actised on the public credulity.
Whom did he deceive? Nobody but those who well deserved to be deceived,
viz., shallow antiquaries, who pretended to a sort of knowledge which
they had not so much as tasted. And it always struck me as a judicial
infatuation in Horace Walpole, that he, who had so brutally pronounced
the death of this marvellous boy to be a matter of little consequence,
since otherwise he would have come to be hanged for forgery, should
himself, not as a boy under eighteen (and I think under seventeen at the
first issuing of the Rowley fraud), slaving for a few guineas that he
might procure the simplest food for himself, and then buy presents for
the dear mother and sister whom he had left in Bristol, but as an
elderly man, with a clear six thousand per annum,[18] commit a far more
deliberate and audacious forgery than that imputed (if even accurately
imputed) to Chatterton. I know of no published document, or none
published under Chatterton's sanction, in which he formally _declared_
the Rowley poems to have been the compositions of a priest living in
the days of Henry IV., viz., in or about the year 1400. Undoubtedly he
suffered people to understand that he had found MSS. of that period in
the tower of St. Mary Redcliff at Bristol, which he really _had_ done;
and whether he simply tolerated them in running off with the idea that
these particular poems, written on _discoloured_ parchments by way of
colouring the hoax, were amongst the St. Mary treasures, or positively
_said so_, in either view, considering the circumstances of the case, no
man of kind feelings will much condemn him.

But Horace Walpole roundly and audaciously affirmed in the first
sentence of his preface to the poor romance of 'Otranto,' that it had
been translated from the Italian of Onuphrio Muralto, and that the MS.
was still preserved in the library of an English Catholic family;
circumstantiating his needless falsehood by other most superfluous
details. _Needless_, I say, because a book with the Walpole name on the
title-page was as sure of selling as one with Chatterton's obscure name
was at that time sure of _not_ selling. Possibly Horace Walpole did not
care about selling, but wished to measure his own intrinsic power as a
novelist, for which purpose it was a better course to preserve his
_incognito_. But this he might have preserved without telling a
circumstantial falsehood. Whereas Chatterton knew that his only chance
of emergi