"Another failing observable in the character of Hayley, was the little attention he paid to public opinion, in regard to his modes and habits of life. During his long residence in his paternal seat of Eartham, though he occasionally received friends from a distance, and especially the votaries of literature and the fine arts, yet to the families in his vicinity he was not easily accessible. He seems, indeed, to have been almost an insulated mortal among them; and one who, discharging himself from the obligation of what is commonly called etiquette, made it impossible to maintain with him the reciprocities of intercourse. It is true, indeed, that the attention of the possessor of Eartham was considerably engrossed by meditation and study; but this increased rather than lessened his adaptation to society, and made the effect of his seclusion the more to be lamented." Hayley's Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 220.

As Hayley was too much extolled at the beginning of his poetical course, so was he undeservedly neglected or ridiculed at the close of it. The excessive admiration he at first met with, joined to that flattering self-opinion which a solitary life is apt to engender, made him too easily satisfied with what he had done. Perhaps he wrote worse after his acquaintance with Cowper; for, aiming at a simplicity which he had not power to support, he became flat and insipid. He had at no time much force of conception or language. Yet if he never elevates he frequently amuses his reader. His chief attraction consists in setting off some plain and natural thought or observation, by a sparkling and ingenious similitude, such as we commonly find in the Persian poets. To this may be added a certain sweetness of numbers peculiar to himself, without the spirit and edge of Pope, or the boldness of Dryden, and fashioned as I think to his own recitation, which though musical, was somewhat too pompous and monotonous. He was desirous that all his rhymes should be exact; but they are sometimes so only according to his own manner of pronouncing them. He holds about the same rank among our poets that Bertaut does among the French; but differs from him in this; that, whereas Bertaut was the earliest of a race analogous to the school of Dryden and Pope, so Hayley was the latest of the correspondent class amongst ourselves.

In one respect he is deserving of most honourable notice. During the course of a long literary life, I doubt whether he was ever provoked to use a single word of asperity or sarcasm towards any of his contemporaries. This was praise which alone ought to have exempted him from the harsh and unmerited censure of Porson, by whom he was called Criticorum et Poetarum pessimus. He sometimes on the other hand, indulged himself too much in a lavish and indiscriminate commendation of contemporary writers. But from whatever might appear like flattery of the great, he scrupulously abstained. When the Princess Charlotte visited him at Felpham, he would not present some verses he had written on her, lest he should be thought capable of that meanness.

His Essays on Painting, History, and Poetry, contain much information that may be useful to young artists and students. That on Sculpture is very inferior to the rest; as the Triumph of Music is to the Triumphs of Temper. The last of these is a poem that still continues to interest a class of readers, whose studies are intimately connected with the happiness and well being of society. The design of it, which is to shew the advantages of self-control to the mind of a well-educated girl, is much to be commended. The machinery though it required no great effort in the production, yet suffices to give some relief to the story. It has been remarked that the trials of the Heroine are too insignificant. But of one of them, at least, the calumny in the newspaper, this cannot properly be said. Nor would the purpose of the writer have been so well answered, if he had been more serious, and had uttered his oracles from behind a graver mask.

The taste which has been lately excited amongst us for Spanish and Italian literature, after having slept nearly since the age of Elizabeth, may be attributed in a great measure to the influence of his example. Gray, Hurd, and the two Wartons, had done something towards awakening it, but the spell was completed by him. The decisive impulse was given by the copious extracts from the great poets in those languages, which he inserted in the notes to his Essay on Epic Poetry, and which he accompanied by spirited translations. Lord Holland, the best informed and most elegant of our writers on the subject of the Spanish theatre, declared that he had been induced to learn that language by what Hayley had written concerning the poet Ercilla.

I have heard his Greek scholarship questioned in consequence of an error which, in his Epistles on History, he has made in the quantity of the word Olorus, the name of the father of Thucydides; but from a casual mistake of this sort, no decisive inference can be drawn.

There is little knowledge of human life and character to be gained from his writings. He had seen mankind chiefly through the medium of books, and those such as did not represent them very faithfully to him, that is, in ordinary plays and novels. Indeed he appeared to consider the real affairs of life in which he was concerned much in the light of a romance, and himself and his friends as so many personages acting in it, all meeting with marvellous adventures at every turn, and all endowed with admirable qualities, to which their petty frailties served only as foils. It is impossible in reading his memoirs to avoid smiling at the importance he attaches to very ordinary occurrences. I am not sure whether it was not this propensity that led him to magnify his own distresses in living with his first wife. That lady I well recollect to have been lively and elegant in her manners, and much addicted to literary pursuits, of which she gave a proof in translating Madame de Lambert's Essay on Friendship. Her excessive zeal for her husband's reputation as an author, he has bantered with some humour in the play of the Mausoleum, where Mrs. Rumble, the wife of a poet is introduced:

Who crows o'er her husband's poetical eggs.

The character of Rumble in the same play appeared so evidently designed for Johnson, though the author disclaimed that intention, that Boswell, when he read it on its first coming out, at Anna Seward's, exclaimed, "It is we. It is we." Trope, who

Talks in a high strutting style of the stars, Of the eagle of Jove, and the chariot of Mars,

was meant for Mason; and by Facil,

Whose verse is the thread of tenuity, A fellow distinguish'd by flippant fatuity, Who nonsense and rhyme can incessantly mingle, A poet—if poetry's only a jingle,

he intended to represent himself.

The name of Facil was but too appropriate. The slender thread of his verse was hastily and slightly spun.

His comedies are adapted to the entertainment of those readers only who have formed their taste on the French drama. His tragedies are some of the most endurable we have in what a lively modern critic[4] has termed the rhetorical style. Yet he had some skill in moving compassion.

His diction, both in poetry and prose, is vitiated by the frequent recurrence of certain hyperbolical expressions, which he applies on almost all occasions.

He was particularly fond of composing epitaphs, of which, as I remember, he shewed me a manuscript book full. One of these on Henry Hammond, the parish clerk at Eartham, is among the best in the language. It is inserted in the Memoirs which Hayley wrote of his son.

An active spirit in a little frame, This honest man the path of duty trod; Toil'd while he could, and, when death's darkness came, Sought in calm hope his recompense from God. His sons, who loved him, to his merit just, Raised this plain stone to guard their parent's dust.

