of the Cnyghte," written by one John De Bergham, |ing a most respectful deference. He accordingly who flourished in the fourteenth century. As Chatter-forwarded a paper, entitled, "The Kyse of Peyneteyne ton had suspected, the worthy pewterer was too well in Englande, wroten by T. Rowlie, for Mastre pleased to permit himself to doubt the authenticity of Canynge," with the accompanying note:the documents which conferred on him such an amount of ancestral dignity; and thus auspiciously commenced the course of fraud which ended in the production of Rowley. A short time after this, a new bridge was opened at Bristol, with the usual ceremonies, and the same week there appeared in Felix Farley's Bristol Journal a curious account of the manner of opening the old bridge, prefaced by the following letter: "Mr. Printer,-The following description of the Mayor's first passing over the old bridge, taken from an old manuscript, may not [at this time] be unacceptable to the generality of your readers. Yours, &c. "DUNHELMUS BRISTOLIENSIS." met with several curious manuscripts, among which Sir,-Being versed a little in antiquities, I have the following may be of service to you, in any future edition of your truly entertaining Anecdotes of Painting.' In correcting the mistakes (if any) in the notes, you will greatly oblige, "Your most humble Servant, "THOMAS CHATTERTON." This short note, it will be observed, is another striking example of Chatterton's miraculous perception of character and knowledge of the world. Never was an epistle more adroitly worded. Walpole, who was at once pleased with his correspondent, and evidently imagined him a very different person from the humble Bristol apprentice, forwarded a prompt and polite reply, containing, among others, these complimentary expressions ::-"What you have already sent me is valuable and full of information; but, instead of correcting you, Sir, you are far more able to correct me. I have not the happiness of understanding the Saxon language, and without your learned notes, should not have been able to comprehend Rowley's text." So auspicious was Chatterton's introduction to Walpole! Then followed, in curiously antique orthography, a circumstantial account of the procession. The communication was read with avidity and astonishment: but who was Dunhelmus Bristoliensis? Inquiries were made, the handwriting examined; but Chatterton kept his secret, and remained undiscovered. Emboldened by success, however, he presented another paper for insertion, and was recognised. He was now closely interrogated about the discovery of the documents, and after some little demur, invented a tale, which, however plausible, was anything but satisfactory. Believing that he had at last secured an influential discoveries" to the world of A surgeon of Bristol, named Barrett,-a learned patron to present his " and painstaking man, -was at this time writing a his- letters, he lost no time in forwarding some additional tory of Bristol; and to this gentleman, Chatterton anecdotes and fragments of ancient poetry. But his was introduced by a Mr. Catcott, the partner of Bur- eagerness excited suspicion. Walpole submitted the gum the pewterer, as a likely person to furnish some documents to his friends, Mason and Gray, and took information respecting the antiquities of the place. other steps to ascertain their authenticity. At the This was too good an opportunity to be lost; Chat- same time inquiries were instituted at Bristol, and as terton eagerly embraced it, and soon produced an soon as Walpole had learned that his correspondent Ancient Account of Bristol, by Turgot or Turgotus, was a mere boy, in an humble station of life, a marked "translated by T. Rowley, out of Saxon into English." change took place in his manner. Too cautious and This is perhaps the least excusable of Chatterton's sensitive to become the dupe of a lawyer's apprentice, frauds; it was falsifying the information of a really he now drew back, and wrote the young enthusiast valuable work, and injuring the reputation of a an edifying homily on the danger and disgrace of forlearned and estimable man, to gratify an idle and cer-geries, and urged him to stick to business, and reThis conduct in tainly not very honourable caprice. But we pass the linquish his poetical aspirations. question of morality by to proceed with our narrative. Walpole is not surprising-from one so totally defiIn December 1768, Chatterton wrote to Dodsley the cient in warmth of heart and generosity of disposition bookseller, to state that he "could procure copies of what else could have been expected?