Part 25

Thus we have traced the course of Thomas Chatterton to that eventful crisis of his fate, when he found himself rejected, as it were, by the literary senate of his nation, and thrust down the few steps of the temple of fame which he had dared to ascend, as a forger and impostor. He was thrust away, in a manner, from the heart, and, what was more, from the intellect of his country; yet his proud spirit spurned the ignominious treatment, and he dared to make one grand effort, one great and final appeal against the fiat, in the face of the whole world, and in the heart of the British metropolis. Alas! it was a desperate enterprise, and our hearts bleed as we follow him in his course. There is nothing, in my opinion, so utterly melancholy in all the history of the calamities of authors as the four fatal months of Chatterton's sojourn in London. It was his great misfortune, from the hour of his birth till that moment, that he never had one suitable friend; one wise, generous, and sympathizing friend, who saw at once his splendid endowments and the faults of his character, and who could thus acquire a sound, and, at the same time, an inspiring influence over him. Born of poor people, who, however they might love him, did not and could not comprehend him; living in a town devoted to trade, and nailed to the desk of a pettifogging attorney, he went on his way alone, conscious of his own powers, and of the inferiority of those around him, till his pride and his passions kept pace with his genius, and he would have been a miracle had he not had great and many faults. If we, therefore, sigh over his religious skepticism, and regret the occasional symptoms of a sufficient want of truth and high principle in his literary hoaxes, especially in foisting fictitious matter into grave history, we are again compelled to acknowledge that it was because he had no adequate friend and counselor. He was like a young giant wandering solitarily over a wilderness without guide or guide-post; and if he did not go wrong in proportion to his unusual ardor, strength, and speed, it were a wonder. But from the moment that he sets foot in London, what is there in all biography so heart-breaking to contemplate? With a few borrowed guineas he sets out. Arrived in this great ocean of human life, where one living wave rushes past another as unrecognizant as the waves of the ordinary sea, his heart overflowing with domestic affections, he expends the few borrowed guineas in presents to his mother and sister, and sends them with flaming accounts of his prospect of honors for himself, and of wealth for them. If any one would make himself acquainted with the true pathetic, let him only read the few letters written home by Chatterton from Shoreditch and Holborn. He was to get four guineas a month by one magazine; was to write a history of England, and occasional essays for the daily papers. "What a glorious prospect!" He was acquainted with all the geniuses at the Chapter Coffee-house. "No author can be poor who understands the arts of booksellers; this knowledge I have pretty well dipped into!" Ah! poor Chatterton, one frog more gone to put himself under the protection of King Stork! Mr. Wilkes knew him by his writings; and he was going to visit him, and use his interest to secure the Trinity House for a Mrs. Ballance. He wrote to all his young men acquaintances. They were to send him up compositions, and he would have them inserted in all sorts of periodicals. Songs he was to write for a doctor in music; and such was the good fortune pouring in, that he could not help exclaiming, "_Bravo, my boys! up we go!_" One person would give him a recommendation as traveling companion to the young Duke of Northumberland, only he spoke nothing but English; another to Sir George Colebrook, an East India director, for a place of no despicable description, only he would not go to sea. He was about to wait on the Duke of Bedford, and had had a most polite interview with Beckford, the lord-mayor. In short, all, according to his poetic fancy, was going on most mountingly. "If," wrote he to his sister, "money flowed as fast upon me as honors, I would give you a portion of £5000."

But what was the stern reality? Amid all the flush of imaginary honors and success, or what he would have his family to think such, to tranquilize their minds, he was, in truth, almost from the first, in a state of starvation. His journey, and the presents so generously but so injudiciously purchased for his mother and sister--the little fund of borrowed guineas was gone. Of friends he does not appear to have had one in this huge human wilderness. Besides the booksellers for whom he did slave-work, not a single influential mortal seems to have put out a single finger of fellowship toward him. So far as the men of literary fame were concerned, it was one wide, dead, and desert silence. From the wretched region of Shoreditch, he flitted to the good-natured dress-maker's of Brook-street, Holborn. But starvation pursued him, and stared him every day more fearfully in the face. He was, with all his glorious talents and his indomitable pride, utterly alone in the world. Walpole, who had given him advice "as kindly as if he had been his guardian," was in great bodily comfort, penning smart letters, and compiling a "Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors" at Strawberry Hill, while the noblest genius living was stalking on sternly through the streets of pitiless London to famine and despair. Sam Johnson, all _his_ struggles now over, and at the annual price of £300 become, according to his own definition of Pensioner in his Dictionary, "A slave of state, hired by a stipend to obey his master," was comfortably lolling on the soft sofas of Mrs. Thrale, or acting the lion in the Literary Club, or in the saloon of some wealthy noble. Goldsmith was hastening to his end at fifty-three, and Chatterton to his at seventeen!