FOOTNOTES [1] Nichols's Illustrations of Literature, vol. iv. p. 742. [2] In a similar sketch from the pen of the Rev. Samuel Greatheed, referring to an earlier period, it is stated that "he usually rose and took a dish of coffee at four A.M.," and that "while dressing, he most frequently composed a few stanzas of a devotional turn." This practice of early rising he continued many years after the Editor became acquainted with him, walking in his garden, even in winter, and when the ground was covered with snow, with a lantern in his hand, some hours before daylight; and repeatedly throwing up the sash of his friend's sleeping room, on the ground floor, to give him the benefit of the morning air. Note by Doctor Johnson. [3] To the best of his recollection, the Editor never saw him abroad without an umbrella; which in fine weather he used as a parasol, to preserve his eyes. He even rode with it on horseback, a very awkward operation, considering the high-spirited animals that composed his stud, and the constitutional malady in his hip-joint, which, in addition to his weight (for he was a remarkably strong-built man), and his never riding without military spurs, reduced his danger of falling almost to a certainty, when he opened his umbrella without due precaution. But he was a stranger to fear in equestrian matters, and always mounted his horse again, as soon as he could be caught. The Editor was once riding gently by his side, on the stony beach of Bognor, when the wind suddenly reversing his umbrella, as he unfolded it, his horse, with a sudden but desperate plunge, pitched him on his head in an instant. Providentially he received no hurt, and some fishermen being at hand, the plunging steed was stopped at a gate, and being once more subjected to his rider, took him home in safety. On another occasion, in the same visit of the Editor, he was tost into the air on the Downs, at the precise moment when an interesting friend, whom they had just left, being apprehensive of what would happen, was anxiously viewing him from her window through a telescope.

These anecdotes may serve to illustrate that determined feature of his character, which has been already noticed, and which impelled him, contrary to the advice of his friends, to persevere in a favourite, though perilous exercise, even at the manifest hazard of his life. At length, however, they prevailed; and for some years before he died, he gave up riding on horseback altogether. Note by Dr. Johnson. [4] My friend Mr. Darley, MS. addition.—ED.

* * * * *

SIR WILLIAM JONES.

The life of Sir William Jones has been written by his friend Lord Teignmouth with that minuteness which the character of so illustrious and extraordinary a man deserved. He was born in London, on the twenty-eighth of September, 1746. His father, whose Christian name he bore, although sprung immediately from a race of yeomen in Anglesea, could yet, like many a Cambro-Briton beside, have traced his descent, at least in a maternal line, from the ancient princes of Wales. But what distinguished him much more was, that he had attained so great a proficiency in the study of mathematics as to become a teacher of that branch of science in the English metropolis, under the patronage of Sir Isaac Newton, and rose to such reputation by his writings, that he attracted the notice and esteem of the powerful and the learned, and was admitted to the intimacy of the Earls of Hardwicke, and Macclesfield; Lord Parker, President of the Royal Society; Halley; Mead; and Samuel Johnson. By his wife, Mary, the daughter of a cabinet-maker in London, he had two sons, one of whom died an infant, and a daughter. In three years after the birth of the remaining son, the father himself died, and left the two children to the protection of their mother. An extraordinary mark of her presence of mind, sufficiently indicated how capable this mother was of executing the difficult duty imposed on her by his decease. Dr. Mead had pronounced his case, which was a polypus on the heart, to be a hopeless one; and her anxious precautions to hinder the fatal intelligence from reaching him were on the point of being defeated by the arrival of a letter of condolence and consolation from an injudicious but well-meaning friend, when, on discovering its purport, she had sufficient address to substitute the lively dictates of her own invention for the real contents of the epistle, and by this affectionate delusion not merely to satisfy the curiosity but to cheer the spirits of her dying husband.

So great was her solicitude for the improvement of her son, that she declined the pressing instances of the Countess of Macclesfield to reside under her roof, lest she should be hindered from attending exclusively to that which was now become her main concern. To the many inquiries which the early vivacity of the boy prompted him to put to her, the invariable answer she returned was, read and you will know. This assurance, added to the other means of instruction, from which her fondness, or more probably her discernment, induced her to exclude every species of severity, were so efficacious that in his fourth year he was able to read at sight any book in his own language. Two accidents occurred to hinder this rapid advancement from proceeding. Once he narrowly escaped being consumed by flames from having fallen into the fire, while endeavouring to scrape down some soot from the chimney of a room in which he had been left alone; and was rescued only in consequence of the alarm given to the servants by his shrieks. At another time, his eye was nearly put out by one of the hooks of his dress, as he was struggling under the hands of the domestic who was putting on his clothes. From the effects of this injury his sight never completely recovered.

In his fifth year he received a strong impression from reading the twentieth chapter of the Apocalypse. The man must have a cold imagination who would deny that this casual influence might have first disclosed not only the lofty and ardent spirit, but even that insatiable love of learning, by which he was afterwards distinguished above all his contemporaries. Amidst the general proscription of reading adapted to excite wonder, that germ of knowledge, in the minds of our children, it is lucky that the Bible is still left them.

At the end of his seventh year he was placed under the tuition of Dr. Thackeray, the master of Harrow school; but had not been there two years before a fracture of his thigh bone, that happened in a scramble among his play-fellows, occasioned another suspension of his studies. During the twelvemonth which he now passed at home with his mother, he became so conversant with several writers in his own language, especially Dryden and Pope, that he set himself about making imitations of them.

On his return to Harrow, no allowance was made for the inevitable consequences of this interruption; he was replaced in the class with those boys whose classical learning had been progressive while his was stationary, or rather retrograde, and unmerited chastisement was inflicted on him for his inferiority to those with whom he had wanted the means of maintaining an equality. Impelled either by fear, by shame, or by emulation, he laboured hard in private to repair his losses: of his own accord recurred to the rudiments of the grammar; and was so diligent that he speedily outstripped all his juvenile competitors.

In his twelfth year he entered into a scheme for representing a play in conjunction with his schoolfellows; but instead of seeking his Dramatis Personae among the heroes of Homer, as Pope had done in his boyhood, Jones, by a remarkable effort of memory, committed to paper what he retained of Shakspeare's Tempest, which he had read at his mother's; and himself sustained the part of Prospero in that Comedy. Meanwhile, his poetical faculty did not lie dormant. He turned into English verse all Virgil's Eclogues and several of Ovid's Epistles; and wrote a Tragedy on the fable of Meleager, which was acted during the holidays by himself and his comrades, and in which he sustained the character of the hero. A short specimen of the drama is preserved. The language brings to our recollection that of the Mock Tragedy in Hamlet.

When the other boys were at their sports, Jones continued to linger over his book, or, if he mingled in their diversions, his favourite objects were still uppermost in his thoughts; he directed his playmates to divide the fields into compartments to which he gave the names of the several Grecian republics; allotted to each their political station; and "wielding at will the fierce democracies," arranged the complicated concerns of peace and war, attack and defence, councils, harangues, and negociations. Dr. Thackeray was compelled to own that "if his pupil were left naked and friendless on Salisbury plain, he would yet find his way to fame and riches."

On the resignation of that master, the management of the school devolved on Dr. Sumner, by whom Jones, then in his fifteenth year, was particularly distinguished. Such was his zeal, that he devoted whole nights to study; and not contented with applying himself at school to the classical languages, and during the vacations to the Italian and French, he attained Hebrew enough to enable him to read the Psalms in the original, and made himself acquainted with the Arabic character. Strangers, who visited Harrow, frequently inquired for him by the appellation of the great scholar.

