practical, for all his
imaginative dreaming of a non-existent past; and this at least may
be said, that Chatterton's suicide was the logical end to a very
remarkably consistent life.

Chatterton's character has suffered a good deal from three accusations
vehemently urged by Maitland and his eighteenth-century predecessors.
The first is that the boy was a 'forger'; the second that he was a
freethinker; the third that he was a free-liver.

To examine these in turn: the first admits of no denial as a question
of fact, but justification may be pleaded which some will accept as a
complete exculpation and others perhaps will hardly comprehend.

Chatterton could only produce poetry in his fifteenth-century vein;
his imagination failed him in modern English. No one who has any
appreciation of Rowley's poems will consider that the _African
Eclogues_ are for a moment comparable with them. If he was to write at
all he must produce antiques, and, as it happened, interest had been
aroused in ancient poetry, largely by the publication of Percy's
_Reliques_ and of the spurious Ossian. Appearing at this juncture,
then, as ancient writings taken from an old chest, his poems would be
read and their value appreciated; while no one would trouble to make
out the professed imitations--not by any means easy reading--of an
attorney's apprentice. Probably if an adequate audience had been
secured in his lifetime, Chatterton would have revealed the secret
when it had served its purpose--just as Walpole confessed to the
authorship of _Otranto_ only when that book had run into a second
edition.

To the second count of the indictment no defence is urged. Chatterton
was too honest and too intelligent to accept traditional dogmatics
without examination.

Finally, he was no free-liver in the sense in which that objectionable
expression is used. Rather he was an ascetic who studied and wrote
poetry half through the night, who ate as little as he slept, and
would make his dinner off 'a tart and a glass of water.' He was
devoted to his mother and sister and to his poetry; and what spare
time was not occupied with the latter he seems to have spent largely
with the former. The attempt to represent him as a sort of
provincial Don Juan--though in the precocious licence of a few of his
acknowledged writings he has even given it some colour himself--cannot
be reconciled with the recorded facts of his life.

Equally ill judged is that picture which is pr