continually pointing out with kindly reluctance that such and such
a word never bore the meaning ascribed to it--that because, for
instance, Bailey had explained _Teres major_ as a smooth muscle of the
arm it was not therefore any legitimate inference of Chatterton's
that _tere_ (singular form) meant a muscle and could be translated
'health'. Only occasionally does one find the note (written with an
obviously sincere pleasure) 'This word is correctly used.' Of
course it was impossible that Chatterton should have produced even a
colourable imitation of fifteenth-century poetry at a time when
even Malone--for all his acknowledged reputation as an English
Scholar--could not quote Chaucer so as to make his lines scan. The
_Rowley Poems_ and Percy's _Reliques_ mark the beginning of that
renascence of our older poetry so conspicuous in the time of Lamb
and Hazlitt. Before this epoch was the Augustan age, much too
well satisfied with its own literature to concern itself with an
unfashionable past.

But, after all, however absurd from any historical point of view the
language and metres of the boy-poet may be, at least he invented a
practicable language which admirably conveyed his impression of the
latest period of the middle ages--that after-glow which began with
the death of Chaucer. Chatterton's poetry is a pageant staged by an
impressionist. It cannot be submitted to a close examination, and it
is all wrong historically, yet it presents a complete picture with an
artistic charm that must be judged on its own merits. An illusion
is successfully conveyed of a dim remote age when an idle-strenuous
people lived only to be picturesque, to kill one another in tourneys,
to rear with painful labour beautiful elaborate cathedrals, and yet
had so much time on their hands that they could pass half their lives
cracking unhallowed sconces in the Holy Land and, in that part of