loak with the words 'A gentleman does not feel
the cold,' and his pride was continually fretted. He was keenly
conscious of the indignity of his position in Lambert's kitchen; he
seems to have been pressed for money, and though he 'did not owe five
pounds altogether' he probably smarted under the thought that all
his hard work, all the long nights of study and composition in the
moonlight which helped his thought, could not earn him even this
comparatively small sum. Again, he was not restrained from a
contemplation of suicide by any scruples of religion--for he has left
his views expressed in an article written some few days before his
death. He believed in a daemon or conscience which prompted every
man to follow good and avoid evil; but--different men different
daemons--his held self-slaughter justified when life became
intolerable; with him therefore it would be no crime. Wilson suggests
too that the boy who had read theology, orthodox and the reverse, held
to the common eighteenth century view that death was annihilation; and
this may well have been the case. One thing at any rate is certain,
that Chatterton on the 14th of April 1770 left on his desk a number of
pieces of paper filled with a jumble of satiric verse, mocking prose,
and directions for the construction of a mediaeval tomb to cover the
remains of his father and himself. Part of this strange document
was headed in legal form--'This is the last Will and Testament of me
Thomas Chatterton,' and contained the declaration that the Testator
would be dead on the evening of the following day--'being the feast of
the resurrection.' The bundle was dated and endorsed 'All this wrote
between 11 and 2 o'clock Saturday in the utmost distress of mind.' Now
while one need not doubt that the distress was perfectly genuine, it
is tolerably certain that Chatterton intended his master to find what
he had written and draw his own conclusions as to the desirability of
dismissing his apprentice. The attorney (who is represented as timid,
irritable and narrow-minded)[9] did in fact find the document, was
thoroughly frightened, and gave the boy his release. He was now free
to starve or earn a living by his pen--so no doubt he represented
the alternative to his mother. He must go to London, where he would
certainly make his fortune. He had been supplying four or five London
journals of good standing with free contributions for some time past,
and had received it appears great enc