Indeed! I suppose five or six different modes of expressing the latter thought will occur to every reader.
Can it be believed, that every one of the lines I have now quoted, this gentleman maintains to have been written by a poet of the fifteenth century (for all that Chatterton ever did, according to his system, was supplying lacunæ, if there were any in the Mss., or modernizing a few antiquated phrases)? He argues indeed very rightly, that the whole of these poems must have been written by one person. “Two poets, (he observes, p. 81,) so distant in their æra [as Rowley and Chatterton], so different from each other in their age and disposition, could not have united their labours [he means, their labours could not unite or coalesce] in the same poem to any effect, without such apparent difference in their style, language, and sentiments, as would have defeated Chatterton’s intent of imposing his works on the public, as the original and entire composition of Rowley.”—Most readers, I suppose, will more readily agree with his premises than his conclusion. Every part of these poems was undoubtedly [writtten] by one person; but that person was not Rowley, but Chatterton.
What reason have we to doubt, that he who imitated all the English poets with whom he was acquainted, likewise borrowed his Homerick images from the versions of Chapman and Pope; in the latter of which he found these allusions dressed out in all the splendid ornaments of the eighteenth century?
[In the new commentary], indeed, on the Battle of Hastings, we are told again and again, that many of the similies which the poet has copied from Homer, contain circumstances that are found in the Greek, but omitted in Mr. Pope’s translation. “Here therefore we have a certain proof that the authour of these poems could read Homer in the original[C*].” But the youngest gownsman at Oxford or Cambridge will inform the reverend critick, that this is a non sequitur; for the poet might have had the assistance of other translations, besides those of Pope; the English prose version from that of Madame Dacier, the translations by Chapman and by Hobbes. Nor yet will it follow from his having occasionally consulted these versions, that he was not at all indebted to Pope; as this gentleman endeavours to persuade us in p. 82. and 106. He availed himself, without doubt, of them all. Whenever the Commentator can show a single thought in these imitations of the Grecian Bard, that is found in the original, and not in any of those translations, I will readily acknowledge that the Battle of Hastings, and all the other pieces contained in his quarto volume, were written by Rowley, or Turgot, or Alfred the Great, or Merlin, or whatever other existent or non-existent ancient he or Mr. Bryant shall choose to ascribe them to. Most assuredly no such instance can be pointed out.
[ C* ] To show how very weak and inconclusive the arguments of Chatterton’s new Editor are on this head, I shall cite but one passage, from which the reader may form a judgment of all the other illustrations with which he has decorated the Battle of Hastings:
——“Siere de Broque an arrowe longe lett flie,
Intending Herewaldus to have sleyne;
It miss’d, but hytte Edardus on the eye,
And at his pole came out with horrid payne.”
So Homer (says the Commentator):