chest in Redcliffe Church, and that he had lent some or
one of them to Thomas Phillips'--an usher at Colston's, an earnest
and thoughtful man fond of poetry, and a great friend of Chatterton's.
'Within a day or two after this,' (Thistlethwaite wrote to Dean
Milles,) 'I saw Phillips ... who produced a MS. on parchment or vellum
which I am confident was "Elenoure and Juga"[1] a kind of pastoral
eclogue afterwards published in the _Town and Country Magazine_ for
May 1769. The parchment or vellum appeared to have been closely pared
round the margin for what purpose or by what accident I know not ...
The writing was yellow and pale manifestly as I conceive occasioned by
age.'

This was the beginning of the Rowley fiction--which might be
metaphorically described as a motley edifice, half castle and half
cathedral, to which Chatterton all his life was continually adding
columns and buttresses, domes and spires, pediments and minarets,
in the shape of more poems by Thomas Rowley (a secular priest of St.
John's, Bristol); or by his patron the munificent William Canynge
(many times Mayor of the same city); or by Sir Thibbot Gorges, a
knight of ancient family with literary tastes; or by good Bishop
Carpenter (of Worcester) or John a Iscam (a Canon of St. Augustine's
Abbey, also in Bristol); together with plays or portions of
plays which they wrote--a Saxon epic translated--accounts of
Architecture--songs and eclogues--and friendly letters in rhyme or
prose. In short, this clever imaginative lad had evolved before he
was sixteen such a mass of literary and quasi-historical matter of
one kind or another that his fictitious circle of men of taste and
learning (living in the dark and unenlightened age of Lydgate and the
other tedious post-Chaucerians) may with study become extraordinarily
familiar and near to us, and was certainly to Chatterton himself quite
as real and vivid as the dull actualities of Colston's Hospital and
the Bristol of his proper century.

Chatterton's own circle of acquaintance was far less brilliant. His
principal patrons were Henry Burgum and George Catcott, a pair of
pewterers, the former vulgar and uneducated but very ambitious to be
thought a man of good birth and education, the latter a credulous,
selfish and none too scrupulous fellow, a would-be antiquary, of
whom there is the most delightfully absurd description in Boswell's
_Johnson_. The biographer relates that in the year 1776 Johnson and
he were o