The footboy of Mr. Lambert could, in all probability, have given very much the same account of the sharer of his attic, as was communicated by his London roommate of a later date. The sister of the latter, having never before come across any youth of literary tastes or eccentricities, "took him more for a mad boy than anything else, he would have such flights and vagaries.' He took his meals with a relative who lodged in the same house; but she adds, " He never touched meat, and drank only water, and seemed to live on the air." She then completes the picture by adding: "He used to sit up almost all night, reading and writing; and her brother said he was afraid to lie with him; for, to be sure, he was a spirit and never slept; for he never came to bed till it was morning, and then, for what he saw, never closed his eyes." For however brief had been the period thus allowed for repose, his bedfellow always found him awake when he opened his eyes; and he got up at the early hour, -between five and six,—at which the young plasterer had to resume his work. He had been busy on his compositions in prose or verse; and almost every morning the floor was covered with minute pieces of paper into which he had torn his first drafts before coming to bed.1 The same habits characterised him to the last. Night was his favourite time for literary toil; and when occupied on some engrossing theme, or transported in fancy to times of yore, "the sleepless soul" was wholly forgetful of the claims of the body; and the labours of a new day were resumed without any interval of repose.

This indifference to sleep was the real excess, dangerous alike to healthful life and to reason. Abnormal as the precocity of Chatterton's intellect was, there is nothing in the history of his singular career to indicate any unusual tendency towards mental disease. Byron's emphatic dictum was: "Chatterton, I think, was mad." But the same easy method of accounting for the eccentricities of genius has been applied to himself. There are, indeed, the rare types of preeminent intellectual power, like 1 Croft, p. 216.

Chaucer and Shakespear, who appear to have been equal to every occasion, surpassing ordinary men even in wise shrewdness and common sense. Milton moved with statesmanlike dignity, bearing himself calmly amid the strife of a great revolution. Burns and Scott were both marked by a rare sagacity, in spite of the unpractical shortcomings of each; and Wordsworth dwelt. in voluntary seclusion among his favourite mountains, the sage of another period of political convulsion. But the theory of insanity may as fitly be applied to Gay, Collins, perhaps to Pope himself; to Goldsmith, Coleridge, Shelley, or to Byron: as to Chatterton.

CHAP. X.

Poets of the first order.

He was, indeed, one to be judged of by no ordinary Not to be standard. To his mother, his strange ways, and pro- ordinary judged of by longed fits of reverie, had been incomprehensible enough standards. from childhood; nor were such reveries reserved solely for home. Though always accessible, as Dr. Gregory says, and rather disposed to encourage than repel the advances of others, he would at times be moody and silent in company. His fits of absent-mindedness were frequent and long. For days together he would go in. and out of Mr. Lambert's office without speaking to any one, and seemingly absorbed in thought; and, according to his relative, Mrs. Ballance, whose London lodging he shared, "he would often look steadfastly in a person's face without speaking, or seeming to see the person, for a quarter of an hour or more, till it was quite frightful."

Bristol

theory.

Yet all this is comprehensible enough without the old The old Bristol theory of a "mad genius." The boy at fifteen had a mind such as has rarely been equalled in power and vigour in man's maturest years; but it had been left to develop itself without training or guidance. He was already creating a mystery which a whole century of criticism has not sufficed to solve to the satisfaction of all men. In some respects he was a child, dealing with that for which the schooling of man's tardy maturity is 2 Palmer; Dix's Life, p. 30. 3 Croft, p. 214.

1 Gregory's Life, p.

80.

CHAP. X.

Intellectual power without experience.

the natural training, and without even the oversight and culture of ordinary childhood. In other respects he was already the man of more than ordinary cerebral development and intellectual power; but there also, at every step, compelled to provide experience for himself, or grope his way destructively, like a blind Samson, till he involved himself and his incompleted designs in a common ruin. But before that end is reached, another all-important element-the religious one,-must be reviewed, in connexion with events which give it a painful prominence in association with the later incidents of his strange career.

CHAPTER XI.

EMANCIPATION.

*

CHAP. XI.

Duties in

Lambert's

office.

THE rule of Mr. Lambert, and the duties of his office, became ever more irksome to Chatterton, in spite of the unquestionable advantages of leisure and solitude which Mr. he enjoyed in the attorney's service. The foremost drawback, in reality, though unappreciated by him, was the want of any legitimate work for the active mind of the boy. He rebelled against the irksome task of copying precedents, of no use that he could see, to himself or any one else. But the ungenial relations of master and clerk made the bondage still more galling to his proud. spirit. The servile position he was compelled to assume offended him more than the routine of office work. He had not been a month away from it when he wrote his mother: "Though as an apprentice none had greater Rebellion liberties, yet the thoughts of servitude killed me.

Now against

servitude.

absence

I have that for my labour I always reckoned the first of my pleasures, and have still my liberty." He had liberties, but not liberty: a nice distinction. We learn from his letter to his friend Baker, in Charleston, that Mr. Lambert had been absent in London; but, he says, The "I must now close my poetical labours, my master being attorney's returned." Again, in his second letter to Dodsley he speaks of him as now out of town." Mr. Capel told Mr. Bryant that he thought he never saw him copying what he took to be the Rowley parchments, "but when his master was gone from home; "1 and the admission that the footman was sent from time to time to ascertain

66

1 Bryant's Observations, p. 524.

from home.

CHAP. XI.

Welcome

intervals of freedom.

The suspicious and irritable

attorney.

to respond to.

if he was in attendance at the office, confirms the probability that such welcome 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 on him; and these done, indulge at will in modern song and satire; or, retiring behind the mask he had so long worn in secret, revel in the creations of his antique muse.

But such intervals of freedom would only tend to make the situation more irksome, when the suspicious, irritable attorney returned to task him with misspent time, search his drawer, tear up his poems and letters; and even destroy the paper which by its unprofessional character betrayed its destination for such forbidden uses. Of Mr. Lambert little has been recorded beyond the meagre notes of Mrs. Newton and Mrs. Edkins. But all that we do know suggests the idea of a peevish, fretful, unloveable man, who dealt with the boy committed to his charge as a mere hireling, and "took every opportunity to vex, No kindness cross, and mortify" him. Chatterton's susceptible nature promptly responded to kindness; but there is no glimpse of any such appeal in the attorney's dealings with him. When delayed a few minutes after the hour prescribed for returning to his master's house, he would say with a sigh, "Well I must go, I suppose, now, to be reproved;" and when, towards the close, his mother endeavoured to dissuade him from his design of quitting Mr. Lambert's office, and going to London, his reply was: "What am I to do? You see how I am treated!" If Chatterton drew his picture, either in confidential correspondence, or when moved by the strong fit of satire to indiscriminate raillery, it has not been preserved; but it is abundantly obvious that no cordial relations could ever have been established between the proud-spirited youth, already conscious of an intellectual supremacy above all his associates, and the master who saw in him only the charity boy serving him for food and clothing. The attorney regarded the poetical aspirations of his ap prentice with angry contempt. In his office he vigilantly

Cordial relations impossible.