Some of his compositions from this time to his twentieth year, which he collected and entitled Limon,[1] in imitation of the ancients, are printed among his works. A young scholar who should now glance his eye over the first chapter, containing speeches from Shakspeare and Addison's Cato translated into Greek iambics on the model of the Three Tragedians, would put aside the remainder with a smile of complacency at the improvement which has since been made in this species of task under the auspices of Porson.

His mother was urged by several of the legal profession, who interested themselves in his welfare, to place him in the office of a special pleader: but considerations of prudence, which represented to her that the course of education necessary to qualify him for the practice of the law was exceedingly expensive and the advantages remote, hindered her from acquiescing in their recommendation; at the same time that his own inclination and the earnest wishes of his master concurred in favour of prosecuting his studies at college. Which of the two universities should have the credit of perfecting instruction thus auspiciously commenced was the next subject of debate. But the advice of Dr. Glasse, then a private tutor at Harrow, prevailing over that of the head master, who, by a natural partiality for the place of his own education would have given the preference to Cambridge, he was in 1764 admitted of University College in Oxford, whither his mother determined to remove her residence, either for the purpose of superintending his health and morals, or of enjoying the society of so excellent a son.

Before quitting school he presented to his friend Parnell, nephew of the poet, and afterwards Chancellor of the Exchequer in Ireland, a manuscript volume of English verses, consisting, among other pieces, of that essay which some years after he moulded into his Arcadia; and of translations from Sophocles, Theocritus, and Horace. If the encouragement of Dr. Sumner had not been overruled by the dissuasion of his more cautious friends, he would have committed to the press his Greek and Latin compositions, among which was a Comedy in imitation of the style of Aristophanes, entitled Mormo. Like many other lads whose talents have unfolded in all their luxuriance under the kindness of an indulgent master, he experienced a sudden chill at his first transplantation into academic soil. His reason was perplexed amid the intricacies of the school logic, and his taste revolted by the barbarous language that enveloped it.

On the 31st of October he was unanimously elected to one of the four scholarships founded by Sir Simon Bennet. But as he had three seniors, his prospect of a fellowship was distant; and he was anxious to free his mother from the inconvenience of contributing to his support. His disgust for the University, however, was fortunately not of long continuance. The college tutors relieved him from an useless and irksome attendance on their lectures, and judiciously left the employment of his time at his own disposal. He turned it to a good account in perusing the principal Greek historians and poets, together with the whole of Lucian and of Plato; writing notes, and exercising himself in imitations of his favourite authors as he went on. In order to facilitate his acquisition of the Arabic tongue, more particularly with regard to its pronunciation, he engaged a native of Aleppo, named Mirza, whom he met with in London, to accompany him to Oxford, and employed him in re-translating the Arabian Nights' Entertainments into their original language, whilst he wrote out the version himself as the other dictated, and corrected the inaccuracies by the help of a grammar and lexicon. The affinity which he discovered between this language and the modern Persian, induced him to extend his researches to the latter dialect; and he thus laid the foundation of his extraordinary knowledge in oriental literature.

During the vacations he usually resorted to London, where he was assiduous in his attendance on the schools of Angelo, for the sake of accomplishing himself in the manly exercises of fencing and riding; and, at home, directed his attention to modern languages; and familiarised himself with the best writers in Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese: "thus," he observed, "with the fortune of a peasant, he gave himself the education of a prince."

The year after his entrance at college, he accepted a proposal that was made him to undertake the education of Lord Althorpe, then a child about seven years old; and for that purpose spent much of his time at Wimbledon, where he composed many of his English poems, and studied attentively the Hebrew Bible, particularly the prophetical writings, and the book of Job.

In the summer of 1766, a fellowship of University College unexpectedly became vacant; and being conferred on Jones, secured him the enjoyment of that independence which he had so much desired. With independence he seems to have been satisfied; for, on his return to Wimbledon, he declined an offer made him by the Duke of Grafton, then first Lord of the Treasury, of the place of interpreter for eastern languages. The same answer which conveyed his refusal recommended in earnest terms his friend Mirza as one fitted to perform the duties of the office, but the application remained unnoticed; and he regretted that his inexperience in such matters had prevented him from adopting the expedient of nominally accepting the employment for himself, and consigning the profits of it to the Syrian.

In 1767 he began his treatise De Poesi Asiatica, on the plan of Lowth's Praelectiones, and composed a Persian grammar for the use of a school-fellow, who was about to go to India. His usual course of study was for a short time interrupted by an attendance on Earl Spencer, the father of his pupil, to Spa. The ardour of his curiosity as a linguist made him gladly seize the opportunity afforded him by this expedition of obtaining some knowledge of German. Nor was he so indifferent to slighter accomplishments as not to avail himself of the instructions of a celebrated dancing master at Aix-la-Chapelle. He had before taken lessons from Gallini in that trifling art. From a pensioner at Chelsea he had learnt the use of the broadsword. He afterwards made an attempt, in which, however, he does not seem to have persevered, to become a performer on the national instrument of his forefathers, the harp. Ambition of such various attainments reminds us of what is related concerning the Admirable Crichton, and Pico of Mirandola.

Christian the Seventh, King of Denmark, who in 1768 was on a visit to this country, had brought with him a Persian history of Nadir Shah in manuscript, which he was desirous to have translated from that language into the French. On this occasion Jones was applied to by one of the under secretaries to the Duke of Grafton, to gratify the wishes of the Danish monarch. The task was so little to his mind that he would have excused himself from engaging in it; and he accordingly suggested Major Dow, a gentleman already distinguished by his translations from the Persic, as one fit to be employed; but he likewise pleading his other numerous occupations as a reason for not undertaking this, and the application to Jones being renewed, with an intimation that it would be disgraceful to the country if the King should be compelled to take the manuscript into France, he was at length stimulated to a compliance. At the expiration of a twelvemonth, during which interval it had been more than once eagerly demanded, the work was accomplished. The publication of it was completed in 1770, and forty copies were transmitted to the court of Denmark. To the History was appended a treatise on Oriental poetry, written also in French. One of the chief difficulties imposed on the translator had been the necessity of using that language in the version, of which it could not be expected that he should possess an entire command; but to obviate this inconvenience, he called in the aid of a Frenchman, who corrected the inaccuracies in the diction. Christian expressed himself well satisfied with the manner in which his intentions had been fulfilled: but a diploma constituting the translator a member of the Royal Society at Copenhagen, together with an earnest recommendation of him to the regard of his own sovereign, were the sole rewards of his labour. Of the history he afterwards published an abridgment in English.

The predilection he had conceived for the Muses of the East, whom, with the blind idolatry of a lover, he exalted above those of Greece and Rome, was further strengthened by his intercourse with an illustrious foreigner, whom they had almost as much captivated. The person, with whom this similarity of taste connected him, was Charles Reviczki, afterwards imperial minister at Warsaw, and ambassador at the English court with the title of Count. Their correspondence, which turns principally on the object of their common pursuits, and is written in the French and Latin languages, commenced in 1768. At this time he took his degree of Bachelor of Arts.

