No More Learning

'Within a day or two after this,' (Thistlethwaite wrote to Dean
Milles,) 'I saw Phillips . . . who produced a MS. on parchment or vellum
which I am confident was "Elenoure and Juga"[1] a kind of pastoral
eclogue afterwards published in the _Town and Country Magazine_ for
May 1769. The parchment or vellum appeared to have been closely pared
round the margin for what purpose or by what accident I know not . . .
The writing was yellow and pale manifestly as I conceive occasioned by
age. '

This was the beginning of the Rowley fiction--which might be
metaphorically described as a motley edifice, half castle and half
cathedral, to which Chatterton all his life was continually adding
columns and buttresses, domes and spires, pediments and minarets,
in the shape of more poems by Thomas Rowley (a secular priest of St.
John's, Bristol); or by his patron the munificent William Canynge
(many times Mayor of the same city); or by Sir Thibbot Gorges, a
knight of ancient family with literary tastes; or by good Bishop
Carpenter (of Worcester) or John a Iscam (a Canon of St. Augustine's
Abbey, also in Bristol); together with plays or portions of
plays which they wrote--a Saxon epic translated--accounts of
Architecture--songs and eclogues--and friendly letters in rhyme or
prose. In short, this clever imaginative lad had evolved before he
was sixteen such a mass of literary and quasi-historical matter of
one kind or another that his fictitious circle of men of taste and
learning (living in the dark and unenlightened age of Lydgate and the
other tedious post-Chaucerians) may with study become extraordinarily
familiar and near to us, and was certainly to Chatterton himself quite
as real and vivid as the dull actualities of Colston's Hospital and
the Bristol of his proper century.

Chatterton's own circle of acquaintance was far less brilliant. His
principal patrons were Henry Burgum and George Catcott, a pair of
pewterers, the former vulgar and uneducated but very ambitious to be
thought a man of good birth and education, the latter a credulous,
selfish and none too scrupulous fellow, a would-be antiquary, of
whom there is the most delightfully absurd description in Boswell's
_Johnson_.
The biographer relates that in the year 1776 Johnson and
he were on a visit to Bristol and were induced by Catcott to climb the
steep flight of stairs which led to the muniment room in order to
see the famous 'Rowley's Cofre'. Whereupon, when the ascent had been
accomplished, Catcott 'called out with a triumphant air of lively
simplicity "I'll make Dr. Johnson a convert" (to the view then still
largely obtaining that Rowley's poems were written in the fifteenth
century) and he pointed to the "Wondrous chest". ' '"_There_" said
he 'with a bouncing confident credulity "_There is the very chest
itself_"! ' After which 'ocular demonstration', Boswell remarks, 'there
was no more to be said. ' It was to such men as these that Chatterton
read his 'Rouleie's' poems. Another of his audience was Mr. Barrett, a
surgeon, who collected materials for a history of Bristol, which,
when published after the boy-poet's death, was found to contain
contributions (supplied by Chatterton) in the unmistakable and unique
'Rowleian' language--valuable evidence about old Bristol miraculously
preserved in Rowley's chest.

We hear also of Michael Clayfield, a distiller, one of the very few
men in Bristol whom Chatterton admired and respected; of Baker, the
poet's bedfellow at Colston's, for whom Chatterton wrote love poems,
as Cyrano de Bergerac did for Christian de Neuvillette, to the address
of a certain Miss Hoyland--thin, conventional silly stuff, but Roxane
was probably not very critical; of Catcott's brother, the Rev. A.
Catcott, who had a fine library and was the author of a treatise on
the Deluge; of Smith, a schoolfellow; of Palmer an engraver, and a
number of others--mere names for the most part. Baker, Thistlethwaite
and a few more were contemporaries of the poet, but the rest of the
circle consisted mainly of men who had reached middle age--dullards,
perhaps, who condescended to clever adolescence, whom Chatterton
certainly mocked bitterly enough in satires which he wrote apparently
for his own private satisfaction, but whom he nevertheless took
considerable pains to conciliate as being men of substance who could
lend books and now and then reward the Muse with five shillings.
For Burgum the poet invented, and pretended to derive from numerous
authorities (some of which are wholly imaginary), a magnificent
pedigree showing him descended from a Simon de Seyncte Lyse _alias_
Senliz Earl of Northampton who had come over with the Conqueror. To
this he appended a portion of a poem not included in this edition,
entitled the 'Romaunte of the Cnyghte', composed by John de Bergham
about A. D. 1320.