He was ingenious, industrious, a poet by nature, and, wonderful to say, withal a herald by taste.  Upon his nefarious possessions, he founded a scheme of literary forgeries; purporting to be ancient pieces of poetry found in Canynge’s chest; and described as being the production of Thomas Canynge and of his friend, one Thomas Rowley, a priest.  Money and books were sent to Chatterton in return for little strips of vellum, which he passed off as the original itself; and the successful forger might now be seen in deep thought, walking in the meadows near Redcliffe; a marked, admired, poetic youth.

In 1769, Chatterton wrote to Horace Walpole, offering to send him some accounts of eminent painters who had flourished at Bristol, and at the same time mentioning the discovery of the poems, and enclosing some specimens.  In a subsequent letter he begged Walpole to aid him in his wish to be freed from his then servile condition, and to be placed in one more congenial to his pursuits.

In his choice of a patron poor Chatterton made a fatal mistake.  The benevolence of Horace was of a general kind, and never descended to anything obscure or unappreciated.  There was a certain hardness in that nature of his which had so pleasant an aspect.  ‘An artist,’ he once said, ’has his pencils—­an author his pens—­and the public must reward them as it pleases.’  Alas! he forgot how long it is before penury, even ennobled by genius, can make itself seen, heard, approved, repaid:  how vast is the influence of prestige! how generous the hand which is extended to those in want, even if in error!  All that Horace did, however, was strictly correct:  he showed the poems to Gray and Mason, who pronounced them forgeries; and he wrote a cold and reproving letter to the starving author:  and no one could blame him:  Chatterton demanded back his poems; Walpole was going to Paris, and forgot to return them.  Another letter came:  the wounded poet again demanded them, adding that Walpole would not have dared to use him so had he not been poor.  The poems were returned in a blank cover:  and here all Walpole’s concern with Thomas Chatterton ends.  All this happened in 1769.  In August, 1770, the remains of the unhappy youth were carried to the burial-ground of Shoe Lane workhouse, near Holborn.  He had swallowed arsenic; had lingered a day in agonies; and then, at the age of eighteen expired.  Starvation had prompted the act:  yet on the day before he had committed it, he had refused a dinner, of which he was invited by his hostess to partake, assuring her that he was not hungry.  Just or unjust, the world has never forgiven Horace Walpole for Chatterton’s misery.  His indifference has been contrasted with the generosity of Edmund Burke to Crabbe:  a generosity to which we owe ‘The Village,’ ‘The Borough,’ and to which Crabbe owed his peaceful old age, and almost his existence.  The cases were different; but Crabbe had his faults—­and Chatterton was worth saving.  It is well for genius that there are souls in the world more sympathizing, less worldly, and more indulgent, than those of such men as Horace Walpole.  Even the editor of ‘Walpoliana’ lets judgment go by default.  ‘As to artists,’ he says, ’he paid them what they earned, and he commonly employed mean ones, that the reward might be smaller.’