Nor fight for sable on a field of ore."
Yet he who could give this sensible counsel did by no means follow it. Chatterton, who really could trace back his ancestors for 150 years as a family of gravediggers, drew out for himself a pedigree which would have astonished Garter king-at-arms, and almost abashed a Welsh or German genealogy. He derived his descent from Sire de Chasteautonne, of the house of Rollo, the first Duke of Normandy, who made an incursion on the coast of Britain in the ninth century, and was driven away by Alfred the Great! Nine shields, exhibiting the family arms, were carefully prepared by him, and are preserved, with many other and very various inventions by the same hand, in the British Museum; and neat engravings of those Chatterton escutcheons are furnished by Mr Cottle, in his excellent essays on this tortuous genius. He was equally liberal in providing a pedigree for his friend Mr Burgham, a worthy and credulous pewterer in his native town, convincing him, by proofs that were not conclusive at the Herald's College, that he was descended from the De Burghams, who possessed the estate and manor of Brougham in the reign of Edward the Confessor, and so allying the delighted hearer with the forefathers of an illustrious Ex-Chancellor of our day. No less a personage, too, than Fitz-Stephen, son of Stephen Earl of Ammerle in 1095, grandson of Od, Earl of Bloys and Lord of Holderness, was the progenitor gravely assigned to Chatterton's relative, Mr Stephens, leather-breeches-maker of Salisbury. Evidence of all sorts was ever ready among the treasures in the Redcliff muniment room, the Blue-Coat boy's "Open Sesame!"
The plot of Ella may be told in a few words. Ella, a renowned English warrior, the same who is invoked in the fine song already quoted, marries Bertha, of whom his friend and fellow warrior, Celmond, is secretly enamoured. On the wedding-day he is called suddenly away to oppose a Danish force, which he defeats, but not without receiving wounds severe enough to prevent his immediate return home. Celmond takes advantage of this circumstance, and under pretence of conducting Bertha to her husband, betrays her into a forest that chances to be the covert of Hurra, the Danish general, and other of the discomfited invaders. Her shrieks bring Hurra and his companions to her aid. They kill Celmond, and generously resolve to restore Bertha to her lord. He in the mean time, impatient to rejoin his bride, has contrived to get home, where, when he hears of her ill-explained departure, believing her false, he stabs himself. She arrives only in time to see him die.
Celmond, soliloquizing on the charms of Bertha, exclaims,—
"Ah, Bertha, why did nature frame thee fair?
Why art thou not as coarse as others are?
But then thy soul would through thy visage shine;
Like nut-brown cloud when by the sun made red,
So would thy spirit on thy visage spread."
At the wedding-feast, so unexpectedly interrupted by news of the Danes, the following pretty stanzas are sung by minstrels representing a young man and woman.