Of all the fine flourishes about the booksellers, whose arts he flattered himself that he understood, the following extract from his pocket-book, found after his death, will show the wretched result:

"Received to May 23, for Middlesex £1 11 6 " " of B 1 2 3 " " of Fell, for the Consuliad 0 10 6 " " of Mr. Hamilton, for Candidus and Foreign Journal 0 2 0 " " of Mr. Fell 0 10 6 " " of Middlesex Journal 0 8 6 " " of Mr. Hamilton, for 16 songs 0 10 6 ------- £4 15 9

"In another part of this little book," says his biographer, "shortly before his death he had inserted a memorandum, intimating that the sum of eleven pounds was due to him from the London publishers. It was a cruel fate to be compelled to turn literary drudge, with four-and-twenty shillings a month for wages, and more cruel still to be doomed to suffer all the pains of hunger because those wages were not paid!"

Such was the life of Chatterton. His fate is too well known; and so little sensation did the awful death of this

"Marvelous boy, who perished in his pride,"

occasion, that it was long before his friends heard any thing of him. He was buried without ceremony, _among paupers in Shoe Lane_; his identity could with difficulty be established when the fact was known.

In all the annals of literature there is nothing resembling the history of this boy-poet; he stands alone. Never did any other youth of the same years, even under the most favorable circumstances, produce works of the same high order; and never was child of genius treated by his country with such unfeeling contempt, with such an iron and unrelenting harshness of neglect. The fate of Francis Hilary Gilbert, a French writer, has been compared to that of Chatterton; but, besides that Gilbert was a man of forty-three, and had no claims to the genius of Chatterton, being a writer on veterinary medicine and rural economy, he destroyed himself because the government, which had sent him to Spain, neglected to send him his remittances, not from neglect of a whole nation. Except in the mere facts of destitution and suicide, there is little resemblance in the characters, claims, or fates of the two men. Chatterton's death has furnished a tragedy to the French stage from the pen of Alfred de Vigny.

* * * * *

The haunts of Chatterton lie within a narrow space. He was not one of those whom fate or fortune allows to traverse many lands; Bristol and London were his only places of residence. In London, little can now be known of his haunts: that he frequented Vauxhall and Marylebone Gardens; resorted to the Chapter Coffee-house; that he lived nine weeks at Mr. Walmsley's, a plasterer, in Shoreditch; and then removed to Mrs. Angel's, dress-maker, No. 4 Brook-street, Holborn, comprises nearly the totality of his homes and haunts in London. Where Mr. Walmsley's house was can not now be ascertained; the Chapter Coffee-house still retains its old situation, but has long ceased to be the resort "of all the literary characters" of London; Vauxhall is in its deserted old age, and Marylebone Gardens are, like many other gardens of Chatterton's time, now overrun, not with weeds, but houses. No. 4 Brook-street, Holborn, would be an interesting number if it remained; but, as if every thing connected with the history of this ill-fated youth, except his fame, should be condemned to the most singular fatality, there is no No. 4; it is swallowed up by an enormous furniture warehouse, Steffenoni's, fronting into Holborn, and occupying what used to be numbers one, two, three, and four of Brook-street. Thus the whole of the interior of these houses has been cleared away, and they have been converted into one long show-shop below, and as long manufacturing shops above. In this form they have been for the last eighteen years; and previous to that time, I am told, were occupied by an equally extensive ironmongery concern. Thus all memory of the particular spot which was the room of Chatterton, and where he committed the suicide, is rooted out. What is still more strange, the very same fate has attended his place of sepulture. He was buried among the paupers in Shoe Lane; so little was known or cared about him and his fate, that it was some time, as stated, before his friends learned the sad story; in the mean time, the exact site of his grave was wellnigh become unknown. It appears, however, from inquiries which I have made, that the spot was recognized; and when the public became at length aware of the genius that had been suffered to perish in despair, a headstone was erected by subscription among some admirers of his productions. With the rapid revolutions of property which now take place, especially in the metropolis and other large cities; with new plans and improvements, which in their progress seem to spare nothing of the past, however sacred, we have already seen, in the course of these volumes, how many traces of the resorts and dwellings of our poets have vanished from among us. The very resting-place of Chatterton could not escape the ungenial character of his fate. London, which seemed to refuse to know him when alive, refused a quiet repose to his ashes. To lie among the paupers of Shoe Lane was, one would have thought, a sufficiently abject lot for so proud and soaring a nature; but fortune had still another spite in reserve for his remains! The burial-ground in Shoe Lane, one of those inclosures of the dead which a dignitary of the Church has asserted to be guarded and guarantied against all violence and change by the ceremony of consecration, was sold to form Farringdon market; and tombs and memorials of the deceased disappeared to make way for the shambles and cabbage stalls of the living. Was there no lover of literature, no venerator of genius to take the alarm; to step in and see that the bones and the headstone of Chatterton were removed to the grave-yard which still is attached to St. Andrew's Church? It appears not. Neglected in death as in life, the headstone was pulled up, the bones of the poet were left to share the fate of those of his pauper comrades, and it is now most probable that they are scattered--Heaven knows where! for I am assured, on good authority, that houses are now built on the spot where this unfortunate youth lay. If houses are built, most likely cellars were dug to those houses; and then the bones of Chatterton--where are they? Echo may answer--where?