In the summer of the ensuing year, Jones accompanied his pupil to the school at Harrow. During his residence there he transcribed his Persian grammar. He had already begun a dictionary of that language, with illustrations of the principal words from celebrated writers, a work of vast labour, which he resolved not to prosecute without the assurance of an adequate remuneration from the East India Company. At the entreaty of Dr. Glasse, he now dedicated some portion of his time to religious inquiry. The result was a conviction of the truth of Christianity, in his belief of which, it is said, he had hitherto been unconfirmed. In the winter he made a second visit to the Continent with the family of his noble patron. After a longer stay at Paris, than was agreeable to him, they passed down the Rhine to Lyons, and thence proceeded by Marseilles, Frejus, and Antibes, to Nice. At the last of these places they resided long enough to allow of his returning to his studies, which were divided between the arts of music and painting; the mathematics; and military tactics; a science of which he thought no Briton could, without disgrace, be ignorant. He also wrote a treatise on education; and begun a tragedy entitled Soliman, on the murder of the son of that monarch by the treachery of his step-mother. Of the latter, although it appears from one of his letters that he had completed it, no traces were found among his papers, except a prefatory discourse too unfinished to meet the public eye. The subject has been treated by Champfort, a late French writer, and one of the best among Racine's school, in a play called Mustapha and Zeangir. I do not recollect, and have not now the means of ascertaining, whether that fine drama, the Solimano of Prospero Bonarelli is founded on the same tragic incident in the Turkish History.

An excursion which he had meditated to Florence, Rome, and Naples, he was under the necessity of postponing to a future occasion. On his way back he diverged to Geneva, in hopes of seeing Voltaire; but was disappointed, as the Frenchman excused himself, on account of age and sickness, from conversing with a stranger. At Paris he succeeded by the help of some previous knowledge of the Chinese character, and by means of Couplet's Version of the Works of Confucius, in construing a poem by that writer, from a selection in the king's library, and sent a literal version of it to his friend Reviczki. From the French capital the party returned through Spa to England. During their short residence at Spa he sketched the plan of an epic poem, on the discovery of Britain by the Prince of Tyre. The suggestion and advice of his friends, who thought that abilities and attainments like his required a more extensive sphere of action than was afforded him by the discharge of his duties as a private tutor, strengthened, probably, by a consciousness of his own power, induced him to relinquish that employment, and henceforward to apply himself to the study and practice of the law. An almost enthusiastic admiration of the legal institutions of his own country, a pure and ardent zeal for civil liberty, and an eminent independence and uprightness of mind, were qualifications that rendered this destination of his talents not less desirable in a public view, than it was with reference to his individual interests. He accordingly entered himself a member of the Temple, on the 19th of September, 1770. To faculties of so comprehensive a grasp, the abandonment of his philological researches was not indispensable for the successful prosecution of his new pursuit. Variety was perhaps even a necessary aliment of his active mind, which without it might have drooped and languished. Indeed, the cultivation of eastern learning eventually proved of singular service to him in his juridical capacity.

In 1771 he published in French a pamphlet in answer to Anquetil du Perron's Attack on the University of Oxford, in the discourse prefixed to his "Zind-Avesta;" and entered on "A History of the Turks," the introduction to which was printed, but not made public till after his death. He had a design to apply for the office of minister at Constantinople, in the event of a termination of the war with Russia, and looked forward with eagerness to an opportunity of contemplating the Turkish manners at their source. A small volume of his poems, consisting chiefly of translations from the Eastern languages, with two prose dissertations annexed, made their appearance in the following year, when he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. From the preface to the poems, it appears that his relish for the Greek and Roman writers had now returned; and that he justly regarded them as the standard of true taste. His terms not having been regularly kept in the University, (where his mother and sister had still continued to reside) he did not take his degree of Master of Arts till the Easter of 1773. In the January following he was called to the bar. At the conclusion of the preface to his Commentaries de Poesi Asiatica, published at this period, he announces his determination to quit the service of the muses, and apply himself entirely to his professional studies. In a letter to Reviczki, of February, 1775, we find him declaring that he no longer intended to solicit the embassy to Constantinople. This year he attended the spring circuit, and sessions at Oxford; and the next was appointed one of the commissioners of bankrupts, and was to be found regularly as a legal practitioner in Westminster Hall. At the same time, that he might not lose sight of classical literature, he was assiduous in his perusal of the Grecian orators, and employed himself in a version of the Orations of Isaeus; nor does he appear to have broken off his correspondence with learned foreigners, among whom were the youngest Schultens, and G.S. Michaelis. The translation of Isaeus, which appears to be executed with fidelity, was published in 1778, with a dedication to Lord Bathurst, in which he declares "his Lordship to have been his greatest, his only benefactor." His late appointment is the obligation to which he refers.

A vacancy had now occurred on the bench at Fort William, in Bengal; and Jones was regarded by his brethren at the bar as the fittest person to occupy that station. The patronage of the minister, however, was requisite to this office; and the violent measures which government had lately adopted, with respect to the American Colonies, were far from being such as accorded with his notions of freedom and justice. He was resolved that no consideration should induce him to surrender the independence of his judgment on this, or any other national topic. "If the minister," says he, in one of his letters to his pupil, Lord Althorpe, "be offended at the style in which I have spoken, do speak, and will speak, of public affairs, and on that account, shall refuse to give me the judgeship, I shall not be at all mortified, having already a very decent competence without a debt, or a care of any kind." His patriotic feelings displayed themselves in a Latin Ode to Liberty; published in March, 1780, under the title of Julii Melesigoni ad Libertatem, an assumed name, formed by an anagram of his own in Latin.

The resignation of Sir Robert Newdigate, one of the members returned to parliament for the University of Oxford, in the meantime, induced several members of that learned body, who were friendly to Jones, to turn their eyes towards him as their future representative. The choice of a candidate undistinguished by birth or riches, and recommended solely by his integrity, talents, and learning, would have reflected the highest honour on his constituents; but many being found to be disinclined to his interest, it was thought more prudent to relinquish the canvass. He published in July a small pamphlet, entitled an Inquiry into the Legal Mode of suppressing Riots, with a constitutional Plan of future Defence. The insurrection which had for some days disgraced the British metropolis, at the beginning of June, suggested the publication of this tract. In the autumn of this year he made a journey to Paris, as he had done the preceding summer. During a fortnight's residence in that capital, he attended some causes at the Palais; obtained access to a fine manuscript in the royal library, which opened to him a nearer insight into the manners of the ancient Arabians; and mingled in the society of as many of the American leaders as he could fall in with, purposing to collect materials for a future history of their unhappy contest with the mother country. In the midst of this keen pursuit of professional and literary eminence he had the misfortune to lose his mother, who had lived long enough to see her tenderness and assiduity in the conduct of his education amply rewarded.

