performing prodigies of valor upon the Normans.
The image of mediaeval life which he succeeded in creating was, of
course, a poor, faint _simulacrum_, compared with Scott's. He lacked
knowledge, leisure, friends, long life--everything that was needed to
give his work solidity. All that he had was a creative, though
undisciplined imagination, together with an astonishing industry,
persistence, and secretiveness. Yet with all his disadvantages, his
work, with all its imperfections, is far more striking than the imitative
verse of the Wartons, or the thin, diffused medievalism of Walpole and
Clara Reeve. It is the product of a more original mind and a more
intense conception.

In the muniment room over the north porch of St. Mary Redcliffe's were
several old chests filled with parchments: architectural memoranda,
church-wardens' accounts, inventories of vestments, and similar parish
documents. One of these chests, known as Master Canynge's coffer, had
been broken open some years before, and whatever was of value among its
contents removed to a place of safety. The remainder of the parchments
had been left scattered about, and Chatterton's father had carried a
number of them home and used them to cover copy-books. The boy's eye was
attracted by these yellow sheep-skins, with their antique script; he
appropriated them and kept them locked up in his room.

How early he conceived the idea of making this treasure-trove responsible
for the Rowley myth, which was beginning to take shape in his mind, is
uncertain. According to the testimony of a schoolfellow, by name
Thistlethwaite, Chatterton told him in the summer of 1764 that he had a
number of old manuscripts, found in a chest in Redcliffe Church, and that
he had lent one of them to Thomas Philips, an usher in Colston's
Hospital. Thistlethwaite says that Philips showed him this manuscript, a
piece of vellum pared close around the edge, on which was traced in pale
and yellow writing, as if faded with age, a poem which he thinks
identical with "Elinoure and Juga," afterward published by Chatterton in
the _Town and Country Magazine_ for May, 1769. One is inclined to
distrust this evidence. "The Castle of Otranto" was first published in
December, 1764, and the "Reliques," only in the year following. The
latter was certainly known to Chatterton; many of the Rowley poems, "The
Bristowe Tragedie," _e.g._, and the ministrel songs in "Aella," show
ballad influence[6]; whi