admired) and various other papers; and in December of this year he
wrote to Dodsley, the well-known publisher, acquainting him that
he could 'procure copies of several ancient poems and an interlude,
perhaps the oldest dramatic piece extant, wrote by one Rowley, a
Priest in Bristol, who lived in the reign of Henry the Sixth and
Edward the Fourth * * * If these pieces would be of any service to
Mr. Dodsley copies should be sent.' The publisher returned no answer.
Chatterton waited two months, then wrote again and enclosed a specimen
passage from _Ælla_. He could procure a copy of this work, he wrote,
upon payment of a guinea to the present owner of the MS. Again Mr.
Dodsley lay low and said nothing, and so the incident closed.

Dodsley having failed him, Chatterton next took the bolder step of
writing to Horace Walpole, who must have been much in his mind for
some years before his sending the letter. Some one has made the
ingenious suggestion that a consideration of Walpole's delicate
connoisseurship sensibly coloured Chatterton's account of the life
of Mastre William Canynge. More than this, his delight in the
Mediæval--the Gothic--and his content with what may be termed a
purely impressionistic view of the past, was singularly akin to the
Bristol poet's own outlook on these matters. Walpole had further some
three years before this time indulged in the very harmless literary
fraud of publishing his _Castle of Otranto_ as a translation from a
mediæval Italian MS., only confessing his own authorship upon
the publication of the second edition. To Walpole then Chatterton
addressed a short letter enclosing some verses by John à Iscam and
a manuscript on the _Ryse of Peyncteyning yn Englande wroten by T.
Rowleie 1469 for Mastre Canynge_[5] with the suggestion that it might
be of service to Mr. Walpole 'in any future edition of his truly
entertaining anecdotes of painting.' This drew from the connoisseur