-but it does several ancient poems, &c. written by one Rowley, a excite resentment to find this dandy térateur— priest in Bristol, who lived in the reign of Henry VI. the author, be it remembered, of the "Castle of and Edward IV." The bookseller returned no answer; Otranto," which was said in the preface to have been and after waiting two months Chatterton wrote again. discovered "in the library of an ancient Catholic This letter-whether answered or not is doubtful-also family in the north of England, and printed at Naples, led to no result, and some other channel of publication in black letter, in the year 1529"-thus insultingly was sought for. Horace Walpole at this time occu- speaking of Chatterton when the wonderful enthupied a high position in the world of letters. From siast was no more: "All the house of forgery are his private printing-press at Strawberry Hill had relations; and though it is just to Chatterton's issued many remarkable works, and his reputation as memory to say, that his poverty never made him claim a man of taste was already European. In addressing kindred with the richest, or more enriching branches, such an august personage, Chatterton saw the neccs-yet his ingenuity in counterfeiting styles, and, I believe, sity of conforming to his particular tastes, and assum-hands, might easily have led him to those more facile imitations of prose, promissory notes." Chatterton took | his revenge on Walpole, and expressed his resentment in some spirited lines, which have been published in a recent memoir. We select a few couplets as apropos to our remarks: "Thou may'st call me cheat; Say did'st thou never practice such deccit? Although, perhaps, we are not called on to argue in these pages the broad question of morality involved in the Rowley forgeries, we cannot help making a slight reference to it in this place. A short time after Chatterton's death it was not an uncommon thing to speak of him as a mere vulgar impostor. There were not wanting biographers like Mr. Alexander Chalmers, who, in the words of Southey's celebrated article in the "Quarterly," related "the history of the Rowley Papers just as a pleader would have told it at the Old Bailey if Chatterton had been upon trial for forging a bill of exchange." Posterity, however, has passed a more lenient judgment—a judgment which is thus admirably summed up by Thomas Campbell: "The Rowleian forgery," says this kind-hearted and excellent man, “must indeed be pronounced improper by the general law which condemns all falsifications of history; but it deprived no man of his fame; it had no sacrilegious interference with the memory of departed genius." The following remarks from the same source are eloquent and touching. "When we conceive the inspired boy transporting himself in imagination back to the days of his fictitious Rowley, embodying his ideal character, and giving to 'airy nothing a local habitation and a name,' we may forget the impostor in the enthusiast, and forgive the falsehood of his reverie for its beauty and ingenuity." In a more exaggerated strain Mr. William Howitt, in one of his recent works, exclaims, after noticing this charge of forgery and falsification: "O glorious thieves! glorious coiners! admirable impostors! would to God that a thousand other such would appear, again and again appear, to fill the hemisphere of England with fresh stars of renown!" Having said so much respecting the circumstances of the forgery, it is time for us to make a few remarks on the poems themselves. The first in the collection is the "Bristowe tragedie, or, the dethe of Syr Charles Bawdin," which Jacob Bryant naïvely says "is written too much from the heart to be a forgery." It is a simple and touching ballad, which few who are fond of such productions will read without interest, and which records the fate of a zcalous adherent of the house of Lancaster, who was executed at Bristol in the first year of the reign of Edward IV. Although it is stated by Milles, a zealous champion for the authenticity of Rowley, and president of the Royal Antiquarian Society, to contain a greater number of internal proofs of antiquity than any poem in the collection, it is so decidedly modern in style, tone, and sentiment, that we cannot help quoting a few stanzas divested of their antique orthography. "Soon as the sledge drew nigh enough, "Thou see'st me, Edward, traitor vile! But be assured, disloyal man, "Whilst thou, perhaps, for some few years, Shalt rule this fickle land, To let them know how wide the rule 'Twixt king and tyrant hand.' "King Edward's soul rush'd to his face; And to his brother Gloucester "To him that so much dreaded death The tragical interlude of "Ella" is the most celebrated of the Rowley poems, and the most thickly studded with poetical beautics. One of the sweetest lyrics in our language is the well known "Mynstrelle's Songe" or rather dirge, of which