him miserable when with a change of mood he lost his buoyancy and
confidence of ultimate fame and success. His ambition was boundless
and his audience was as limited in numbers as in understanding. He
was as proud as the poor Spaniard who on a bitter day rejected the
friendly offer of a cloak with the words 'A gentleman does not feel
the cold,' and his pride was continually fretted. He was keenly
conscious of the indignity of his position in Lambert's kitchen; he
seems to have been pressed for money, and though he 'did not owe five
pounds altogether' he probably smarted under the thought that all
his hard work, all the long nights of study and composition in the
moonlight which helped his thought, could not earn him even this
comparatively small sum. Again, he was not restrained from a
contemplation of suicide by any scruples of religion--for he has left
his views expressed in an article written some few days before his
death. He believed in a daemon or conscience which prompted every
man to follow good and avoid evil; but--different men different
daemons--his held self-slaughter justified when life became
intolerable; with him therefore it would be no crime. Wilson suggests
too that the boy who had read theology, orthodox and the reverse, held
to the common eighteenth century view that death was annihilation; and
this may well have been the case. One thing at any rate is certain,
that Chatterton on the 14th of April 1770 left on his desk a number of
pieces of paper filled with a jumble of satiric verse, mocking prose,
and directions for the construction of a mediæval tomb to cover the
remains of his father and himself. Part of this strange document
was headed in legal form--'This is the last Will and Testament of me
Thomas Chatterton,' and contained the declaration that the Testator
would be dead on the evening of the following day--'being the feast of
the resurrection.' The bundle was dated and endorsed 'All this wrote
between 11 and 2 o'clock Saturday in the utmost distress of mind.' Now