memory traces back the round
Which fills the varied interval between;
Much pleasure, more of sorrow, marks the scene.--
Sweet native stream! those skies and suns so pure
No more return, to cheer my evening road!
Yet still one joy remains, that not obscure
Nor useless, all my vacant days have flow'd
From youth's gay dawn to manhood's prime mature,
Nor with the Muse's laurel unbestow'd."

I have thus gone through all the names of this period I could think
of, but I find that there are others still waiting behind that I had
never thought of. Here is a list of some of them--Pattison, Tickell,
Hill, Somerville, Browne, Pitt, Wilkie, Dodsley, Shaw, Smart, Langhorne,
Bruce, Greame, Glover, Lovibond, Penrose, Mickle, Jago, Scott,
Whitehead, Jenyns, Logan, Cotton, Cunningham, and Blacklock.--I think
it will be best to let them pass and say nothing about them. It will be
hard to persuade so many respectable persons that they are dull writers,
and if we give them any praise, they will send others.

But here comes one whose claims cannot be so easily set aside: they
have been sanctioned by learning, hailed by genius, and hallowed by
misfortune--I mean Chatterton. Yet I must say what I think of him, and
that is not what is generally thought. I pass over the disputes between
the learned antiquaries, Dr. Mills, Herbert Croft, and Dr. Knox, whether
he was to be placed after Shakspeare and Dryden, or to come after
Shakspeare alone. A living poet has borne a better testimony to him--

"I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous boy,
The sleepless soul that perished in his pride;
And him [8] who walked in glory and in joy
Beside his plough along the mountain side."

I am loth to put asunder whom so great an authority has joined together;
but I cannot find in Chatterton's works any thing so extraordinary as
the age at which they were written. They have a facility, vigour, and
knowledge, which were prodigious in a boy of sixteen, but which would
not have been so in a man of twenty. He did not shew extraordinary
powers of genius, but extraordinary precocity. Nor do I believe he would
have written better, had he lived. He knew this himself, or he would
have lived. Great geniuses, like great kings, have too much to think of
to kill themselves; for their mind to them also "a kingdom is." With an
unaccountable power coming over him at an unusual age, and w