the anapaestic dance of which breaks in upon the normal iambic
movement of the poem with a natural dramatic propriety. He compares
too _The Eve of St. Agnes_ with the _Excelente Balade of Charitie_,
remarking that it was only in his latest work that Keats attained
to that dramatic objectivity which was 'the very core and centre of
Chatterton's genius.'

Another writer, Mr. Thomas Seccombe, speaks of his 'genuine lyric
fire, a poetic energy, and above all an intensity remote from his
contemporaries and suggestive (as Cimabue in his antique and primitive
manner is suggestive of Giotto and Angelico) of Shelley and Keats.'

Chatterton's influence on the great body of poets of the generation
succeeding his own was very considerable--Mr. Watts-Dunton indeed
declares him to have been the father of the New Romantic School--and
the affection with which Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth and many others
regarded him was extraordinary. He was their pioneer, who had lost
his life in a heroic attempt to penetrate the dull crassness of the
mid-eighteenth century.

He had great originality and the gift of an intense imagination. If
he is sometimes crude and immature in thought and expression--if his
images sometimes weary by their monotony--it is accepted that a poet
is to be judged by his highest and not his lowest; and Chatterton's
best work has an inspiration, a singular and unique charm both of
thought and of music that is of the first order of English poetry.