Let us now quit the desecrated scene of the poet's interment, and, returning to Bristol, seek that of his birth: we shall seek it equally in vain! The house of his birth, and the last narrow house of his remains, are alike swept away from the earth! Chatterton was born on Redcliffe Hill, in a back court behind the row of houses facing the northwest side of St. Mary's churchyard; the row of houses and its back courts have all been pulled down and rebuilt. The house in which Chatterton was born was behind a shop nearly opposite the northwest corner of the church; and the monument to the young poet, lately erected by subscription, has been very appropriately placed in a line between this house and the north porch of the church in which he professed to have found the Rowley MSS. This monument is a Gothic erection, much resembling an ancient cross, and on the top stands Chatterton, in the dress of Colston's school, and with an unfolded roll of parchment in his hand. This monument was erected under the care and from the design of John Britton, the antiquary, who, so much to his honor, long zealously exerted himself to rescue Chatterton's memory from apparent neglect in his native city. The man who can gaze on this monument; can contemplate the boyish figure and face of the juvenile poet; can glance from this quarter, where he was born in poverty, to that old porch, where he planned the scheme of his fame; and can call to mind what he was and what he did without the profoundest sensations of wonder and regret, may safely pass through life without fear of an astonishment. It is, in my opinion, one of the most affecting objects in Great Britain. How much, then, is that feeling of sympathy and regret augmented when you approach, and, upon the monument, read the very words written by the inspired boy himself for his supposed monument, and inserted in his "will."

"TO THE MEMORY OF

"THOMAS CHATTERTON.

"Reader, judge not: if thou art a Christian--believe that he shall be judged by a Superior Power; to that Power alone is he now answerable."

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One of the spots in Bristol which we should visit with the intensest interest connected with the history of Chatterton, would be the office of Lambert the attorney, where he wrote the finest of his poems attributed to Rowley. The first office of this person was on St. John's Steps, but he left this during Chatterton's abode with him; and, ceasing to be an office, it does not now seem to be exactly known in which house it was. From this place he removed to the house now occupied by Mr. Short, silversmith, in Cornhill, opposite to the Exchange; and here Chatterton probably wrote the greater portion of Rowley's poems. Another favorite haunt of Chatterton's, Redcliffe Meadow, is now no longer a meadow, but is built all over; so rapidly has about seventy years eradicated the footsteps of the poet in his native place. There are two objects, however, which, from their public character, remain, and are likely to remain, unchanged, and around which the recollections of Chatterton and his singular history will forever vividly cling: these are, Colston's School, and the Church of St. Mary's.

The school in Pyle-street, where he was sent at five years of age, and which his father had taught, I believe no longer exists. The school on St. Augustine's Back exists, and is likely to exist. It is one of those endowments founded by the great merchants of England, which, if they had been preserved from the harpy and perverting fingers of trustees, would now suffice to educate the whole nation. This school, founded at a comparatively recent date, and in the midst of an active city like Bristol, seems to be well administered. There you find an ample school-room, dining-hall, chapel, and spacious bed-rooms, all kept in most clean and healthy order; a hundred boys, in their long, blue, full-skirted coats and scarlet stockings, exactly as they were in the days of Chatterton. You may look on them, and realize to yourself precisely how Chatterton and his schoolfellows looked when he was busy there devouring books of history, poetry, and antiquities, and planning the Burgum pedigree, and the like. Take any fair boy of a similar age; let him be one of the oldest and most attractive--for, says his biographer, "there was a stateliness and a manly bearing in Chatterton beyond what might have been expected from his years." "He had a proud air," says Mrs. Edkins, and, according to the general evidence, he was as remarkable for the prematurity of his person as he was for that of his intellect and imagination. His mien and manner were exceedingly prepossessing; his eyes were gray, but piercingly brilliant; and when he was animated in conversation, or excited by any passing event, the fire flashed and rolled in the lower part of the orbs in a wonderful and almost fearful way. Mr. Calcott characterized Chatterton's eye "as a kind of hawk's eye, and thought we could see his soul through it." As with Byron, "one eye was more remarkable than the other; and its lightning-like flashes had something about them supernaturally grand." Take some fine, clever-looking lad, then, from the crowd, and you will find such, and you will feel the strangest astonishment in imagining such a boy appearing before the grave citizen Burgum with his pedigree, and within a few years afterward acting so daring and yet so glorious a part before the whole world.

