The young widow established a girl’s school, took in sewing and ornamental needlework, and so brought up her two children, a girl and boy, till the latter attained his eighth year, when he was admitted to Colston’s Charity. But the Bristol blue-coat school had little share in the education of its marvellous pupil. The hereditary race of sextons had come to regard the church of St Mary Redcliffe as their own peculiar domain; and, under the guidance of his uncle, the orphan child found there his favourite haunt. The knights, ecclesiastics, and civic dignitaries, recumbent on its altar tombs, became his familiar associates; and by and by, when he was able to spell his way through the inscriptions graven on their monuments, he found a fresh interest in certain quaint oaken chests in the muniment room over the porch on the north side of the nave, where parchment deeds, old as the Wars of the Roses, long lay unheeded and forgotten. His father, the schoolmaster, had already made free with them for wrappers to his copy books; his mother turned them to account for thread papers and patterns; and they formed the child’s playthings almost from his cradle. He learned his first letters from the illuminated capitals of an old musical folio, and turned to account deeds and charters of the Henrys and Edwards as his primers. Wayward, as it seems, almost from his earliest years, and manifesting no sympathy with the ordinary pastimes of children, he was regarded for a time as deficient in intellect. But he was even then ambitious of distinction. One of his sister’s earliest recollections of him was his thirst for pre-eminence. He was confident in his own resources, and while still little more than a child was wont to say that a man might do anything he chose. But from his earliest years he was liable to fits of abstraction, sitting for hours in seeming stupor, or yielding after a time to tears, for which he would assign no reason. He had no one near him to sympathize in the strange world of fancy which his imagination had already called into being, or to feel any interest in the wonderful productions of his pen, which ere long were the fruits of such musings.

The influence of this lack of appreciative sympathy, along with the suspicions which his incomprehensible love of solitude excited, helped to foster his natural reserve, and beget that love of mystery which exercised so great an influence on the development of his genius. When the strange child had attained his sixth year his mother began to recognize his capacity; at eight he was so eager for books that when unrestrained, he would read from an early hour till bed-time; and by the time he reached his eleventh year he had become a contributor to Felix Farley's Bristol Journal. A beautiful cross of curious workmanship had adorned the churchyard of St Mary Redcliffe for upwards of three centuries, until, in 1763, it became an object of offence to an over zealous churchwarden, and was swept away. The spirit of veneration was strong in the boy; and taking up his pen, he sent to the local journal a clever satire on the parish Vandal. Other juvenile productions followed, characteristic of the precocity of their author; and under various disguises he sported with tho satiric muse, or in graver mood strove to awake some reverence for the past in the unsympathetic community amid which his lot was cast. He had a bold independent bearing; and except during his fits of reverie, he was frank and companionable, and manifested a special fondness for female society. But his delight was to lock himself in a little attic which he had appropriated as his study, and there, with books, parchments, and drawing materials, the child already dallied with the muse, and began the strange literary maskings on which his fame depends.

On the 3d of August 1760, when in his eighth year, Chatterton was admitted to all the privileges of Cols'ton’s Hospital. This charity is popularly styled the Blue-coat School of Bristol, and as such has been referred to as an institution of a similar character to that of Christ’s Hospital, London. But except in the quaint, half-monkish garb of its inmates, Colston’s Hospital bore little resemblance to the foundation where Barnes and Markland acquired their scholarship, and Lamb and Coleridge found culture for their genius. The “great house on St Augustine’s Back,” which had been converted to the use of Colston’s Charity, was a fine civic mansion erected in Tudor times on the site of a dissolved house of Friars Carmelites. Queen Elizabeth had held court there in 1581; and when the Stuarts succeeded to the Tudors, its hospitalities had been exercised by Sire Ferdinand Gorges, one of the merchant princes of the old seaport. But though Edward Colston, as the representative of a line of merchant adventurers who had flourished in Bristol in the reign of Edward III., no less deserved that title, the civic mansion when transferred to his care rather resembled the dwelling of the older friars, except in its lack of their redeeming feature of monkish learning. Bristol had its grammar school, with liberal endowments and university exhibitions, for the sons of its more favoured citizens. But the rules of Colston’s Hospital provided for the training of its inmates in “the principles of the Christian religion, as laid down in the church catechism,” and in fitting them to be apprenticed in due course to some trade. But Chatterton was too young, as yet, to comprehend the difference between the two schools. He was thirsting for knowledge, and was greatly elated at his election on the foundation, “thinking,” as his fostermother said, “that he should there get all the learning he wanted.” But he speedily discovered that its meagre curriculum was inadequate to his cravings, and he indignantly complained that he could not learn so much as at home.

