In aid of his plans, Chatterton first addressed himself to Dodsley, the Pall Mall bookseller, once with smaller poems, and afterwards on behalf of the greatest production of his genius—the tragedy of "Ella;" but the booksellers of those days were not more intellectual than those at the present: they devoured the small forgery of the great Horace Walpole, "The Castle of Otranto," and rejected the magnificence of a nameless composition. This man's neglect drove the young poet to the "Autocrat of Strawberry Hill." In reply he at first received a polished letter. The literary trifler was not aware of the poverty and low station of his correspondent, and so was courteous; he is "grateful" and "singularly obliged;" bowing, and perfumed, and polite. Other communications followed. Walpole inquired—discovered the poet's situation; and then he changed! The poor fond boy! how hard and bitter was the rebuff. How little had he imagined that the Walpole's soul was not, by five shillings, as large as the Bristol pewterer's!—that he who was an adept at literary imposition could have been so harsh to a fellow-sinner! The volume of his works containing "Miscellanies of Chatterton" is now before us. Hear to his indignant honesty! He declares that "all the house of forgery are relations; and that though it be but just to Chatterton's memory to say his poverty never made him claim kindred with the richest, or more enriching branches, yet that his ingenuity in counterfeiting styles, and I believe hands, might easily have led him to those more facile imitations of prose—promissory notes." The literal meaning of this paragraph stamps the littleness of the man's mind. A slight—a very slight effort on his part might have turned the current of the boy's thoughts, and saved him from misery and death. We do not call Chatterton "his victim," because we do not think him so; but he, or any one in his position, might have turned him from the love of an unworthy notoriety to the pursuit of a laudable ambition. Following in the world's track (which he was ever careful not to outstep), when the boy was dead, Walpole bore eloquent testimony to his genius. The words of praise he gives his memory are like golden grains amid the chaffy verbiage with which he defends himself. If he perceived this at first, why not have come forward hand and heart, and shouted him on to honest fortune? But, like all clique kings, he made no general cause with literature; he only smiled on his individual worshippers, who could applaud when he said, with cruel playfulness, "that singing birds should not be too well fed!"
His master, Lambert, dismissed the youth from his service, because he had reason to suppose he meditated self-destruction; and then he proceeded to London. How buoyant and full of hope he was during his probationary days there, his letters to his mother and sister testify; his gifts, also, extracted from his necessities, are evidences of the bent of his mind—fans and china—luxuries rather than necessaries; but in this, it must be remembered, his judgment was in fault, not his affections. In all things he was swayed and guided by his pride,—his indomitable pride. The period, brief as it was, of his sojourn in the great metropolis proved that Walpole, while he neglected him so cruelly, understood him perfectly, when he said that "nothing in Chatterton could be separated from Chatterton—that all he did was the effervescence of ungovernable impulse, which, chameleon-like, imbibed the colours of all it looked on it was Ossian, or a Saxon monk, or Gray, or Smollett, or Junius." His first letter to his mother is dated, April the 26th, 1770. He terminated his own existence on the 24th of August in the same year. He battled with the crowded world of London, and, what was in his case a more dire enemy than the world, his overwhelming pride, for nearly four months. Alas! how terrible are the reflections which these few weeks suggest! Now borne aloft upon the billows of hope, sparkling in the fitful brightness of a feverish sun, and then plunged into the slough of despair, his proud, dark soul disclaiming all human participation in a misery exaggerated by his own unbending pride. Let us not talk of denying sympathy to persons who create their own miseries; they endure agonies thrice told. The paltry remuneration he received for his productions is recorded by himself. Among the items is one as extraordinary as the indignant emotion it excites:—
Received from Mr. Hamilton, for 16 songs, 10s. 6d.
Of Mr. Hamilton, for "Candidus" and Foreign Journal 2s.!!
We are wearied for him of the world's dark sight: yet in the same book is recorded that the same publisher owed him £10 19s. 6d.! This sum might have saved him, but he was too proud to ask for money; too proud to complain; too proud to accept the invitation of his acquaintances, or his landlady, to dine or sup with them; and all too proud to hint, even to his mother and sister, that he was any thing but prosperous. Ardent as if he had been a son of the hot south, he had learned nothing of patience or expediency. His first residence was at Mrs. Walmsley's, in Shoreditch, but, doubtless, finding the lodging too expensive, he removed to a Mr. Angell's, sac (or dress) maker, 4, Brook Street, Holborn. This woman, who seems to have been of a gentle nature, finding that for two days he had confined himself to his room, and gone without sustenance, invited him to dine with her; but he was offended, and assured her he was not hungry. It is quite impossible to account for this uncalled for pride. It was his nature. Lord Byron said he was mad: according to his view of the case, all eccentricity is madness; but in the case of unhappy Chatterton, that madness which arises from "hope deferred," was unquestionably endured. Three days before his death, pursuing, with a friend, the melancholy and speculative employment of reading epitaphs in the churchyard of St. Pancras, absorbed by his own reflections, he fell into a new-made grave. There was something akin to the raven's croak, the death-fetch, the fading spectre, in this foreboding accident: he smiled at it, and told his friend he felt the sting of speedy dissolution:—
"Then black despair,
The shadow of a starless night, was thrown
Over the earth on which he moved alone."
At the age of seventeen years and nine months, his career ended; it was shown that he had swallowed arsenic in water, and so—
"perished in his pride!"
An inquest was held, and yet though Englishmen—men who could read and write, and hear—who must have heard of the boy's talents, either as a poet, a satirist, or a political writer—though these men were guided by a coroner, one, of course, in a more elevated sphere than those who usually determine the intentions of the departed soul—yet was there not one—not one of them all—with sufficient veneration for the casket which had contained the diamond—not one with enough of sympathy for the widow's son—to wrap his body in a decent shroud, and kneel in Christian piety by his grave!—not one to pause and think that, between genius and madness,
"What thin partitions do their bounds divide!"
In a letter from Southey to Mr. Britton (dated in 1810, to which we have already referred, and which Mr. Britton kindly submitted to us with various other correspondence on the subject), he says, "there can now be no impropriety in mentioning what could not be said when the collected edition of Chatterton's works was published,—that there was a taint of insanity in his family. His sister was once confined; and this is a key to the eccentricities of his life, and the deplorable rashness of his death." Of this unhappy predisposition, indeed, he seems to have been himself conscious, for "in his last will and testament," written in April, 1770, before he quitted Bristol, when he seems to have meditated suicide—although, from the mock-heroic style of the document his serious design may be questioned,—he writes, "If I do a mad action, it is conformable to every action of my life, which all savored of insanity." His "sudden fits of weeping, for which no reason could be assigned," when a mere child, were but the preludes to those gloomy forebodings which haunted him when a boy. His mother had said, "she was often apprehensive of his going mad."