An Essay on the Law of Bailments, and the translation of an Arabian Poem, on the Mohammedan Law of Succession to the Property of Intestates, to the latter of which undertakings he was incited by his views of preferment in the East, testified his industry in the pursuit of his legal studies; while, on the other hand, several short poems evinced, from time to time, his intended relinquishment of the tuneful art to be either impracticable or unnecessary.

In the summer of 1782 the interests of one of his clients led him again to Paris, from whence he returned by the circuitous route of Normandy, and the United Provinces. In the spring of this year he had become a member of the Society for Constitutional Information. A more equal representation of the people in parliament was at this time the subject of general discussion, and he did not fail to stand forward as the strenuous champion of a measure which seemed likely to infuse new spirit and vigour into our constitutional liberties. His sentiments were publicly professed in a speech before the meeting assembled at the London Tavern, on the 28th of May; and he afterwards gave a wider currency to them from the press. He maintained that the representation ought to be nearly equal and universal; an opinion in which few would now be found to coincide; and which, if he had lived a little longer, he would probably himself have acknowledged to be erroneous. At Paris, he had written a Dialogue between a Farmer and a Country Gentleman on the Principles of Government, and it was published by the Society. A bill of indictment was found against the Dean of St. Asaph, whose sister he afterwards married, for an edition printed in Wales; and Jones avowed himself the author.

In the beginning of 1783 appeared his translation of the seven Arabian poems, suspended in the temple at Mecca about the commencement of the sixth century.

In the March of this year, he was gratified by the long desired appointment to the office of judge in the supreme court of judicature, at Fort William, in Bengal, which was obtained for him through the interest of Lord Ashburton; and he received the honour of knighthood usually conferred on that occasion. The divisions among his political friends, after the decease of that excellent nobleman, the Marquis of Buckingham, afforded him an additional motive for wishing to be employed at a distance from his country, which he no longer hoped to see benefited by their exertions. He was immediately afterwards united to Anna Maria Shipley, the daughter of the Bishop of St. Asaph, a learned and liberal prelate. His attachment to this lady had been of long continuance, and he had been waiting only for an honourable independence before he could resolve to join the fortunes of one so tenderly beloved to his own.

Sir William Jones embarked for the East in April, 1783. It is impossible not to sympathise with the feelings of a scholar about to visit places over which his studies had thrown the charm of a mysterious interest; to explore treasures that had rested as yet in darkness to European eyes; and to approach the imagined cradle of human science and art. During his voyage he made the following memoranda of objects for his inquiry, and of works to be begun or executed during his residence in Asia.

1. The laws of the Hindus and Mahommedans.

2. The History of the Ancient World.

3. Proofs and Illustrations of Scripture.

4. Traditions concerning the Deluge, &c.

5. Modern Politics, and Geography of Hindustan.

6. Best Mode of Governing Bengal.

7. Arithmetic and Geometry, and Mixed Sciences of the Asiatics.

8. Medicine, Chemistry, Surgery, and Anatomy, of the Indians.

9. Natural Productions of India.

10. Poetry, Rhetoric, and Morality of Asia

11. Music of the Eastern Nations.

12. The Shi-King, or 300 Chinese Odes.

13. The best Accounts of Thibet and Cashmir.

14. Trade, Manufactures, Agriculture, and Commerce of India.

15. Mogul Constitution contained in the Defteri Alemghiri, and Ayein Acbari.

16. Mahratta Constitution.

* * * * *

To print and publish the Gospel of St. Luke, in Arabic.

To publish Law Tracts, in Persian or Arabic.

To print and publish the Psalms of David, in Persian Verse.

To compose, if God grant me life,

1. Elements of the Laws of England. Model—the Essay on Bailment. Aristotle.

2. The History of the American War. Model—Thucydides and Polybius.

3. Britain Discovered, an Heroic Poem on the Constitution of England. Machinery. Hindu Gods. Model—Homer.

4. Speeches, Political and Forensic. Model—Demosthenes.

5. Dialogues, Philosophical and Historical. Model—Plato.

6. Letters.

Model—Demosthenes and Plato.

In the course of the voyage the vessel touched at Madeira; and in ten weeks after quitting Cape Verd Islands arrived at that of Hinzuan or Joanna, of which he has left a very lively and pleasing description.

In September he landed at Calcutta; and before the conclusion of the year, entered on the performance of his judicial function, and delivered his first charge to the grand jury, on the opening of the sessions. This address was such as not to disappoint the high expectations that had been formed of him before his arrival.

It was evident that the leisure, or perhaps even the undivided attention and labour of no one man, could have sufficed for prosecuting researches so extensive and arduous as those he had marked out for himself. The association of others in this design was the obvious method of remedying the difficulty. At his suggestion, accordingly, an institution was, in January, 1784, framed as closely as possible on the model of the Royal Society in London; and the presidency was offered to Mr. Hastings, then Governor-general in India, who not only was a liberal encourager of Persian and Sanscrit literature, but had made himself a proficient in the former of these languages at a time when its importance had not been duly appreciated; and was familiarly versed in the common dialects of Bengal. That gentleman, however, declining the honour, and recommending that it should be conferred on the proposer of the scheme, he was consequently elected president. The names of Chambers, Gladwyn, Hamilton, and Wilkins, among others, evince that it was not difficult for him to find coadjutors. How well the institution has answered the ends for which it was formed the public has seen in the Asiatic Researches.

A thorough acquaintance with the religion and literature of India appeared to be attainable through no other medium than a knowledge of the Sanscrit; and he therefore applied himself without delay to the acquisition of that language. It was not long before he found that his health would oblige him to some restriction in the intended prosecution of his studies. In a letter written a few days after his arrival in India, he informs one of his friends that "as long as he stays in India, he does not expect to be free from a bad digestion, the morbus literatorum; for which there is hardly any remedy but abstinence from too much food, literary and culinary. I rise," he adds, "before the sun, and bathe after a gentle ride; my diet is light and sparing, and I go early to rest; yet the activity of my mind is too strong for my constitution, though naturally not infirm; and I must be satisfied with a valetudinarian state of health." All these precautions, however, did not avail to secure him from violent and reiterated attacks. In 1784, he travelled to the city of Benares, by the route of Guyah, celebrated as the birth-place of the philosopher Boudh, and the resort of Hindu pilgrims from all parts of the East; and returned by Gour, formerly the residence of the sovereigns of Bengal. During this journey he laboured for some time under a fit of illness that had nearly terminated his life. Yet no sooner did he become a convalescent than he applied himself to the study of botany, and composed a metrical tale, entitled The Enchanted Fruit, or Hindu Wife; and a Treatise on the Gods of Greece, Italy, and India; the latter of which he communicated to the Society. He had not been many months settled after his return to Calcutta, when he found the demand made on him for his company, by the neighbourhood of that place, so frequent as to produce a troublesome interruption to the course of his literary engagements. He therefore looked out for a situation more secluded, to which he might betake himself during the temporary cessations of his official duties; and made choice of Chrishnanagur, at the distance of about fifty miles, which, besides a dry soil and pure air, possessed an additional recommendation in its vicinity to a Hindu College. Indeed, he omitted no means that could tend to facilitate his acquaintance with the learning and manners of the natives. A considerable portion of his income was set aside for the purpose of supporting their scholars, whom he engaged for his instruction.

