this it appears that the Chancellor and Society of Masters of Oxford, piously bearing in mind the scriptural maxim that a lighted candle should not be put under a bushel, and dreading lest, by the envy of calumniators, the brilliant light of their dearest brother, Master John de Bergham, monk, of the church of the Blessed Mary of Bristol, should fail to diffuse its rays far and wide, according to the true merits of his proficiency and worth, had caused these letters to be written, and sealed with the common seal of the University, on the Vigil of All Saints, A.D. 1330. A scrap of antique French is next quoted, as possibly referring to his translation of the Iliad, under the title of "Le Romaunce de Troys."

Having thus led up to the grand act of this "genteel comedy" of the eighteenth century, the commentator naïvely adds:- "To give you an idea of the poetry of the age, take the following piece, wrote by John de Bergham, about 1320." The specimen of the old monk's verse is entitled "The Romaunte of the Cnyghte," but its obscure language and orthography had to be rendered into a modernised paraphrase before Mr. Burgum could comprehend its drift. Its confirmation of the De Bergham genealogy, however, was altogether satisfactory to him, and so he testified his gratification by another gift of five shillings.

CHAP. IV.

A lighted candle

should not

be hid

"The

Romaunte of the

Cnyghte.”

The pedigree is described by Dr. Maitland as "a Estimate of the pedigree. great coat of arms, and a string of rubbish, indescribably ignorant and impudent," preserved, as he conceives, only to the shame of its author; the memorial of a transaction for which "swindling" appears to him the fittest term.1 It may console the reader who sympathises in such virtuous indignation, to know that the pedigree did not, after all, prove a bad investment. The copy-books, containing, along with it and its "Romaunte of the Cnyghte," some of the earliest transcripts of the Rowley poems, were ultimately disposed of by the family to Mr. Joseph Cottle, for the sum of five guineas. For its author, however, the results were far from profitable. 1 Chatterton: an Essay, p. 19.

It

CHAP. IV.

Unprofitable results to the author.

Developing the humour of the hoax.

Learned critics.

was the misfortune of Chatterton to be brought in contact, at a very early age, with vain, credulous men, so greatly his inferiors in intellect that he was tempted by their amazing folly to persevere in deceptions which their credulity had suggested. Nor can it be doubted that his success on this occasion, when not more than fourteen years of age, was calculated to confirm the tendency to mystery and deception. If we could ignore the moral influences on the boy himself, and forget the age, the privations, and all the disabilities of its perpetrator, the humour of the hoax would predominate above all else connected with its history. But as the production of a youth, whose whole education had been obtained in a charity school, though crude enough when tested by learned heralds and antiquaries, and in its moral effects on himself injurious beyond all question, it still appears to me truly wonderful.

But it was left for Mr. Burgum and the Rowley commentators to develop all the latent humour of the hoax. Mr. Cottle learned, on inquiry at the College of Heralds, that the De Bergham pedigree was formally submitted to that court of honour by Mr. Burgum, as a document deriving its chief authority from ancient deeds found in the muniment-room of Redcliffe Church. Let the reader picture, if he can, the disgust of the ennobled pewterer, on learning that his crown-pieces had been squandered as the reward of an impudent fabrication. But the grave comments perpetrated by learned critics, at long subsequent dates, equal in absurdity the pilgrimage of Mr. Burgum to Doctors' Commons, to have his pedigree attested by the College of Heralds. Mr. Joseph Cottle devotes eight pages of small type to "a few cursory remarks upon it, till the public shall be presented with a fuller investigation which the subject amply merits ;" and so he proceeds gravely to prove, among other things, that no such person as Simon de Seycnte Lyze came to England with the Conqueror: that the De Berghams do not appear in any heraldic record as entitled to coat armour that the Azure, three Hippotames naisant Or;

Argent, three Fermoulxes sable; Or, between a Fess dancetty sable, two Cat-a-mountains ermine;" and much else of the like kind, including Radcliffe de Chatterton's "Pheon azure, ermine Lyon rampant," &c. &c., are wholly without authority from Garter, Clarencieux, or the Heralds' College !1

CHAP. IV.

of heraldry.