Chatterton remained an inmate of Colston’s Hospital for upwards of six years, learning little more than the most ordinary elements of a common school education; and its chief value was that it lightened to his poor mother the burden of his maintenance. Some influences, however, of a more congenial character are traceable to the friendly sympathy of one of its ushers. Thomas Phillips, himself a writer of verse, strove to excite a spirit of emulation among the older of his pupils and found in Chatterton a response to his appeal. Three of his companions are named along with him, as youths whom Phillips’s taste for poetry stimulated to rivalry, and ere long enlisted among the contributors to Felix Parleys Journal. But Chatterton had already conceived more daring literary adventures; and it was while still an inmate of Colston’s Charity that he essayed on Phillips his first serious . attempt to pass off verses of his own as the production of a poet of the 15 th century. Except, indeed, in the immaturity and inexperience inseparable from his years, Chatterton was the superior of those to whose society he was limited, and was in all essential respects his own teacher. His little pocket-money was spent in borrowing books from a circulating library; and he early ingratiated himself with book collectors, by whose aid he found access to Weever, Dugdale, and Collins, as well as to Chaucer, Spenser, and other writers strangely out of the line of reading of a charity boy, or indeed of any boy of his age. His holidays were mostly spent at his mother’s house; and much of them in the favourite retreat of his attic study there. He had already conceived the romance of an imaginary monk of the 15th century, and lived for the most part in an ideal world of his own, relegated to that elder time when Edward IV. was England’s king, and Master William Canynge—familiar to him among the recumbent effigies in Redcliffe church— still ruled in Bristol’s civic chair. “The Storie of William Canynge,” a poem of great beauty which constitutes one of the shorter pieces of his ingenious romance, represents the bard endowed by Truth, a heavenly maid, with divine insight, and so translated to those elder times, and that more real poetic life, in which Chatterton had revelled from his own childhood :—

“Straight was I carried back to times of yore, Whilst Canynge swathed yet in fleshly bed, And saw all actions which had been before, And all the scroll of Fate unravelled;

And when the fate-marked babe acome to sight, I saw him eager gasping after light.

In all his simple gambols and child’s play,

In every merry-making, fair, or wake, l kenn’d a perpled light of wisdom’s ray;

He ate down learning with the wastel-cake;

As wise as any of the aidermen,

He’d wit enow to make a mayor at ten.”

This beautiful picture of the childhood of the ideal patron of Rowley is in reality that of the poet himself,— “the fate-marked babe,” with his wondrous child-genius, and all his romantic dreams realized. The first lines are, indeed, referred to by Mr Skeat, in his annotated edition of the poems, as “clearly an oversight,” in which the poet writes in his own person and modern character, and sc introduces “an unconscious admission of forgery.” The literary masquerade which thus constituted the life-dream of the boy was wrought out by him with marvellous consistency into a coherent romance, until the credulous scholars and antiquaries of his day were persuaded into the belief that there had lain in the parish chest of Redcliffe church for upwards of three centuries, a collection of poems of rare merit, the work of Thomas Rowley, an unknown priest of Bristol in the days of Henry VI. and his poet laureate, John Lydgate.

