“Perchance in Virtue’s gare rhyme might be then”: 
    “If in this battle luck deserts our gare.”

Again the Middle English howten (Modern English, hoot) is defined by Speght as “hallow,” i.e., halloo.  But Kersey and Bailey misprint this “hollow”; and Chatterton, entering it so in his manuscript list of old words, evidently takes it to be the adjective “hollow” and uses it thus in the line: 

    “Houten are wordes for to telle his doe,” i.e.,
    Hollow are words to tell his doings.

Still again, in a passage already quoted,[17] it is told how the “Wynde hurled the Battayle”—­Rowleian for a small boat—­“agaynste an Heck.” Heck in this and other passages was a puzzle.  From the context it obviously meant “rock,” but where did Chatterton get it?  Mr. Skeat explains this. Heck is a provincial word signifying “rack,” i.e., “hay-rack”; but Kersey misprinted it “rock,” and Chatterton followed him.  A typical instance of the kind of error that Chatterton was perpetually committing was his understanding the “Listed, bounded,” i.e., edged (as in the “list” or selvage of cloth) for “bounded” in the sense of jumped, and so coining from it the verb “to liss"=to jump: 

    “The headed javelin lisseth here and there.”

Every page in the Rowley poems abounds in forms which would have been as strange to an Englishman of the fifteenth as they are to one of the nineteenth century.  Adjectives are used for nouns, nouns for verbs, past participles for present infinitives; and derivatives and variants are employed which never had any existence, such as hopelen=hopelessness, and anere=another.  Skeat says, that “an analysis of the glossary in Milles’s edition shows that the genuine old English words correctly used, occurring in the Rowleian dialect, amount to only about seven per cent, of all the old words employed.”  It is probable that, by constant use of his manuscript glossary, the words became fixed in Chatterton’s memory and he acquired some facility in composing at first hand in this odd jargon.  Thus he uses the archaic words quite freely as rhyme words, which he would not have been likely to do unless he had formed the habit of thinking to some degree, in Rowleian.

The question now occurs, apart from the tragic interest of Chatterton’s career, from the mystery connected with the incubation and hatching of the Rowley poems, and from their value as records of a very unusual precocity—­what independent worth have they as poetry, and what has been the extent of their literary influence?  The dust of controversy has long since settled, and what has its subsidence made visible?  My own belief is that the Rowley poems are interesting principally as literary curiosities—­the work of an infant phenomenon—­and that they have little importance in themselves, or as models and inspirations to later poets.  I cannot help