we transcribe one or two stanzas, in modern spelling, just to bring it to our readers' minds. "Oh! sing unto my roundelay, Oh! drop the briny tear with me, Gone to his death-bed,' "See the white moon shines on high; Gone to his death-bed, All under the willow tree." Although it is, perhaps, unnecessary to multiply examples, we cannot refrain from quoting, in the original orthography, another "mynstrelle's songe" from the same interlude, which is as remarkable for its graceful and melodious versification, as for its dissimilarity to the style of our early poets. bleachynge, 13 Gyff any new entered doe aske for mie aidens,10 Thann swythynne11 you fynde mee a teachynge. "Lorde Walterre, mie fadre, he loved me welle, And nothynge unto mee was nedeynge, Botte schulde I agen goe to merrie Cloud-dell, In sothen1 'twoulde be wythoute redeynge.' "Shee sayde, and Lorde Thomas came over the lea, As hee the fatte derkynnes1 was chacynge; Shee putte uppe her knyttynge, and to hym wente shee: So wee leave them both kyndelie embracynge." It is stated by Warton, that in Durfey's "Pills to purge Melancholy," or some other book of pills for the same salutary purpose, he remembered an old Somersetshire ballad, which exhibited, as he believed, for the first time, the same structure of stanza. "Go find out the Vicar of Taunton Dean, And he 'll tell you the banns were asked; A thumping fat capon he had for his pains, And I skewered her up in a basket." Besides the Interlude of Ella, these celebrated forgeries comprise a fragment of " Goddwyn, a tragedie, by T. Rowlie;" an unfinished poem on the Battle of Hastings, said to have been written by Turgot the monk, a Saxon, in the tenth century, and translated by T. Rowlie; "The Parliamente of Sprytes; a most merrie Entyrlude, bie T. Rowlie and J. Iscamme," and several shorter poems. This Thomas Rowley was said by Chatterton to have been a priest of Saint John's, at Bristol; and, as a prose specimen of the Bristol boy's inventive genius, we quote the following passage from Rowley's account of his friend and patron, William Canynge: "I gave master Cannings my Bristow tragedy, for which he gave me in hands twentie pounds, and did praise it more than I did think myself did deserve; for I can say in troth, I was never proud of my verses since I did read master Chaucer; and nowe haveing nought to do, and not wyling to be ydle, I wente to the minster of our Ladie and Saint Goodwin, and then did purchase the Saxon manuscripts, and sett myselfe diligentlic to translate and worde it in English metre, which in one year I performed, and styled it the Battle of Hastings; master William did bargyin for one manuscript, and John Pelham, an Esquire of Ashley for another. Master William did praise it muckle greatly. . . . He gave me 20 markes, and I did goe to Ashley, to master Pelham, to be payd of him for the other one I left with him. But his ladie being of the family of the Fiscamps, of whom some things are said, he told me he had burnt it, and would have me burnt if I did not avaunt. Dureing this dinn his wife did come out, and made a dinn, to speak by a figure, would have oversounded the bells of our Ladie of the Cliffe; I was fain content to get away in a safe skin." Although the history of the Rowley controversy has now lost much of its intcrest, we cannot conclude this article without a brief reference to the most celebrated combatants and their prominent arguments. Of the authenticity of Rowley, the ablest and most successful champion was the learned Jacob Bryant. Some of his arguments, backed as they were by the authority of his potent name, appeared at the time unanswerable. For instance, of Chatterton's explanations of the obsolete words in Rowley, he thus speaks : "The transcriber has given some notes in order to But he is often very explain words of this nature. unfortunate in his solutions. He mistakes the sense grossly; and the words have often far more force and significance than he is aware of. This could not have been the case if he had been the author." And he thus amusingly illustrates his position: "I lay it down for a certainty, if a person in any such composition has, in transcribing, varied any of the terms through ignorance, and the true reading appears from the context, that he cannot have been the author. If, as the ancient vicar is said to have done in respect to a portion of the Gospel, he for sumpsimus reads uniformly mumpsimus, he never composed the treatise in which he is so grossly mistaken. If a person, in his notes upon a poem, mistakes Liber, Bacchus, for liber, a book; and, when he meets with liber, a book, he interprets it liber, free, he certainly did not compose the poem where these terms occur. In short, every writer must know his own