Among the Bristol patrons of Chatterton, Mr George Catcott and Henry Burgum, his partner in their trade as pewterers, occupy a prominent place. The former was one of the most zealous accreditors of Rowley, the imaginary priest and poet of the times of the Roses, and continued to collect his reputed writings long after the death of their real author. The credulity of the other was subjected to a more severe test. He had come from Gloucestershire to Bristol, a poor friendless boy, and himself owed to one of Colston’s charities his first start in life. He had risen, mainly by his own exertions, to the position of a successful tradesman, and gave full licence to the vanity with which he asserted the claims of his new position. On him, accordingly, the blue-coat boy palmed off the De Bergham pedigree, and other equally apocryphal evidences of the pewterer’s descent from an ancestry old as the Norman Conquest. The De Bergham quarterings, blazoned on a piece of parchment doubtless recovered from the Redcliffe muniment chest, was itself supposed to have Iain for centuries in that ancient depository. The pedigree was professedly collected by Chatterton from original records, including “The Rowley MSS.” Into this he introduced an ingenious romance of one of the pewterer’s ancestors, who was also a metallurgist, though after a more dignified fashion. According to this the De Bergham of that elder time obtained from Henry VI. a royal patent to play the alchemist, and so to transmute pewter and other base metals into gold. He left issue four sons, one of whom figures as “Edward Asheton of Chatterton, in Com. Lane, in the right of his wife, the daughter and heiress of Radcliffe de Chatterton of Chatterton, the heir general of many families.” The pedigree still exists in Chatterton’s own handwriting, copied into a book in which he had previously transcribed portions of antique verse, under the title of “Poems by Thomas Rowley, priest of St John’s, in the city of Bristol;” and in one of these, “The Tournament,” Syrr Johan de Berghamme plays a conspicuous part. The ennobled pewterer rewarded Chatterton with five shillings, and was satirized for this valuation of a noble pedigree in some of his latest verse. The pedigree and all its accessories are crude enough; but as the production of a boy not fourteen years of age, whose whole education had been acquired in a charity school, it is a remarkable evidence of precocity.

On the 1st of July 1767, before he had completed the seventh year of his residence in Colston’s Hospital, Chatterton was transferred to the office of Mr John Lambert, attorney, to whom he was bound apprentice as a clerk. There he was left much a!one; and after fulfilling the routine duties devolving on him, he found leisure for his own favourite pursuits. An ancient stone bridge on the Avon, built in the reign of Henry II., and altered by many later additions into a singularly picturesque but inconvenient thoroughfare, had been displaced by a structure better adapted to modern requirements. In the month of September 1768, when Chatterton was in the second year of his apprenticeship, the new bridge was partially opened for traffic. Shortly afterwards the editor of Felix Farley's Journal received from a correspondent, signing himself Dunelmus Bristoliensis, a “description of the mayor’s first passing over the old bridge,’’ professedly derived from an ancient MS. Mr William Barrett, F.S. A., surgeon and antiquary, who was then accumulating materials for a history of Bristol, secured the original manuscript, which is now preserved in the British Museum, along with other Chatterton MSS., most of which were ultimately incorporated by the credulous antiquary into a learned quarto volume, entitled the History and Antiquities of the City of Bristol, published nearly twenty years after the poet’s death.

The publication of the description of the ancient opening of the bridge naturally excited inquiry; for the picturesque narrative acquired a suitable flavour of antiquity, without being too much obscured for the general reader, by its archaic language and spelling; and so a desire was manifested to trace it to its source. Chatterton was ere long recognized as its contributor, on presenting himself at the office of the Bristol Journal with another of his productions; and then it was that the definite story made its appearance—over which critics and antiquaries wrangled for nearly a century—of numerous ancient poems and other MSS. taken by the elder Chatterton from a coffer in the muniment room of Redcliffe church, and transcribed, and so rescued from oblivion, by his son.