To the admirers of genius, and the sympathizers with the strange fate of Chatterton, a visit to this school must always be a peculiar gratification; and under the improved management of improved times, and that of a zealous committee, and so excellent a master as the present one, Mr. Wilson, that gratification will be perfect. All is so airy, fresh, and cheerful; there is such a spirit of order evinced even in the careful rolling up of their Sunday suits, with their broad, silver-plated belt clasps, each arranged in its proper place, on shelves in the clothes-room, under every boy's own number; and yet without that order degenerating into severity, but the contrary, that you can not help feeling the grand beneficence of those wealthy merchants who, like Edward Colston, make their riches do their generous will forever; who become thereby the actual fathers of their native cities to all generations; who roll in every year of the world's progress some huge stone of anxiety from the hearts of poor widows; who clear the way before the unfriended, but active and worthy lad; who put forth their invisible hands from the heaven of their rest, and become the genuine guardian angels of the orphan race forever and ever; raising from those who would otherwise have been outcasts and ignorant laborers, aspiring and useful men, tradesmen of substance, merchants the true enrichers of their country, and fathers of happy families. How glorious is such a lot! how noble is such an appropriation of wealth! how enviable is such a fame! And among such men there were few more truly admirable than Edward Colston. He was worthy to have been lifted by Chatterton to the side of the magnificent Canynge, and one can not help wondering that he says so little about this great benefactor of his city.

Edward Colston was not merely the founder of this school for the clothing, maintaining, and apprenticing of one hundred boys, at a charge of about £40,000, but he also founded another school in Temple-street, to clothe and maintain forty boys, at a cost of £3000; and he left £8500 for an alms-house for twelve men and twelve women, with 6_s._ per week to the chief brother, and 3_s._ per week to the rest, with coals, &c.; £600 for the maintaining of six sailors in the Merchants' Alms-house; £1500 to clothe, maintain, instruct, and apprentice six boys; £200 to the Mint Work-house; £500 to rebuild the Boys' Hospital; £200 to put out poor children; £1200 to be given, in £100 a year, for twelve years, to apprentice the boys with, £10 each for his school; £1230 to beautify different churches in the city; £2500 to St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London; and £2000 to Christ Church School in London; £500 to St. Thomas's Hospital; £500 to Bethlehem Hospital; £200 to New Work-house in Bishopsgate Without; £300 to the Society for Propagating the Gospel; £900 for educating and clothing twelve poor boys and twelve girls, at £45 yearly, at Mortlake in Surrey; to build and endow an alms-house at Sheen in Surrey, sum not stated; £6000 to augment poor livings; besides various other sums for charitable purposes. All this property did this noble man thus bestow on the needs of his poorer brethren, without forgetting, as is often the case on great occasions, those of his own blood relatives, to whom he bequeathed the princely sum of £100,000. But, like an able and wise merchant, he did not merely bequeath these munificent funds, but "he performed all these charitable works in his lifetime; invested revenues for their support in trustees' hands; lived to see the trusts justly executed, as they are at this day; and saw with his own eyes the good effects of all his establishments." Great, too, as were these bequests, they were not the result of hoarding during a long, penurious life, as is often the case, to leave a boastful name at his death; his whole life was like the latter end of it. True, he did not marry, and when urged to it, used to reply, with a sort of pleasantness, "Every helpless widow is my wife, and her distressed orphans my children." "He was a most successful merchant," says Barrett, in his History of Bristol, "and never insured a ship, and never lost one." He lived first in Small-street, Bristol, but having so much business in London, and being chosen to represent the city, he removed thither, and afterward lived, as he advanced in years, a very retired life, at Mortlake, in Surrey. His daily existence was one of the noblest acts of Christian benevolence; and his private donations were not less than his public. He sent at one time £3000 to relieve and free debtors in Ludgate, by a private hand; freed yearly those confined for small debts in Whitechapel Prison and the Marshalsea; sent £1000 to relieve distress in Whitechapel; twice a week distributed beef and broth to all the poor around him; and were any sailor suffering or cast away in his employ, his family afterward found a sure asylum in him.