meaning," &c. A number of instances are then given in which Chatterton is said to have mistaken the sense of Rowley. Further, Mr. Bryant argues that the acknowledged poems of Chatterton furnished conclusive evidence that he could not have written the poems ascribed to Rowley. "It may appear," he says, "an invidious task, and it certainly is not a pleasing one, to decry the compositions of an unfortunate young man, and expose his mistakes to the world; but, as there are persons who rank his poems with those of Rowley, and think them equally excellent, we have no way to take this prejudice, but by showing in this manner their great inferiority. Though he was pleased to say of himself that he had read more than Magliabccchi, yet his reading was certainly scanty, and confined, in great measure, to novels and magazines, and the trash of a circulating library." Examples are then cited, and Mr. Bryant triumphantly concludes: 66 A person may write volumes in this style and taste and never be a Rowley!" On the other hand, Warton and Malone satisfactorily proved from internal evidence, that the compositions were modern, and must have been forged by Chatterton or some one else. It was well observed by Warton, that "the lines have all the tricks and trappings, all the sophistications of poetical style, belonging to those models which were popular when Chatterton began to write verses." The poems which he produced were too perfect and too polished to have proceeded from a priest of the 15th century. It was here, perhaps, that his prudence was at fault. "His aim," says Warton, dazzle and surprise by producing such high wrought pieces of ancient poetry as never before existed. But to secure our credulity he should have pleased us less. He has shown too much genius, and too little skill." was to In looking back upon the opinions of Chatterton's contemporaries, we cannot help referring to those expressed by the literary giant of those days, Dr. Samuel Johnson. In his wholesome horror of precocious genius and juvenile prodigies, Johnson had ventured to declare his unmitigated contempt for the Bristol poct. "Don't talk to me of the powers of ́a vulgar, uneducated stripling," he said to Boswell; no man can coin guincas but in proportion as he has gold." Yet, when prevailed upon to look into the volume, he retracted his opinion, in language equally characteristic: "This is the most extraordinary young man that has encountered my knowledge. It is wonderful how the whelp has written such things." It is not our province to write a biography of Chatterton, or to linger on the "last scene of all, that ended that strange eventful history." It is enough to say that, having perished by his own hands, his corpse was interred, with scanty honours, in the pauper burial-ground in Shoe-lane. Mr. Chalmers, in his notice of Chatterton, in the Biographical Dictionary, remarks, that "there could not be a more decisive proof of the little regard he attracted in London, than the secrecy and silence that accompanied his death. This event, although so extraordinary--for young suicides are surely not commonis not even mentioned in any shape in the Gentleman's Magazine, the Annual Register, the Saint James's or London Chronicle, nor in any of the respectable publications of the day." Notwithstanding the indifference of contemporary journalists, and the silence of the "respectable publications," the Life and Death of Thomas Chatterton, his career of misfortune, and death of ignominy, have since become world-celebrated, and the creator of Rowley is ranked with names that the world will not willingly let die. VOL. VIII. THE PHANTOM SHIP. THE breeze had sunk to rest, The noonday sun was high, And ocean's breast lay motionless Beneath a cloudless sky. There was silence in the air, There was silence in the deep; And it seem'd as though that burning calm Were nature's final sleep. A noble ship there lay Upon the quiet sea, Her keel had ploughed for many a day She had braved the storm and battle, And many a noble heart That gallant vessel bore, Was round her like a chain, Her canvass all was spread, To catch the lightest gale; But spread in vain, for no breeze was there You might trace the line of her slenderest spar The mid-day watch was set When there came a cry from the tall masthead, A snowy speck appear'd, There was no breath of air, Yet she bounded on her way, She answer'd not their hail There were none who trod her spacious deck, Not a scaman on the mast: No hand to guide her helm; Yet on she held her course; A silence, as of death, Was o'er that vessel spread; She pass'd away from sight, The deadly calm was o'er, And the spell-bound ship pursued her course And the winds arose at the tempest's call Midnight, and still the