The administration of justice was frequently interrupted by the want of integrity in the Pundits, or expounders of the statutes. To prevent the possibility of such deception, this upright magistrate undertook to compile and translate a body of Hindu and Mohammedan laws, and to form a digest of them in imitation of that of the Roman law framed by the order of the Emperor Justinian. The mind can scarcely contemplate a plan of utility more vast or splendid than one which aimed at preserving the fountain of right uncontaminated for twenty millions of people. During the period of sessions and term, when his attendance was required at Calcutta, he usually resided on the banks of the Ganges, five miles from the court.

In 1785 a periodical work, called the Asiatic Miscellany, which has been erroneously attributed to the Asiatic Society, was undertaken at Calcutta; and to the first two volumes, which appeared in that and the following year, he contributed six hymns addressed to Hindu deities; a literal version of twenty tales and fables of Nizami, expressly designed for the help of students in the Persian language; and several smaller pieces.

A resolution, which had passed the Board of the Executive Government of Bengal, for altering the mode of paying the salaries of the judges, produced from him a very spirited remonstrance. The affair, however, seems to have been misconceived by himself and his brethren on the Bench; and on its being explained the usual harmony was restored. At the commencement of 1786, while this matter was pending, he made a voyage to Chatigan, the boundary of the British dominions in Bengal towards the east. In this "Indian Montpelier," where he describes "the hillocks covered with pepper vines, and sparkling with blossoms of the coffee tree," in addition to his other literary researches he twice perused the poem of Ferdausi, consisting of above sixty thousand couplets. This he considered to be an epic poem as majestic and entire as the Iliad; and thought the outline of it related to a single hero, Khosrau, (the Cyrus of Herodotus and Xenophon), whom, as he says, "the Asiaticks, conversing with the Father of European History, described according to their popular traditions by his true name, which the Greek alphabet could not express." A nearer acquaintance with the great epic bard of Persia had now taught him therefore to retract the assertion he had made in his Commentary on Asiatic Poetry, that "the hero, as it is called, of the poem, was that well known Hercules of the Persians, named Rustem; although there are several other heroes, or warriors, to each of whom their own particular glory is assigned." At the time of writing this, he had an intention, if leisure should be allowed him, of translating the whole work. A version of Ferdausi, either in verse unfettered by rhyme, or in such numerous prose as the prophetical parts of the Bible are translated into, would, I think, be the most valuable transfer that our language is now capable of receiving from foreign tongues.

In 1787 he flattered himself that his constitution had overcome the climate; but his apprehensions were awakened for the health of Lady Jones, to which it had been yet more unfavourable; and he resolved, if some amendment did not appear likely, to urge her return to her native country; preferring, he said, the pang of separation for five or six years, to the anguish, which he should hardly survive, of losing her.

At the beginning of 1789 appeared the first volume of the Society's Researches, selected by the President. Two other volumes followed during his life-time, and a fourth was ready for the press at the time of his decease.

In the same year he published his version of an Indian drama of Calidas, entitled Sancontala, or the Fatal Ring; a wild and beautiful composition, which makes us desire to see more by the same writer, who has been termed the Shakspeare of India, and who lived in the last century before the Christian era. The doubts suggested by the critics in England, concerning the authenticity of this work, he considered as scarcely deserving of a serious reply.

In his discourses, delivered before the Society, he discusses the origin of the several nations which inhabit the great continent of Asia, together with its borderers, mountaineers, and islanders; points out the advantages to be derived from the concurrent researches of the members of the Society, amongst which the confirmation of the Mosaic account of the primitive world is justly insisted on as the most important; and enlarges on the philosophy of the Asiatics. Besides several other essays, particular dissertations are allotted to the subjects of the Indian chronology; the antiquity of their zodiac, which he maintains not to have been formed from the Greek or Arabs; the literature of the Hindus; and the musical modes used by that people.

In the course of the last two years he edited the Persian poem by Hatefi, of Laile and Majnoon, the Petrarch and Laura of the Orientals. The book was published at his own cost; and the profits of the sale appropriated to the relief of insolvent debtors in the gaol at Calcutta.

In 1793 Lady Jones, to whose constitution, naturally a weak one, the climate continued still unpropitious, embarked for England. The physicians had long recommended a return to Europe as necessary for the restoration of her health, or rather as the only means of preserving her life; but her unwillingness to quit her husband had hitherto retained her in India. His eagerness to accomplish his great object of preparing the Code of Laws for the natives would not suffer him to accompany her. He hoped, however, that by the ensuing year he should have executed his design; and giving up the intention he had had of making a circuit through Persia and China on his return, he determined to follow her then without any deviation from his course. In the beginning of 1794 he published a translation of the Ordinances of Menu, on which he had been long employed, and which may be regarded as initiatory to his more copious pandect.

The last twenty years of his life he proposed passing in a studious retreat after his return to England; and had even commissioned one of his friends to look out for a pleasant country-house in Middlesex, with a garden, and ground to pasture his cattle.

But this prospect of future ease and enjoyment was not to be realized. The event, which put an unexpected end both to that and to his important scheme for the public advantage, cannot be so well related as in the words of Lord Teignmouth. "On the 20th of April, or nearly about that date, after prolonging his walk to a late hour, during which he had imprudently remained in conversation in an unwholesome situation, he called upon the writer of these sheets, and complained of agueish symptoms, mentioning his intention of taking some medicine, and repeating jocularly an old proverb, that "an ague in the spring is medicine for a king." He had no suspicion at the time of the real nature of his indisposition, which proved in fact to be a complaint common in Bengal, an inflammation in the liver. The disorder was, however, soon discovered by the penetration of the physician, who after two or three days was called in to his assistance; but it had then advanced too far to yield to the efficacy of the medicines usually prescribed, and they were administered in vain. The progress of the complaint was uncommonly rapid, and terminated fatally on the 27th of April, 1794.

