Southey, Byron, and others have supposed that Chatterton was mad; it
has been suggested that he was the victim of a suicidal mania. All
the evidence that there is goes to show that he was not. He was
very far-sighted, shrewd, hard-working, and practical, for all his
imaginative dreaming of a non-existent past; and this at least may
be said, that Chatterton's suicide was the logical end to a very
remarkably consistent life.

Chatterton's character has suffered a good deal from three accusations
vehemently urged by Maitland and his eighteenth-century predecessors.
The first is that the boy was a 'forger'; the second that he was a
freethinker; the third that he was a free-liver.

To examine these in turn: the first admits of no denial as a question
of fact, but justification may be pleaded which some will accept as a
complete exculpation and others perhaps will hardly comprehend.

Chatterton could only produce poetry in his fifteenth-century vein;
his imagination failed him in modern English. No one who has any
appreciation of Rowley's poems will consider that the _African
Eclogues_ are for a moment comparable with them. If he was to write at
all he must produce antiques, and, as it happened, interest had been
aroused in ancient poetry, largely by the publication of Percy's
_Reliques_ and of the spurious Ossian. Appearing at this juncture,
then, as ancient writings taken from an old chest, his poems would be
read and their value appreciated; while no one would trouble to make
out the professed imitations--not by any means easy reading--of an
attorney's apprentice. Probably if an adequate audience had been
secured in his lifetime, Chatterton would have revealed the secret
when it had served its purpose--just as Walpole confessed to the