“Where we may soft humanity put on,
    And sit, and rhyme, and think on Chatterton."[28]

Keats said that he always associated the season of autumn with the memory of Chatterton.  He asserted, somewhat oddly, that he was the purest writer in the English language and used “no French idiom or particles, like Chaucer.”  In a letter from Jane Porter to Keats about the reviews of his “Endymion,” she wrote:  “Had Chatterton possessed sufficient manliness of mind to know the magnanimity of patience, and been aware that great talents have a commission from Heaven, he would not have deserted his post, and his name might have been paged with Milton.”

Keats was the poetic child of Spenser, but some traits of manner—­hard to define, though not to feel—­he inherited from Chatterton.  In his unfinished poem, “The Eve of St. Mark,” there is a Rowleian accent in the passage imitative of early English, and in the loving description of the old volume of saints’ legends whence it is taken, with its

                “—­pious poesies
    Written in smallest crow-quill size
    Beneath the text.”

And we cannot but think of the shadow of St. Mary Redcliffe falling across another young life, as we read how

    “Bertha was a maiden fair
    Dwelling in th’ old Minster-square;
    From her fireside she could see,
    Sidelong, its rich antiquity,
    Far as the Bishop’s garden-wall”;

and of the footfalls that pass the echoing minster-gate, and of the clamorous daws that fall asleep in the ancient belfry to the sound of the drowsy chimes.  Rossetti, in so many ways a continuator of Keats’ artistry, devoted to Chatterton the first of his sonnet-group, “Five English Poets,"[29] of which the sestet runs thus: 

    “Thy nested home-loves, noble Chatterton;
      The angel-trodden stair thy soul could trace
      Up Redcliffe’s spire; and in the world’s armed space
    Thy gallant sword-play:—­these to many an one
    Are sweet for ever; as thy grave unknown
      And love-dream of thine unrecorded face.”

The story of Chatterton’s life found its way into fiction and upon the stage.  Afred de Vigny, one of the French romanticists, translator of “Othello” and “The Merchant of Venice,” introduced it as an episode into his romance, “Stello ou les Diables Bleus,” afterward dramatized as “Chatterton,” and first played at Paris on February 12, 1835, with great success.  De Vigny made a love tragedy out of it, inventing a sweetheart for his hero, in the person of Kitty Bell, a role which became one of Madame Dorval’s chief triumphs.  On the occasion of the revival of De Vigny’s drama in December, 1857, Theophile Gautier gave, in the Moniteur,[30] some reminiscences of its first performance, twenty-two years before.