"On the morning of that day, his attendants, alarmed at the evident symptoms of approaching dissolution, came precipitately to call the friend who has now the melancholy task of recording the mournful event: not a moment was lost in repairing to his house. He was lying on a bed in a posture of meditation, and the only symptom of remaining life was a small degree of motion in the heart, which after a few seconds ceased, and he expired without a pang or groan. His bodily suffering, from the complacency of his features, and the ease of his attitude, could not have been severe; and his mind must have derived consolation from those sources where he had been in the habit of seeking it, and where alone in our last moments it can be found." "The funeral ceremony," adds his noble biographer, "was performed on the following day, with the honours due to his public station; and the numerous attendance of the most respectable British inhabitants of Calcutta evinced their sorrow for his loss, and their respect for his memory. The Pundits who were in the habit of attending him, when I saw them at a public durbar, a few days after that melancholy event, could neither restrain their tears for his loss, nor find terms to express their admiration at the wonderful progress which he had made in the sciences which they professed."

A domestic affliction of the severest kind was spared him by his removal from life. Eight years after that event, his sister, who was married to an opulent merchant retired from business, perished miserably, in consequence of her clothes having taken fire.

His large collection of Sanscrit, Arabic, and other eastern manuscripts, was presented by his widow to the Royal Society. A catalogue of them, compiled by Mr. Wilkins, is inserted in his works.

The following list of desiderata was found among his papers, after his decease.

India.

The Ancient Geography of India, &c., from the Puranas.

A Botanical Description of Indian Plants, from the Cochas, &c.

A Grammar of the Sanscrit Language, from Panini.

A Dictionary of the Sanscrit Language, from thirty-two original Vocabularies and Niructi.

On the ancient Music of the Indians.

On the Medical Substances of India, and the Indian Art of Medicine.

On the Philosophy of the Ancient Indians.

A Translation of the Veda.

On Ancient Indian Geometry, Astronomy, and Algebra.

A Translation of the Puranas.

Translation of the Mahabharat, and Ramayan.

On the Indian Theatre, &c. &c.

On the Indian Constellations, with their Mythology, from the Puranas.

The History of India, before the Mohammedan Conquest, from the Sanscrit Cashmir Histories.

Arabia.

The History of Arabia before Mohammed.

A Translation of the Hamasa.

A Translation of Hariri.

A Translation of the Facahatal Khulafa. Of the Cafiah.

Persia.

The History of Persia, from authorities in Sanscrit, Arabic, Greek, Turkish, Persian, ancient and modern.

The five Poems of Nizami, translated in prose.

A Dictionary of pure Persian—Jehangiri.

China.

Translation of the Shi-cing.

The Text of Con-fu-tsu, verbally translated.

Tartary.

A History of the Tartar Nations, chiefly of the Moguls and Othmans, from the Turkish and Persian.

By an unanimous vote of the East India Company Directors, it was resolved, that a cenotaph, with a suitable inscription, should be raised to his memory in St. Paul's Cathedral; and that a statue of him should be sent to Bengal, for the purpose of being placed there in a proper situation.

A monument has also been erected to his memory in the anti-chapel of University College, Oxford, by Lady Jones, with the following inscription:

M. S. Gulielmi Jones equitis aurati, Qui clarum in literis nomen a patre acceptum Magna cumulavit gloria. Ingenium in illo erat scientiarum omnium capax, Disciplinisque optimis diligentissima exculturn. Erat indoles ad virtutem eximia, Et in Justitia, Libertate, Religione vindicanda Maxime probata. Quicquid autem utile vel honestum Consiliis, Exemplo, Auctoritate vivus promoverat, Id omne scriptis suis immortalibus Etiam nunc tuetur atque ornat. Praestantissimum hunc virum, Cum a provincia Bengala, Ubi judicis integerrimi munus Per decennium obierat, Reditum in patriam meditaretur, Ingruentis morbi vis oppressit, X. Kal. Jun. A. C. MDCCLXXXXIV. Aet. XLVIII. Ut quibus in aedibus Ipse olim socius inclaruisset, In iisdem memoria ejus potissimum conservaretur, Honorarium hoc monumentum Anna Maria filia Jonathan Shipley, Epis. Asaph. Conjugi suo, B. M. P. C.

To the name of poet, as it implies the possession of an inventive faculty, Sir William Jones has but little pretension. He borrows much; and what he takes he seldom makes hotter. Yet some portion of sweetness and elegance must he allowed him.

In the hymns to the Hindu deities, the imagery, which is derived chiefly from Eastern sources, is novel and attractive. That addressed to Narayena is in a strain of singular magnificence. The description, in the fourth stanza, of the creative power or intelligence, issuing from the primal germ of being, and questioning itself as to its own faculties, has something in it that fills the mind with wonder.

What four-form'd godhead came, With graceful stole and beamy diadem, Forth from thy verdant stem? Full-gifted Brahma! Rapt in solemn thought He stood, and round his eyes fire-darting threw But whilst his viewless origin he sought, One plain he saw of living waters blue, Their spring nor saw nor knew. Then in his parent stalk again retired, With restless pain for ages he inquired What were his powers, by whom, and why, conferr'd, With doubts perplex'd, with keen impatience fired, He rose, and rising heard Th' unknown, all-knowing word, Brahma! no more in vain research persist. My veil thou canst not move.—Go, bid all worlds exist.

To the hymns he subjoins the first Nemean ode of Pindar, "not only," he says, "in the same measure as nearly as possible, but almost word for word with the original; those epithets and phrases only being necessarily added which are printed in Italic letters." Whoever will be at the trouble of comparing him with Pindar, will see how far he is from fulfilling this promise.

Of the Palace of Fortune, an Indian tale, the conclusion is unexpected and affecting.

The Persian song from Hafez, is one of those pieces that, by a nameless charm, fasten themselves on the memory.

In the Caissa, or poem on Chess, he is not minute enough to gratify a lover of the game, and too particular to please one who reads it for the poetry. The former will prefer the Scacchia Ludus of Vida, of which it is a professed imitation; and the latter will be satisfied with the few spirited lines which the Abbe de Lille has introduced into his L'Homme des Champs, on this subject. Vida's poem is a surprising instance of difficulty overcome, in the manner with which he has moulded the phraseology of the classics to a purpose apparently alien from it; and he has made his mythology agreeable, trivial as it is, by the skill with which it is managed. But I find that both the Caissa, and the Arcadia, which is taken from a paper in the Guardian, were done, as the author says, at the age of 16 or 17 years, and were saved from the fire in preference to a great many others, because they seemed more correctly versified than the rest. It is, therefore, hardly fair to judge them very strictly.

His Latin commentary on Asiatic poetry is more valuable for the extracts from the Persian and Arabic poets, which he has brought together in it, than to be commended for anything else that it contains, or for the style in which it is written. Certain marks of hurry in the composition, which his old schoolfellow, Doctor Parr, had intimated to him with the ingenuousness of a friend and a scholar, are still apparent. He takes up implicitly with that incomplete and partial, though very ingenious system, which Burke had lately put forth in his essay on the Sublime and Beautiful. He has supported that writer's definition of Beauty by a quotation from Hermogenes. A better confirmation of his theory might have been adduced from the Philebus of Plato, in which Socrates makes the same distinction as our eloquent countryman has taken so much pains to establish between that sensation which accompanies the removal of pain or danger, and which he calls delight—and positive pleasure.[2] As the work, however, of a young man, the commentary was such as justly to raise high expectations of the writer.

