In an account of "St. Marie Magdalene's Chapele, by Thomas Rowley," deposited also in the British Museum, there is the following sentence, which implies much: "Aelle, the founder thereof, was a manne myckle stronge yn vanquysheynge the Danes, as yee maie see ynne mie unwordie Entyrlude of Ella!"
It is Rome or Carthage. It is Rowley or Chatterton: and a hope is cherished that the public, from this moment, will concur in averring that there is neither internal nor external evidence, to authorize the belief that a single line of either the prose or the verse, attributed to Rowley, or the rest of his apocryphal characters, was written by any other than that prodigy of the eighteenth century, Thomas Chatterton.
The opinion entertained by many, that Chatterton found part of Rowley, and invented the rest, is attended with insurmountable objections, and is never advanced but in the deficiency of better argument; for in the first place, those who favor this supposition, have never supported it by the shadow of proof, or the semblance even of fair inferential reasoning; and in the second place, he who wrote half, could have written the whole; and in the third, and principal place, there are no inequalities in the poems; no dissimilar and incongruous parts, but all is regular and consistent, and without, in the strict sense of the word, bearing any resemblance to the writers of the period when Rowley is stated to have lived.
Whoever examines the beautiful tragedy of Ella, will find an accurate adjustment of plan, which precludes the possibility of its having been conjointly written by different persons, at the distance of centuries. With respect, also, to the structure of the language, it is incontrovertibly modern, as well as uniform with itself, and exhibits the most perfect specimens of harmony; which cannot be interrupted by slight orthographical redundancies, nor by the sprinkling of a few uncouth and antiquated words.
The structure of Rowley's verse is so unequivocally modern, that by substituting the present orthography for the past, and changing two or three of the old words, the fact must become obvious, even to those who are wholly unacquainted with the barbarisms of the "olden time." As a corroboration of this remark, the first verse of the song to Aella may be adduced.
"O thou, or what remains of thee,
Aella, thou darling of futurity.
Let this, my song, bold as thy courage be,
As everlasting—to posterity."
But, perhaps, the most convincing proof of this modern character of
Rowley's verse, may be derived from the commencement of the chorus in
Godwin.
"When Freedom, dress'd in blood-stain'd vest,
To every knight her war-song sung,
Upon her head wild weeds were spread,
A gory anlace by her hung.
She danced on the heath;
She heard the voice of death;
Pale-eyed Affright, his heart of silver hue,
In vain essay'd his bosom to acale, [freeze]
She heard, enflamed, the shivering voice of woe,
And sadness in the owlet shake the dale.
She shook the pointed spear;
On high she raised her shield;
Her foemen all appear,
And fly along the field.
Power, with his head exalted to the skies,
His spear a sun-beam, and his shield a star,
Round, like two flaming meteors, rolls his eyes,
Stamps with his iron foot, and sounds to war:
She sits upon a rock,
She bends before his spear;
She rises from the shock,
Wielding her own in air.
Hard as the thunder doth she drive it on,
And, closely mantled, guides it to his crown,
His long sharp spear, his spreading shield, is gone;
He falls, and falling, rolleth thousands down."
Every reader must be struck with the modern character of these extracts, nor can he fail to have noticed the lyrical measure, so eminently felicitous, with which the preceding ode commences; together with the bold image of freedom triumphing over power. If the merits of the Rowleian Controversy rented solely on this one piece, it would be decisive; for no man, in the least degree familiar with our earlier metrical compositions, and especially if he were a poet, could hesitate a moment in assigning this chorus to a recent period.