The pomp of heraldry had a fascinating charm for The charms Chatterton; and the intricacies of its symbolic ramifications evidently furnished a favourite recreation, in which he could live over again that heroic past which he had already made his own. The study was a strange one for the charity boy; but heraldry had its origin in unlettered ages, and appealed intelligibly to thousands to whom its mottoes were known only traditionally as slogans or cries de guerre. In like manner the painted and sculptured blazonry in Redcliffe Church probably attracted his wondering delight, before he had mastered his letters, with the help of the illuminated folio which served as his primer. He was left in no mystery as to his own pedigree, for, sure enough, the parchments of Redcliffe treasury-house preserved the genealogies of its old sextons for at least a hundred and fifty years. But A pleasant the Radcliffe de Chatterton of the De Bergham pedigree was too pleasant a romance to be summarily dismissed. In his "Last Will and Testament," which Chatterton's biographers have been content to accept as a serious document, he gives directions for inscriptions on four sides of his monument. The first of these, in Norman French, commemorates an imaginary Guateroine Chatterton, of A.D. 1260; the second records, in Latin, the names of Alan Chatterton and his wife Alicia, the former of whom is said to have died in 1415; while the third is dedicated to the memory of his father, a subchaunter of the cathedral of this city, whose ancestors were residents of St. Mary Redcliffe since the year

1140.

romance.

The old

The actual old family name of Chadderdon, recovered by his father from the parchments of Redcliffe muniment-family 1 Works, vol. ii. p. 455.

name.

CHAP. IV.

Genealogy of the

Chattertons.

A parallel for the young

romancer.

The humour of the dreamer.

The Somerset Herald.

room, does not seem to have taken the boy's fancy. Among the MSS. in the British Museum is an elaborate piece of blazonry of nine distinct shields, executed by him as the first materials for an imaginary genealogy of the Chattertons, which was to throw the De Bergham pedigree entirely in the shade. Getting back far beyond Norman William's time, he starts with Sire de Chasteautonne of the House of Rollo, the first Duke of Normandy, and Eveligina of Ghent a lady perhaps as genuine as the fair Gisella, daughter of Charles the Simple, whom ancient chroniclers assign to Rollo with the dower of Normandy.

If we could discard the elements of youth and all the disadvantages under which the orphan child laboured, it would not be difficult to find a parallel for the ingenious romancer. The charity-boy reappears in fancy, in his quaint Bluecoat garb, poring over his imaginary pedigree with an earnestness akin to that with which Sir Walter Scott contemplated the plans of his Tweed-side mansion, and dreamt of a long array of Scotts of Abbotsford who were to carry down the honours of his line to remote centuries. For the time it was a reality to both. Then came a change in the humour of the dreamer; and, just as Scott could appreciate the absurdity of his own over-ridden hobby, and picture its most grotesque phases in his Baron of Bradwardine, or his Laird of Monkbarns : so the boy-poet and antiquary discerned the humorous. side of his self-deceiving fancies, and sported with the weakness of Mr. Burgum; or wrote to his relative, Mr. Stephens, the Salisbury breeches-maker, "whose good sense disdains flattery :" "When you quarter your arms in the mullet, say, Or a Fess vert, by the name of Chatterton.' I trace your family from FitzStephen, Earl of Ammerle in 1095, son of Od, Earl of Bloys, and Lord of Holderness." The breeches-maker, it seems probable, had already been in correspondence with him on the quarterings of the family shield.

In a different vein he wrote to Ralph Bigland, Esq. Somerset Herald: "Hearing you are composing a book

Most of our

CHAP. IV.

of heraldry, I trouble you with this. heralds assert piles should never be borne in even numbers. I have seen several old seals with four, six, and eight; and in the cathedral here is a coat of the Berkeleys with four." Then follows a list of apocryphal coats-of-arms "in and about Bristol;" for he was palming Heraldic off heraldic fictions on the very custodier of arms in the fictions. Court of Honour. But both this letter and the communication to Mr. Stephens of Salisbury belong to the later period of his apprenticeship in an attorney's office, when he had formed the acquaintance of Thomas Palmer, an heraldic engraver, from whom he received instruction in drawing and colouring coats-of-arms. It was a favourite practice with him to inform his friends what their arms were; and meeting his instructor one day, he said, “I'll tell you the meaning of your name. Persons used to go to the Holy Land, and return from thence with palm branches, and so were called Palmers ;" and he added, the arms of the Palmers were three palm branches, and the crest a leopard, or tiger, with a palm branch in its mouth.

It was with Chatterton's heraldry, as with his antique prose and verse: a vein of earnestness is inextricably blended with what, in other respects, appears as palpable fraud. We are reminded of the boy and the visionary dreamer, in the midst of his most elaborate fictions, till it becomes a puzzle to determine how much of selfdeception and of actual belief were blended with the humour of the jest.

Deceptions and selfdeceptions.

F