to find at once a dupe and a patron, was too clearsighted to be deceived by such evident fictions, and that he could earn a livelihood by his talents, without fabricating old Mss. in order to gain a few shillings from Mess. Barrett and Catcott, he deferred his original plan, and we hear little more of Rowley's verses.
With regard to the time in which the poems attributed to this priest were produced, which it is urged was much too short for Chatterton to have been the inventor of them, it is indeed astonishing that this youth should have been able to compose, in about eighteen months, three thousand seven hundred verses, on various subjects; but it would have been still more astonishing, if he had transcribed in that time the same number of lines, written on parchment, in a very ancient hand, in the close and indistinct manner, in which these poems are pretended to have been written, and defaced and obliterated in many places[1]:—unless he had been endued with the faculty of a celebrated solicitor, who being desired a few years
- ↑ Let those who may be surprised at this assertion, recollect the wonderful inventive faculties of Chatterton, and the various compositions, both in prose and verse, which he produced after his arrival in London, in the short space of four months; not to mention the numerous pieces, which he is known to have written in the same period, and which have not yet been collected—Let them likewise examine any one of the defaced Mss. of the fifteenth century, in the Cotton Library, and see in what time they can transcribe a dozen lines from it.
