he said he had them from the very person at Bristol to whom he had given them.  If any man was to tell you that monkish rhymes had been dug up at Herculaneum, which was destroyed several centuries before there was any such poetry, should you believe it?  Just the reverse is the case of Rowley’s pretended poems.  They have all the elegance of Waller and Prior, and more than Lord Surrey—­but I have no objection to anybody believing what he pleases.  I think poor Chatterton was an astonishing genius—­but I cannot think that Rowley foresaw metres that were invented long after he was dead, or that our language was more refined at Bristol in the reign of Henry V. than it was at Court under Henry VIII.  One of the chaplains of the Bishop of Exeter has found a line of Rowley in “Hudibras”—­the monk might foresee that too!  The prematurity of Chatterton’s genius is, however, full as wonderful, as that such a prodigy as Rowley should never have been heard of till the eighteenth century.  The youth and industry of the former are miracles, too, yet still more credible.  There is not a symptom in the poems, but the old words, that savours of Rowley’s age—­change the old words for modern, and the whole construction is of yesterday.

[Footnote 1:  Macpherson was a Scotch literary man, who in 1760 published “Fingal” in six books, which he declared he had translated from a poem by Ossian, son of Fingal, a Gaelic prince of the third century.  For a moment the work was accepted as genuine in some quarters, especially by some of the Edinburgh divines.  But Dr. Johnson denounced it as an imposture from the first.  He pointed out that Macpherson had never produced the manuscripts from which he professed to have translated it when challenged to do so.  He maintained also that the so-called poem had no merits; that “it was a mere unconnected rhapsody, a tiresome repetition of the same images;” and his opinion soon became so generally adopted, that Macpherson wrote him a furious letter of abuse, even threatening him with personal violence; to which Johnson replied “that he would not be deterred from exposing what he thought a cheat by the menaces of a ruffian”—­a reply which seems to have silenced Mr. Macpherson (Boswell’s “Life of Johnson,” i. 375, ii. 310).]

[Footnote 2:  Chatterton’s is a melancholy story.  In 1768, when a boy of only sixteen, he published a volume of ballads which he described as the work of Rowley, a priest of Bristol in the fifteenth century, and which he affirmed he had found in an old chest in the crypt of the Church of St. Mary Redcliffe at Bristol, of which his father was sexton.  They gave proofs of so rich and precocious a genius, that if he had published them as his own works, he would “have found himself famous” in a moment, as Byron did forty years afterwards.  But people resented the attempt to impose on them, Walpole being among the first to point out the proofs of their modern composition; and consequently the admiration which his genius might have excited was turned into general condemnation of his imposture, and in despair he poisoned himself in 1770, when he was only eighteen years old.]