With the exception of “Elinour and Juga,” already mentioned, the Rowley poems were still unprinted.  The manuscripts, in Chatterton’s handwriting, were mostly in the possession of Barrett and Catcott.  They purported to be copies of Rowley’s originals; but of these alleged originals, the only specimens brought forward by Chatterton were a few scraps of parchment containing, in one instance, the first thirty-four lines of the poem entitled “The Storie of William Canynge”; in another a prose account of one “Symonne de Byrtonne,” and, in still others, the whole of the short-verse pieces, “Songe to Aella” and “The Accounte of W. Canynge’s Feast.”  These scraps of vellum are described as about six inches square, smeared with glue or brown varnish, or stained with ochre, to give them an appearance of age.  Thomas Warton had seen one of them, and pronounced it a clumsy forgery; the script not of the fifteenth century, but unmistakably modern.  Southey describes another as written, for the most part, in an attorney’s regular engrossing hand.  Mr. Skeat “cannot find the slightest indication that Chatterton had ever seen a MS. of early date; on the contrary, he never uses the common contractions, and he was singularly addicted to the use of capitals, which in old MSS. are rather scarce.”

Boswell tells how he and Johnson went down to Bristol in April, 1776, “where I was entertained with seeing him inquire upon the spot into the authenticity of Rowley’s poetry, as I had seen him inquire upon the spot into the authenticity of Ossian’s poetry.  Johnson said of Chatterton, ’This is the most extraordinary young man that has encountered my knowledge.  It is wonderful how the whelp has written such things.’”

In 1777, seven years after Chatterton’s death, his Rowley poems were first collected and published by Thomas Tyrwhitt, the Chaucerian editor, who gave, in an appendix, his reasons for believing that Chatterton was their real author, and Rowley a myth.[11] These reasons are convincing to any modern scholar.  Tyrwhitt’s opinion was shared at the time by all competent authorities—­Gray, Thomas Warton, and Malone, the editor of the variorum Shakspere, among others.  Nevertheless, a controversy sprang up over Rowley, only less lively than the dispute about Ossian, which had been going on since 1760.  Rowley’s most prominent champions were the Rev. Dr. Symmes, who wrote in the London Review; the Rev. Dr. Sherwin, in the Gentleman’s Magazine; Dr. Jacob Bryant,[12] and Jeremiah Milles, D.D., Dean of Exeter, who published a sumptuous quarto edition of the poems in 1782.[13] These asserters of Rowley belonged to the class of amateur scholars whom Edgar Poe used to speak of as “cultivated old clergymen.”  They had the usual classical training of Oxford and Cambridge graduates, but no precise knowledge of old English literature.  They had the benevolent curiosity of Mr. Pickwick, and the gullibility—­the large, easy swallow—­which seems to go with the clerico-antiquarian habit of mind.