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ACKNOWLEDGED POEMS.'

SLY DICK.*

Sharp was the frost, the wind was high
And sparkling stars bedeckt the sky,

From a copy in the handwriting of Sir Herbert Croft, in the volume of Chatterton's works purchased by Mr. Waldron at the sale of Sir Herbert's Library. He says "this was written by Chatterton at about eleven as well as the following Hymn."

1 The poems of Chatterton may be divided into two grand classes, those ascribed to Rowley, and those which the bard of Bristol avowed to be his own composition. Of these classes, the former is incalculably superior to the latter in poetical power and diction. This is a remarkable circumstance, and forms, we think, the only forcible argument in support of the existence and claims of Rowley. But there is a satisfactory answer, founded upon more than one reason, for the inferiority betwixt the avowed and concealed productions of Chatterton. He produced those antiquated poems which he ascribed to Rowley, when a youth of sixteen; and his education had been so limited that his general acquirements were beneath those of boys of the same age, since he was neither acquainted with French nor Latin. If, therefore, there is other evidence to prove that the poems of Rowley are his own composition, it follows that the whole powers and energies of his extraordinary talents must have been converted to the acquisition of the obsolete language, and peculiar style necessary to support the deep-laid deception. He could have no time for the study of our modern poets, their rules of verse, or modes of expression, while his whole faculties were intensely employed in the Herculean task of creating the person, history and language of an ancient poet, which, vast as these faculties were, was surely sufficient wholly to engross, though not to overburden them. When, therefore, due time is allowed for a boy of sixteen to have ac quired the astonishing skill in antique lore' necessary to the execution of this great project, it will readily be allowed that he must have come to the composition of modern poetry a mere novice, destitute of all adventitious support, and relying only on the strength of his own genius, which, powerful as it was, had hitherto been used in a different and somewhat inconsistent direction. In the poems of Rowley, therefore, we read the exertions of Chatterton in the line of his own choice, aided by all the information which his researches had enabled him to procure, and stimulated by his favourite ambition of imposing upon the

Sly Dick in arts of cunning skill'd,
Whose rapine all his pockets fill'd,
Had laid him down to take his rest

And soothe with sleep his anxious breast.

literary world; but, in his modern poems, he is engaged in a style of composition to which he was comparatively a stranger, and to which the bent of his mind and turn of his studies had not naturally inclined him. Although this argument seems to account, in a manner sufficiently satisfactory for the inequality of these productions in which Chatterton has thrown aside the mask of Rowley, it is not the only one which can be offered. Let it be remembered, that, admitting Chatterton to be engaged in a deception, he had pledged himself to maintain it; he was therefore carefully to avoid whatever might tend to remove the veil which he had spread over it; and such was his firmness of perseverance, that he seems to attest the originality of Rowley, even in the Will which he wrote before his projected suicide. Without therefore supposing that he had underwritten his own poems in order to set off those of Rowley, it is obvious that the former must have been executed under a degree of embarrassment highly unfavourable to poetical composition. As Rowley, Chatterton had put forth his whole strength, and exerted himself to the utmost in describing those scenes of antique splendour which captivated his imagination so strongly. But when he wrote in his own character, he was under the necessity of avoiding every idea, subject or expression, however favourite, which could tend to identify the style of Chatterton with that of Rowley, and surely it is no more to be expected that, thus cramped and trammelled, he should equal his unrestrained efforts, than that a man should exert the same speed with fetters on his limbs as if they were at liberty. Let it be further considered, that there exist persons to whom nature has granted the talent of mimicking, not merely the voice and gesture, but the expression, ideas, and manner of thinking of others, and who, speaking in an assumed character, display a fire and genius which evaporates when they resume their own. In like manner, Chatterton, with all his wonderful powers, appears from the habit of writing as a fictitious personage, and in a strangely antiquated dialect, to have in some degree formed a character to his supposed Rowley, superior to what he was able to maintain in his own person when his disguise was laid aside. The veil of antiquity also, the hard, and often inexplicable phrases, which he felt himself at liberty to use under his assumed character of a poet of the fifteenth century, serve in a considerable degree to blind and impose upon the reader, who does not find himself entitled to condemn what he does not understand, and who is inclined, from the eminent beauty of many passages, to extend his gratuitous admiration to those which are less intelligible. But, when writing in modern English, this advantage is lost, and we are often shocked with a bald and prosaic tautology, with bombast, and with coarseness of expression, all the defects, not of Chatterton's natural genius, but of his extreme youth and deficient education; and many instances of which will be found to exist, by curious inquirers even under the seemly and antique Alban of the Deigne Thomas Rowleie Preiste of St. Johans, Bristowe.-SIR WALTER SCOTT.

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