betoken'd that her name was Truth."
The few words then spoken by this angelical lady—who unhappily favoured Chatterton but with "angel visits, short and far between"—throw him into a reverie on the life of William Canning, whose boyhood was more fortunate than the poet's; for it is here reported of Canning, that
