that he inscribed the matter of the few Rowley documents which he ever showed for originals.  We have the account of a certain Thistlethwaite, one of the ‘solid lads’ with whom Chatterton had made friends at school, that his friend Thomas in the summer of 1764 told him ’he was in possession of some old MSS. which had been found deposited in a chest in Redcliffe Church, and that he had lent some or one of them to Thomas Phillips’—­an usher at Colston’s, an earnest and thoughtful man fond of poetry, and a great friend of Chatterton’s.  ‘Within a day or two after this,’ (Thistlethwaite wrote to Dean Milles,) ’I saw Phillips ... who produced a Ms. on parchment or vellum which I am confident was “Elenoure and Juga"[1] a kind of pastoral eclogue afterwards published in the Town and Country Magazine for May 1769.  The parchment or vellum appeared to have been closely pared round the margin for what purpose or by what accident I know not ...  The writing was yellow and pale manifestly as I conceive occasioned by age.’

This was the beginning of the Rowley fiction—­which might be metaphorically described as a motley edifice, half castle and half cathedral, to which Chatterton all his life was continually adding columns and buttresses, domes and spires, pediments and minarets, in the shape of more poems by Thomas Rowley (a secular priest of St. John’s, Bristol); or by his patron the munificent William Canynge (many times Mayor of the same city); or by Sir Thibbot Gorges, a knight of ancient family with literary tastes; or by good Bishop Carpenter (of Worcester) or John a Iscam (a Canon of St. Augustine’s Abbey, also in Bristol); together with plays or portions of plays which they wrote—­a Saxon epic translated—­accounts of Architecture—­songs and eclogues—­and friendly letters in rhyme or prose.  In short, this clever imaginative lad had evolved before he was sixteen such a mass of literary and quasi-historical matter of one kind or another that his fictitious circle of men of taste and learning (living in the dark and unenlightened age of Lydgate and the other tedious post-Chaucerians) may with study become extraordinarily familiar and near to us, and was certainly to Chatterton himself quite as real and vivid as the dull actualities of Colston’s Hospital and the Bristol of his proper century.

Chatterton’s own circle of acquaintance was far less brilliant.  His principal patrons were Henry Burgum and George Catcott, a pair of pewterers, the former vulgar and uneducated but very ambitious to be thought a man of good birth and education, the latter a credulous, selfish and none too scrupulous fellow, a would-be antiquary, of whom there is the most delightfully absurd description in Boswell’s Johnson.  The biographer relates that in the year 1776 Johnson and he were on a visit to Bristol and were induced by Catcott to climb the steep flight of stairs which led to the muniment room in order to see the famous ‘Rowley’s Cofre’.