With respect to the stanza that Chatterton has employed in his two poems on the Battle of Hastings, Mr. Bryant and the Dean of Exeter seem to think that they stand on sure ground, and confidently quote Gascoigne, to prove that such a stanza was known to our old English poets. “The greatest part of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (says the latter gentleman, p. 30), and his Legend of Good Women, are in the decasyllabick couplet; but in general Lidgate’s, Occleve’s, Rowley’s, Spenser’s, and a great part of Chaucer’s poetry, is written in stanzas of seven, eight, or nine decasyllabick lines; to which Rowley generally adds a tenth, and closes it with an Alexandrine. All these may be ranked under the title of Rithme Royal; of which Gascoigne, in his Instructions for English verse, has given the following description: “Rithme Royal is a verse of ten syllables, and seven such verses make a staffe, whereof the first and third do answer acrosse in the terminations and rime; the second, fourth, and fifth, do likewise answer eche other in terminations; and the two last combine and shut up the sentence: this hath been called Rithme Royal, and surely it is a royal kind of verse, serving best for grave discourses.” I leave it to the reverend Antiquarian to reconcile the contradictory assertions with which the passage I have now quoted sets out; and shall only observe, that we have here a great parade of authority, but nothing like a proof of the existence of such a stanza as Chatterton has used, in the time of K. Edward IV.; and at last the Commentator is obliged to have recourse to this flimzy kind of reasoning: “The different number of lines contained in the stanza makes no material alteration in the structure of this verse, the stanza always concluding with a couplet: in that of six lines, the four first rime alternately; in that of nine, wherein Spenser has composed his Fairy Queen, the sixth line rimes to the final couplet, and the seventh to the fifth: Rowley having added another line to the stanza, the eighth rimes with the sixth.”—The upshot of the whole is, that Rowley himself, or rather Chatterton, is at last the only authority to show that such a stanza was employed at the time mentioned. And it is just with this kind of circular proof that we are amused, when any very singular fact is mentioned in Chatterton’s verses: “This fact, say the learned Commentators, is also minutely described by Rowley in the Yellow Roll, which wonderfully confirms the authenticity of these poems;” i.e. one forgery of Chatterton in prose, wonderfully supports and authenticates another forgery of his in rhyme.—To prevent the Dean from giving himself any farther trouble in searching for authorities to prove that the stanza of the Battle of Hastings (consisting of two quatrains rhyming alternately, and a couplet,) was known to our early writers, I beg leave to inform him, that it was not used till near three centuries after the time of the supposed Rowley; having been, if I remember right, first employed by Prior, who considered it as an improvement on that of Spenser.
II. The second point that I proposed to consider is, the imitations of Pope’s Homer, Shakspeare, Dryden, Rowe, &c. with which these pieces abound. And here the cautious conduct of Chatterton’s new commentator is very remarkable. All the similies that poor Chatterton borrowed from Pope’s or Chapman’s Homer, to embellish his Battle of Hastings, are exhibited boldly; but then “they were all clearly copied from the original of the Grecian Bard,” in whom we are taught, that Rowley was better read than any other man, during the preceding or subsequent century: but in the tragedy of Ella, and other pieces, where we in almost every page meet with lines and half-lines of Shakspeare, Dryden, &c. the reverend Antiquarian is less liberal of his illustrations. Indeed when the fraud is so manifest as not to be concealed, the passage is produced. Thus in Ella we meet
“Gone to her death-bed,
“All under the willow tree——”
and here we are told, “the burthen of this roundelay very much resembles that in Hamlet:”
“And will he not come again?
“And will he not come again?
“No, no, he is dead;
“Go to thy death-bed,