some fictitious bard of the Middle Ages.  It was the day of literary forgery; the Ossian controversy was raging, and the tide of popular favor set strongly toward the antique.  A series of avowed imitations of old English poetry, however clever, would have had small success.  But the discovery of a hitherto unknown fifteen-century poet was an announcement sure to interest the learned and perhaps a large part of the reading public.  Besides, instances are not rare where a writer has done his best work under a mask.  The poems composed by Chatterton in the disguise of Rowley—­a dramatically imagined persona behind which he lost his own identity—­are full of a curious attractiveness; while his acknowledged pieces are naught.  It is not worth while to bear down very heavily on the moral aspects of this kind of deception.  The question is one of literary methods rather than of ethics.  If the writer succeeds by the skill of his imitations, and the ingenuity of the evidence that he brings to support them, in actually imposing upon the public for a time, the success justifies the attempt.  The artist’s purpose is to create a certain impression, and the choice of means must be left to himself.

In the summer of 1764 Chatterton was barely twelve, and wonderful as his precocity was, it is doubtful whether he had got so far in the evolution of the Rowley legend as Thistlethwaite’s story would imply.  But it is certain that three years later, in the spring of 1767, Chatterton gave Mr. Henry Burgum, a worthy pewterer of Bristol, a parchment emblazoned with the “de Bergham,” coat-of-arms, which he pretended to have found in St. Mary’s Church, furnishing him also with two copy-books, in which were transcribed the “de Bergham,” pedigree, together with three poems in pseudo-antique spelling.  One of these, “The Tournament,” described a joust in which figured one Sir Johan de Berghamme, a presumable ancestor of the gratified pewterer.  Another of them, “The Romaunte of the Cnyghte,” purported to be the work of this hero of the tilt-yard, “who spent his whole life in tilting,” but notwithstanding found time to write several books and translate “some part of the Iliad under the title ‘Romance of Troy.’”

All this stuff was greedily swallowed by Burgum, and the marvelous boy next proceeded to befool Mr. William Barrett, a surgeon and antiquary who was engaged in writing a history of Bristol.  To him he supplied copies of supposed documents in the muniment room of Redcliffe Church:  “Of the Auntiaunte Forme of Monies,” and the like:  deeds, bills, letters, inscriptions, proclamations, accounts of churches and other buildings, collected by Rowley for his patron, Canynge:  many of which this singularly uncritical historian incorporated in his “History of Bristol,” published some twenty years later.  He also imparted to Barrett two Rowleian poems, “The Parliament of Sprites,” and “The Battle of Hastings” (in two quite different versions).