ng from the obscure station of a grave-digger's son, and
carrying into comfort the dear female relatives that had half-starved
themselves for _him_ (I speak of things which have since come to my
knowledge thirty-five years after Chatterton and his woes had been
buried in a pauper's coffin), lay in bribing public attention by some
_extrinsic_ attraction. Macpherson had recently engaged the public gaze
by his 'Ossian'--an abortion fathered upon the fourth century after
Christ. What so natural as to attempt other abortions--ideas and
refinements of the eighteenth century--referring themselves to the
fifteenth? Had this harmless hoax succeeded, he would have delivered
those from poverty who delivered _him_ from ignorance; he would have
raised those from the dust who raised _him_ to an aerial height--yes, to
a height from which (but it was after his death), like _Ate_ or _Eris_,
come to cause another Trojan war, he threw down an apple of discord
amongst the leading scholars of England, and seemed to say: 'There, Dean
of Exeter! there, Laureate! there, Tyrwhitt, my man! Me you have
murdered amongst you. Now fight to death for the boy that living you
would not have hired as a shoeblack. My blood be upon you!' Rise up,
martyred blood! rise to heaven for a testimony against these men and
this generation, or else burrow in the earth, and from that spring up
like the stones thrown by Deucalion and Pyrrha into harvests of feud,
into armies of self-exterminating foes. Poor child! immortal child!
Slight were thy trespasses on this earth, heavy was thy punishment, and
it is to be hoped, nay, it is certain, that this disproportion did not
escape the eye which, in the algebra of human actions, estimates _both_
sides of the equation.

Lord Byron was of opinion that people abused Horace Walpole for several
sinister reasons, of which the first is represented to be that he was a
gentleman. Now, I, on the contrary, am of opinion that he was _not_
always a gentleman, as particularly seen in his correspondence with
Chatterton. On the other hand, it is but just to recollect that in
retaining Chatterton's MSS. (otherwise an unfeeling act, yet chiefly
imputable to indolence), the worst aggravation of the case under the
poor boy's construction, viz., that if Walpole had not known his low
rank 'he would not have dared to treat him in that way,' though a very
natural feeling, was really an unfounded one. Horace Walpole (I call him
so, because he was