The dream of the boy-poet was of an age devoid of all the sordid meanness of his own, and of a patron of the muses generous as the ideal Canynge of his romance. Living in this imaginary world, he continued to invent, and ascribe to the authorship of the good priest Thomas Rowley, dramatic, lyrical, and descriptive poems, along with letters, fragments of local or general history, and other miscellaneous productions in prose,—nearly all of them pertaining to the romance of Rowley and Master Canynge, the old citizen and mayor of Bristol. With a persistent coherence to this ideal, which he had formed in his own mind while still a mere child, Chatterton produced nearly all the marvellous literary creations on which his fame depends. In the interval between his first-known antique ballad, the “Elinoure and Juga,” written while still an inmate of Colston’s Hospital, and his leaving Bristol at the age of seventeen, his pieces include the “Bristowe Tragedy,” another and longer ballad; his “Aella, a Tragycal Interlude,” as he styles it, but in reality a dramatic poem of sustained power and curious originality of structure; his “Goddwyn,” another dramatic poem; his “Tournament,” “Battle of Hastings,” “The Parliament of Sprites,” with numerous smaller pieces of autique verse—forming altogether a goodly volume of poetry, the rare merit of which is indisputable, wholly apart from the fact that it was the production of a mere boy.

Yet this only partially illustrates the fertility of his genius. During the same period he had thrown off numerous lyrics, and had given vent to his satirical humour in several lengthened poems, which, though for the most part inferior in merit to his antique verse, would excite wonder as the sole productions of anyboy of hisage. But the authorship even of those modem poems was rarely avowed. The habit of secretiveness grew ere long into a love of mystery, which ultimately proved prejudicial to the boy. Unfortunately for him, his ingenious romance had either to be acknowledged as his own creation, and so l in all probability be treated with contempt, or it had to be sustained by the manufacture of spurious antiques. To this accordingly Chatterton resorted, and found no difficulty in gulling the most learned of his βredulous dupes with his parchments.

The literary labours of the boy, though diligently pursued at his desk, were not allowed to interfere with the duties of Mr Lambert’s office. Nevertheless such a mode of employing any portion of his time was peculiarly distasteful to the Bristol attorney. He was wont to search his apprentice’s drawer, and to tear up any poems or other manuscripts that he could lay his hands upon; so that it was only during the absences of Mr Lambert from Bristol that he was able to expend his unemployed time in his favourite pursuits. But repeated allusions, both by Chatterton and others, seem to indicate that such intervals of freedom were of frequent occurrence. Then he could finish his average two hours of legitimate office work, attend to whatever other duties devolved upon him, and thereafter betake himself to song or satire, or abandon himself to the romance of that antique world in which his pleasantest hours were passed.

But such intervals of freedom only tended to increase his dislike for the restraints of office-life under his master’s eye. In every changing mood of mind he was prone to seek relief in his pen;— yielding at times to earnest thought, and giving lyrical form to his religious feelings and convictions; at other times giving freest scope to his satirical humour, and subjecting all who came within its range to ridicule or scornful invective; or again, lapsing into romantic reverie, and revelling in the creations of his antique muse. Some of his modern poems, such as the piece entitled “Resignation,” are of great beauty; and these, with the satires, in which he took his revenge on all the local celebrities whose vanity or meanness had excited his ire, are alone sufficient to fill a volume. The Catcotts, Burgum, Barrett, and others of his patrons, figure in these satires, in imprudent yet discriminating caricature, along with mayor, aidermen, bishop, dean, and other notabilities of Bristol. But such satirical sallies were the mere sportive effusions of the boy, in which he thoughtlessly exposed even the foibles of his friends. Towards Lambert his feelings were of too keen a nature to find relief in such sarcasm. "When he does give utterance to them, it is with a bitter sense of one deeply wronged. Doubtless the abilities of the attorney’s clerk were widely different from what he had bargained for; but it is obvious that the boy whom he had received into his house was regarded by him with no more sympathy than any transient menial who drudged for hire. Át length, in...