Although he did not go with the expectation of finding a land flowing with milk and honey, the sight of all this ruin long saddened his thoughts.  All was confusion, disorder, debts, mortgages, sales, pillage, villainy, waste, folly, and madness.  The nettles and brambles in the park were up to his shoulders; horses had been turned into the garden, and banditti lodged in every cottage.

The perpetuity of livings that came up to the very park-palings had been sold, and the farms let at half their value.  Certainly, if Houghton were bought by Sir Robert Walpole with public money, that public was now avenged.

The owner of this ruined property had just stemmed the torrent; but the worst was to come.  The pictures were sold, and to Russia they went.

Whilst thus harassed by family misfortunes, other annoyances came.  The mournful story of Chatterton’s fate was painfully mixed up with the tenour of Horace Walpole’s life.

The gifted and unfortunate Thomas Chatterton was born at Bristol in 1752.  Even from his birth fate seemed to pursue him, for he was a posthumous son:  and if the loss of a father in the highest ranks of life be severely felt, how much more so is it to be deplored in those which are termed the working classes!

The friendless enthusiast was slow in learning to read; but when the illuminated capitals of an old book were presented to him, he quickly learned his letters.  This fact, and his being taught to read out of a black-letter Bible, are said to have accounted for his facility in the imitation of antiquities.  Pensive and taciturn, he picked up education at a charity-school, until apprenticed to a scrivener, when he began that battle of life which ended to him so fatally.

Upon very slight accidents did his destiny hinge.  In those days women worked with thread, and used thread-papers.  Now paper was, at that time, dear:  dainty matrons liked tasty thread-papers.  A pretty set of thread-papers, with birds or flowers painted on each, was no mean present for a friend.  Chatterton, a quiet child, one day noticed that his mother’s thread-papers were of no ordinary materials.  They were made of parchment, and on this parchment was some of the black-letter characters by which his childish attention had been fixed to his book.  The fact was, that his uncle was sexton to the ancient church of St. Mary Redcliffe, at Bristol; and the parchment was the fruit of theft.  Chatterton’s father had carried off, from a room in the church, certain ancient manuscripts, which had been left about; being originally abstracted from what was called Mr. Canynge’s coffin.  Mr. Canynge, an eminent merchant, had rebuilt St. Mary Redcliffe in the reign of Edward IV.:  and the parchments, therefore, were of some antiquity.  The antiquary groans over their loss in vain:  Chatterton’s father had covered his books with them; his mother had used up the strips for thread-papers; and Thomas Chatterton himself contrived to abstract a considerable portion also, for his own purposes.