The Rowley Poems by Thomas Chatterton
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page 12 of 413 (02%)
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of which last he appears in an unguarded moment to have acknowledged
to his mother). He told her also that he had himself written one of the two poems _Onn oure Ladies Chyrche_--which one, Mrs. Chatterton could not remember[4], but if it was the first of the two printed in this edition (p. 275) it was a strange coincidence indeed that led him to repudiate the antiquity of the only two Rowley poems which are really at all like 'antiques'--Professor Skeat's convenient expression. The two Battles of Hastings were written during this period, and it appears that Barrett the surgeon, on being shown the first poem, was for once very insistent in asking for the original, whereupon Chatterton in a momentary panic confessed he had written the verses for a friend; but he had at home, he said, the copy of what was really the translation of Turgot's Epic--Turgot was a Saxon monk of the tenth century--by Rowley the secular priest of the fifteenth. This was the second _Battle of Hastings_ as printed in this book. Again this strange explanation, so laboured and so patently disingenuous, was accepted without comment though probably not believed. And if it appears matter for surprise that there should ever have been any controversy about the authorship of the Rowley writings, in view of the lad's admission that he had written three such signal pieces as the _Bristowe Tragedy_, the first _Battle of Hastings_, and _Onn oure Ladies Chyrche_, it must be considered that the production of the greater part of the poems by a poorly educated boy not turned seventeen would naturally appear a circumstance more surprising than that such a boy should tell a lie and claim some of them as his own. With his acknowledged work, as with Rowley, Chatterton by dint of continued application was making good progress. In 1769 he had become a frequent contributor to the _Town and Country Magazine_, to which he sent articles on heraldry, imitations of Ossian (whom he very much |
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