Excerpt from The Poetical Works of Thomas Chatterton, Vol. 1: With an Essay on the Rowley Poems
From a copy in the handwriting of Sir Herbert Croft, in the volume of Chatterton's works purchased by Mr. Waldron at the sale of Sir Herbert's Library. He says "this was written by Chatterton at about eleven: as well as the following Hymn."
1 The poems of Chatterton may be divided into two grand classes, those ascribed to Rowley, and those which the bard of Bristol avowed to be his own composition. Of these classes, the former is incalculably superior to the latter in poetical power and diction. This is a remarkable circumstance, and forms, we think, the only forcible argument in support of the existence and claims of Rowley. But there is a satisfactory answer, founded upon more than one reason, for the inferiority betwixt the avowed and concealed productions of Chatterton. He produced those antiquated poems which he ascribed to Rowley, when a youth of sixteen; and his education had been so limited that his general acquirements were beneath those of boys of the same age, since he was neither acquainted with French nor Latin. If, therefore, there is other evidence to prove that the poems of Rowley are his own composition, it follows that the whole powers and energies of his extraordinary talents must have been converted to the acquisition of the obsolete language, and peculiar style necessary to support the deep-laid deception. He could have no time for the study of our modern poets, their rules of verse, or modes of expression, while his whole faculties were intensely employed in the Herculean task of cresting the person, history and language of an ancient poet, which, vast as these faculties were, was surely sufficient wholly to engross, though not to overburden them. When, therefore, due time is allowed for a boy of sixteen to have acquired the astonishing skill in 'antique lore' necessary to the execution of this great project, it will readily be allowed that he must have come to the composition of modern poetry a mere novice, destitute of all adventitious support, and relying only on the strength of his own genius, which, powerful as it was, had hitherto been used in a different and somewhat inconsistent direction.
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