which last he appears in an unguarded moment to have acknowledged to his mother).  He told her also that he had himself written one of the two poems Onn oure Ladies Chyrche—­which one, Mrs. Chatterton could not remember[4], but if it was the first of the two printed in this edition (p. 275) it was a strange coincidence indeed that led him to repudiate the antiquity of the only two Rowley poems which are really at all like ’antiques’—­Professor Skeat’s convenient expression.  The two Battles of Hastings were written during this period, and it appears that Barrett the surgeon, on being shown the first poem, was for once very insistent in asking for the original, whereupon Chatterton in a momentary panic confessed he had written the verses for a friend; but he had at home, he said, the copy of what was really the translation of Turgot’s Epic—­Turgot was a Saxon monk of the tenth century—­by Rowley the secular priest of the fifteenth.  This was the second Battle of Hastings as printed in this book.  Again this strange explanation, so laboured and so patently disingenuous, was accepted without comment though probably not believed.  And if it appears matter for surprise that there should ever have been any controversy about the authorship of the Rowley writings, in view of the lad’s admission that he had written three such signal pieces as the Bristowe Tragedy, the first Battle of Hastings, and Onn oure Ladies Chyrche, it must be considered that the production of the greater part of the poems by a poorly educated boy not turned seventeen would naturally appear a circumstance more surprising than that such a boy should tell a lie and claim some of them as his own.

With his acknowledged work, as with Rowley, Chatterton by dint of continued application was making good progress.  In 1769 he had become a frequent contributor to the Town and Country Magazine, to which he sent articles on heraldry, imitations of Ossian (whom he very much admired) and various other papers; and in December of this year he wrote to Dodsley, the well-known publisher, acquainting him that he could ’procure copies of several ancient poems and an interlude, perhaps the oldest dramatic piece extant, wrote by one Rowley, a Priest in Bristol, who lived in the reign of Henry the Sixth and Edward the Fourth * * * If these pieces would be of any service to Mr. Dodsley copies should be sent.’  The publisher returned no answer.  Chatterton waited two months, then wrote again and enclosed a specimen passage from AElla.  He could procure a copy of this work, he wrote, upon payment of a guinea to the present owner of the MS. Again Mr. Dodsley lay low and said nothing, and so the incident closed.