Nothing is so extinct as an extinct controversy; and, unlike the Ossian puzzle, which was a harder nut to crack, this Rowley controversy was really settled from the start.  It is not essential to our purpose to give any extended history of it.  The evidence relied upon by the supporters of Rowley was mainly of the external kind:  personal testimony, and especially the antecedent unlikeliness that a boy of Chatterton’s age and imperfect education could have reared such an elaborate structure of deceit; together with the inferiority of his acknowledged writings to the poems that he ascribed to Rowley.  But Tyrwhitt was a scholar of unusual thoroughness and acuteness; and, having a special acquaintance with early English, he was able to bring to the decision of the question evidence of an internal nature which became more convincing in proportion as the knowledge necessary to understand his argument increased; i.e., as the number of readers increased, who knew something about old English poetry.  Indeed, it was nothing but the general ignorance of the spelling, flexions, vocabulary, and scansion of Middle English verse, that made the controversy possible.

Tyrwhitt pointed out that the Rowleian dialect was not English of the fifteenth century, nor of any century, but a grotesque jumble of archaic words of very different periods and dialects.  The orthography and grammatical forms were such as occurred in no old English poet known to the student of literature.  The fact that Rowley used constantly the possessive pronominal form itts, instead of his; or the other fact that he used the termination en in the singular of the verb, was alone enough to stamp the poems as spurious.  Tyrwhitt also showed that the syntax, diction, idioms, and stanza forms were modern; that if modern words were substituted throughout for the antique, and the spelling modernized, the verse would read like eighteenth-century work.  “If anyone,” says Scott, in his review of the Southey and Cottle edition, “resists the internal evidence of the style of Rowley’s poems, we make him welcome to the rest of the argument; to his belief that the Saxons imported heraldry and gave armorial bearings (which were not known till the time of the Crusades); that Mr. Robert [sic] Canynge, in the reign of Edward IV., encouraged drawing and had private theatricals.”  In this article Scott points out a curious blunder of Chatterton’s which has become historic, though it is only one of a thousand.  In the description of the cook in the General Prologue to the “Canterbury Tales,” Chaucer had written: 

    “But gret harm was it, as it thoughte me,
    That on his schyne a mormal hadde he,
    For blankmanger he made with the beste.”