ol Tragedy, or Death of
Sir Charles Baldwin--Chatterton confessed; and such an admission might
have satisfied any one but Dean Milles. The language is modern--the
measure flowing without interruption; and, though the orthography
affects to be antiquated, there is but one word (bataunt) in the whole
series of quatrains, ninety-eight in number, that would embarrass any
reader in his teens; though a boy that could generate such a poem as
that, might well be believed the father of other giants whom he chose to
disown. It is a masterpiece in its kind, almost unexceptionable in all
its parts. The subject is supposed to have been suggested by the fate of
Sir Baldwin Fulford, a zealous Lancastrian, beheaded at Bristol in 1461,
the first year of the reign of Edward IV., who, it is believed, was
actually present at the execution.

Now comes Ella, a tragical interlude, or discoursing tragedy, by Thomas
Rowley, prefaced by two letters to Master Canning, and an introduction.
In the first letter, among various sarcasms on the age, is one,
complaining that

"In holy priest appears the baron's pride."

A proposition, we fear, at least as true in our day as in the fifteenth
century. From the same epistle we would recommend to the consideration
of the Pontius Pilates of our era, the numerous poets who choose none
but awfully perilous themes, and who re-enact tremendous mysteries more
confidently than if they were all Miltons, the annexed judicious
admonition:--

"Plays made from holy tales I hold unmeet;
Let some great story of a man be sung;
When as a man we God and Jesus treat,
In my poor mind we do the Godhead wrong."

And the following piece of advice, from the same letter, would not be
ill bestowed on modern shopocracy:--

"Let kings and rulers, when they gain a throne,
Show what their grandsires and great-grandsires bore;
Let trades' and towns'-folk let such things alone,
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