In the parts I did read, Mr. Bryant, as I expected, reasons admirably, and staggered me; but when I took up the poems called Rowley’s again, I protest I cannot see the smallest air of antiquity but the old words.  The whole texture is conceived on ideas of the present century.  The liberal manner of thinking of a monk so long before the Reformation is as stupendous; and where he met with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, eclogues, and plans of Greek tragedies, when even Caxton, a printer, took Virgil’s AEneid for so rare a novelty, are not less incomprehensible:  though on these things I speak at random, nor have searched for the era when the Greek and Latin classics came again to light-at present I imagine long after our Edward the Fourth.

Another thing struck me in my very cursory perusal of Bryant.  He asks where Chatterton could find so much knowledge of English events?  I could tell him where he might, by a very natural hypothesis, though merely an hypothesis.  It appears by the evidence, that Canninge left six chests of manuscripts, and that Chatterton got possession of some or several.  Now what was therein so probably as a diary drawn up by Canninge himself, or some churchwarden or wardens, or by a monk or monks?  Is any thing more natural than for such a person, amidst the events at Bristol, to set down other public facts as happened in the rest of the kingdom?  Was not such almost all the materials of our ancient story?  There is actually such an one, with some curious collateral facts, if I am not mistaken,—­for I write by memory,—­ in the History of Furnese or Fountains Abbey, I forget which:  if Chatterton found such an one, did he want the extensive literature on which so much stress is laid.  Hypothesis for hypothesis,—­I am sure this is as rational an one as the supposition that six chests were filled with poems never else heard of.

These are my indigested thoughts on this matter—­not that I ever intend to digest them—­for I will not, at sixty-four, sail back into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and be drowned in an ocean of monkish writers of those ages or of this!  Yours most sincerely.

(464) Mr. Cole, in a letter of the 31st says, “About six weeks ago, the gout was harassing both my feet; on Christmas-day it shifted its quarters, and got into my left hand; and inexpressible have been the pain and torment I have endured, with sleepless nights, racking pain, and no rest nor relief by day.  I hope the worst is over, as I had a comfortable sleep for the whole night last night:  but my hopes are like those in a ship in a storm; when one billow is past, another and greater is at the heels of it:  for a water-drinker my lot is hard."-E.