storm Raged wrathfully and loud, And deep in the trough of the heaving sca P == There was darkness all around, Save where lightning flashes keen Play'd on the crests of the breken waves, And lit the depths between. Around her and below The waste of waters roar'd, And answer'd the crash of the falling masts Her quivering timbers strain; And o'er that stormy sea She flew before the gale, Yet she had not struck her lightest spar, Another blinding flash, And nearer yet she seem'd, But it showed no scaman's form, Driv'n o'er her pathless way, The angry tempest ceased, The winds were hush'd to sleep, And many a hardy seaman, Who fears nor storm nor fight, For his shroud, the wandering wave. EXTRACTS FROM THE LETTER-PRESS OF THE ASTRONOMICAL OBSERVATIONS. MADE AT THE ROYAL OBSERVATORY, EDINBURGII. THE ingenious author of the "Stars and the Earth" has been at infinite pains to convince us that "Time is only the rhythm of the world's history ;" and having, as he conceives, "irrefragably" proved his point, and fairly put an end to Old Father Time, he proceeds to perform the same kind office, and finish off his venerable coadjutor, "Space." Now, without saying whether we have, or have not, been convinced by the aforesaid assertion, we may at least maintain that there never was a period at which greater efforts were being made than at the present moment for the admeasurement of both. The progress of scientific research in England and in Europe generally, must not be judged of by the startling theories or amusing paradoxes which are occasionally put forward with the implied sanction of well-known names; as little might we judge of the general education of English girls by D'Israeli's clever satire. "It is all development," says the fair drawingroom savante, referring to a well-known modern book; I was a fish, and I shall be a crow!" The answer scems to be "j'aimai autant descendre d'un poisson que d'un singe." Apart, however, from such publications, we have brought before us in every department of science, quietly and almost without notice, the unobtrusive results of years of labour; and such is the book from which we have extracted the following narrative, which, we trust, will prove not without an interest peculiarly its own; giving, as it does, a simple and truthful account of the great efforts made by those gentlemen who founded the Edinburgh Observatory, and the many difficulties which presented themselves before the propriety of the present site was established beyond doubt: The most natural idea, and one which seems to have obtained at first in the question of securing the very utmost degree of stability for astronomical instruments, was to go to the proverbially sure foundation of rock. But in proportion as the optical power of such instruments was successively improved, many causes of disturbance, which were of no importance before, now not only became of noticeable effect, but proved even more prejudicial than some of the older ones. Thus, minute and rapid vibrations of the soil, when occurring in consequence of the neighbourhood of a large town, and continuing, as they do there, through nearly all the twenty-four hours, may almost prevent a powerful telescope from being used at all: though | they would have offered no impediment to the employment of one of the older astronomical instruments with plain sights. And as stone transmits vibrations much more readily than gravel or sand, an astronomer in the present day, in such a locality, would perhaps avoid the former material, and rather build on a looser one, though he might be occasionally plagued with a subsidence of the piers. Besides the more obvious disadvantages of rock as a foundation for astronomical instruments, an unnecessary prejudice was created against it from considering, theoretically, the effects of expansion by heat in deranging the position of the instruments. Though these are to a certain extent cere cause of disturbance, yet they are quite imperceptible in most situations; but having been first brought into notice by reason of the wonderful advance of modern practical optics,- -an advance, too, which promised to be continuous for a length of time to come,—their influence was rather overrated, and an opinion was very generally entertained that rock was not suitable as a foundation for astronomical purposes, and in the case of a Royal Observatory, not very long ago, built on a rocky hill, where no expense was spared to make the piers as perfect as possible (testified by the carriage alone of one of the enormous blocks having cost 500/), the builders were so deeply imbued with the prevailing feeling, that they were at infinite pains to neutralize the effects of the stony matter on which they were by necessity founded. ! |