it appears then, that in March 1769, Walpole-received a letter from Chatterton, enclosing a few specimens of the pretended poems of Rowley, and announcing his discovery of a series of ancient painters at Bristol.  To this communication Walpole, naturally enough, returned a very civil answer.  Shortly afterwards, doubts arose in his mind as to the authenticity of the poems; these were confirmed by the opinions of some friends, to whom he showed them; and he then wrote an expression of these doubts to Chatterton.  This appears to have excited the anger of Chatterton, who, after one or two short notes, wrote Walpole a very impertinent one, in which he redemanded his manuscripts.  This last letter Walpole had intended to have answered with some sharpness; but did not do so.  He only returned the specimens on the 4th of August 1769; and this concluded the intercourse between them, and as Walpole observes, “I never saw him then, before, or since.”  Subsequently to this transaction, Chatterton acquired other patrons more credulous than Walpole, and proceeded with his forgeries.  In April 1770 he came to London, and committed suicide in August of that year; a fate which befell him, it is to be feared, more in consequence of his own dissolute and profligate habits, than from any want of patronage.  However this may be, Walpole clearly had nothing to say to it.

In addition to the accusation of crushing, instead of fostering his genius, Walpole has also been charged with cruelty in not assisting him with money.  Upon this, he very truly says himself, “Chatterton was neither indigent nor distressed, at the time of his correspondence with me.  He was maintained by his mother and lived with a lawyer.  His only pleas to my assistance were, disgust to his profession, inclination to poetry, and communication of some suspicious MSS.  His distress was the consequence of quitting his master, and coming to London, and of his other extravagances.  He had depended on the impulse of the talents he felt for making impression, and lifting him to wealth, honours, and faine.  I have already said, that I should have been blamable to his mother and society, if I had seduced an apprentice from his master to marry him to the nine Muses;’ and I should have encouraged a propensity to forgery, which is not the talent most wanting culture in the present age.” (53) Such and so unimportant was the transaction with Chatterton, which brought so much obloquy on Walpole, and seems really to have given him at different times great annoyance.

There remains but little more to relate in the life of Walpole.  His old age glided on peacefully, and, with the exception of his severe sufferings from the gout, apparently contentedly, in the pursuit of his favourite studies and employments.  In the year 1791, he succeeded his unhappy nephew, George, third Earl of Orford, who had at different periods of his life been insane, in the family estate and the earldom.  The accession of this latter dignity seems rather to have annoyed him than otherwise.  He never took his seat in the House of Lords, and his unwillingness to adopt his title was shown in his endeavours to avoid making use of it in his signature.  He not unfrequently signed himself, “The Uncle of the late Earl of Orford.” (54)