iff's.
The Rowley poems included two tragedies, _Aella_ and _Goddwyn_, two
cantos of a long poem on the _Battle of Hastings_, and a number of
ballads and minor pieces. Chatterton had no precise knowledge of early
English, or even of Chaucer. His method of working was as follows: He
made himself a manuscript glossary of the words marked as archaic in
Bailey's and Kersey's English dictionaries, composed his poems first in
modern language, and then turned them into ancient spelling, and
substituted here and there the old words in his glossary for their
modern equivalents. Naturally he made many mistakes, and though Horace
Walpole, to whom he sent some of his pieces, was unable to detect the
forgery, his friends, Gray and Mason, to whom he submitted them, at
once pronounced them {198} spurious. Nevertheless there was a
controversy over Rowley, hardly less obstinate than that over Ossian, a
controversy made possible only by the then almost universal ignorance
of the forms, scansion, and vocabulary of early English poetry.
Chatterton's poems are of little value in themselves, but they are the
record of an industry and imitative quickness, marvelous in a mere
child, and they show how, with the instinct of genius, he threw himself
into the main literary current of his time. Discarding the couplet of
Pope, the poets now went back for models to the Elisabethan writers.
Thomas Warton published, in 1753, his _Observations on the Faerie
Queene_. Beattie's _Minstrel_, Thomson's _Castle of Indolence_,
William Shenstone's _Schoolmistress_, and John Dyer's _Fleece_, were
all written in the Spenserian stanza. Shenstone gave a partly humorous
effect to his poem by imitating Spenser's archaisms, and Thomson
reproduced in many passages the copious harmony and luxuriant imagery
of the _Faerie Queene_. The _Fleece_ was a poem on English
wool-growing, after the fashion of Vergil's _Georgics_. The subject
was unfortunate, for, as Dr. Johnson said, it is impossible to make
poetry out of serges and druggets. Dyer's _Grongar Hill_, which
mingles reflection with natural description in the manner of Gray's
_Elegy written in a Country Churchyard_, was composed in the
octosyllabic verse of Milton's _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_.
Milton's minor poems, which had hitherto been neglected, {199}
exercised a great influence on Collins and Gray. Collins's _Ode to
Simplicity_ was written in the stanza of Milton's _Nativity_, and his
exquisite unri