Of Chatterton's mother little need be said. Gentle and rather foolish,
she was devoted to her two children Mary and, his sister's junior by
two years, Thomas the Poet. Of these Mary seems to have inherited the
colourless character of her mother; but Thomas must always have been
remarkable. We have the fullest accounts of his childhood, and the
details that might with another be set down as chronicles of the
nursery will be seen to have their importance in the case of this boy
who set himself consciously to be famous when he was eight, wrote
fine imaginative verse before he was thirteen, and killed himself aged
seventeen and nine months.

Thomas, then, was a moody baby, a dull small boy who knew few of his
letters at four; and was superannuated--such was his impenetrability
to learning--at the age of five from the school of which his father
had been master. He was moreover till the age of six and a half so
frequently subject to long fits of abstraction and of apparently
causeless crying that his mother and grandmother feared for his
reason and thought him 'an absolute fool.' We are told also by his
sister--and there is no incongruity in the two accounts--that he
early displayed a taste for 'preheminence and would preside over his
playmates as their master and they his hired servants.' At seven and
a half he dissipated his mother's fear that she had borne a fool
by rapidly learning to read in a great black-letter Bible; for
characteristically 'he objected to read in a small book.' In a very
short time from this he appears to have devoured eagerly the contents
of every volume he could lay his hands on. He had a thirst for
knowledge at large--for any kind of information, and as the merest
child read with a careless voracity books of heraldry, history,
astronomy, theology, and such other subjects as would repel most
children, and perhaps one may say, most men. At the age of eight