His style in English prose, where he had most improved it, that is, in his discourses delivered in India on Asiatic History and Literature, is opulent without being superfluous; dignified, yet not pompous or inflated. He appears intent only on conveying to others the result of his own inquiries and reflections on the most important topics, in as perspicuous a manner as possible; and the embellishments of diction come to him unbidden and unsought. His prolixity does not weary, nor his learning embarrass, the reader. If he had been more elaborate, he might have induced a suspicion of artifice; if he had been less so, the weightiness of his matter would seem to have been scarcely enough considered. But he has higher claims to the gratitude of his country, and of mankind, than either prose or poetry can give. His steady zeal in the cause of liberty, and justice, and truth, is above all praise; and will leave his name among the few

—quos aequus amavit Jupiter, aut ardens evexit ad aethera virtus, Dis geniti.

FOOTNOTES [1] [Greek: Leimhon], a meadow. [2] [Greek: Alaethehis dhan tinas, o Sokrates, upolambanon, orthos tis dianooit an; SO. Tas peri te ta kala legomena chromata kai peri ta schaemata, kai ton osmon tas pleistas, kai tas ton phthongon, kai osa tas endeias anaisthaetous echonta kai alupous, tas plaeroseis aisthaetas kai aedeias katharas lupon paradidosi.] "What pleasures then, Socrates, may one justly conclude to be true ones?—Soc. Those which regard both such colours as are accounted beautiful; and figures; and many smells and sounds; and whatsoever things, when they are absent, we neither feel the want of, nor are uneasy for; but when present, we feel and enjoy without any mixture of uneasiness." He then goes on to exemplify these true pleasures in forms, colours, &c. Compare the De Rep. p. 534.

* * * * *

THOMAS CHATTERTON.

If it were allowable for one who professes to write the lives of English poets to pass the name of Chatterton in silence, I should think the literature of our country more honoured by the concealment of his fate than by the record of his genius. Yet from his brief story, the young will learn, that genius is likely to lead them into misery, if it be not accompanied by something that is better than genius; and men, whom birth and station have rendered eminent, may discover that they owe some duty to those whom nature has made more than their equals; and who—

Beneath the good tho' far—are far above the great.

Thomas Chatterton was born in the parish of St. Mary Redcliffe, at Bristol, on the twentieth of November, 1752. His father, who was of the same name, and who died about three months before the birth of his son, had been writing-master to a classical school, singing-man in Bristol cathedral, and master of the free-school in Pyle-street in that city; and is related to have been inclined to a belief in magic, and deeply versed in Cornelius Agrippa. His forefathers had borne the humble office of sexton to St. Mary Redcliffe church for a century and a half, till the death of John Chatterton, great uncle of the poet.

From what is recorded of the infancy of Chatterton, parents may be satisfied that an inaptness to learn in childhood, is far from being a prognostic of future dullness. At the age of five years, he was sent to the school of which his father had been master, and was found so incorrigibly stupid, that he was rejected by the teacher, whose name was Love, as incapable of profiting by his instruction. His mother, as most mothers would have done in the like case, bitterly lamented her son's untowardness; when an old musical manuscript in French coming in his way, he fell in love, as she expressed it, with the illuminated capitals. Of this fancy she eagerly availed herself to lead him on to an acquaintance with the alphabet; and from hence proceeded to teach him to read in an old Testament or Bible in the black letter. Doctor Gregory, one of his biographers, justly observes, that it is not unreasonable to suppose his peculiar fondness for antiquities to have originated in this incident.

It is related, on the testimony of his sister, as a mark of his early thirst for distinction, that being offered a present of china-ware by a potter, and asked what device he would have painted on it, he replied, "Paint me an angel with wings, and a trumpet to trumpet my name about the world." It is so usual with those who are fondly attached to a child, to deceive themselves into a belief, that what it has said on the suggestion of others, has proceeded from its own mind, that much credit is seldom due to such marvels.

A little before he had attained his eighth year, he was admitted into Colston's charity school in Bristol, an institution in some respects similar to that excellent one of Christ's Hospital in London, the boys being boarded and clothed, as well as instructed, in the house. In two years his dislike to reading was so thoroughly overcome, that he spent the pocket-money allowed him by his mother in hiring books from a circulating library. He became reserved, thoughtful, and at times melancholy; mixed little in childish sports; and between his eleventh and twelfth years had made a catalogue of the books he had read to the number of seventy. It is to be regretted, that with a disposition thus studious, he was not instructed in any language but his own. The example of one of the assistants in the school, named Thomas Phillips, spread a poetical emulation among the elder boys, of whom Thistlethwaite, Cary, and Fowler, figured in the periodical publications of the day. Chatterton did not escape the contagion; and a pocket-book presented to him by his sister, as a new-year's gift, was returned at the end of the year filled with his writing, chiefly in verse. Phillips is probably the person whose skill in poetry is extolled by Chatterton in an elegy on the death of his acquaintance of that name, which has some stanzas of remarkable beauty.

Soon after his confirmation by the bishop, at twelve years of age, he was prompted by the serious reflections which the performance of that ceremony had awakened in him, to compose some lines on the Last Day, and a paraphrase of the ninth chapter of Job, and of some chapters in Isaiah. Had his life been protracted, there is every reason to believe, from the process which usually takes place in minds constituted like his, that after an interval of scepticism, these feelings of piety would have returned in their full force. At the same time he indulged himself in satirical effusions on his master, and such of his schoolfellows as had provoked either his resentment or his ridicule.

On the first of July, 1767, he was taken from school, and apprenticed for seven years to Mr. John Lambert, attorney, of Bristol, to be instructed in the art of a scrivener. The apprentice fee was only ten pounds; he slept in the room with the footboy, and was confined to the office from eight o'clock in the morning, with the usual interval for dinner, till the same hour at night. His conduct was such as left his master no room for blame. He never exceeded the hours limited for his absence, except on one occasion, when he had been to spend an evening in the company of his mother and some friends. Once only he incurred correction. His old schoolmaster had received an abusive anonymous letter; and Lambert having discovered from the hand-writing, which was ill disguised, and by the paper, which was the same as that used in his office, that Chatterton was the writer, thought it necessary to check so mischievous a propensity, by inflicting on him one or two blows. Though he was compelled to pass so large a portion of time in confinement, he had much leisure left him, as his master's business frequently did not occupy more than two hours in the day. His chief employment was the copying of precedents, with which he filled a folio book of 344 pages closely written.

At the beginning of October, 1768, the new bridge at Bristol was completed; and about the same time there appeared in the Bristol Journal a paper, purporting to be a description of the Fryar's first passing over the old bridge, taken from an ancient manuscript, and signed Dunhelmus Bristoliensis. By this the public curiosity was excited; and the printer not being able to satisfy the inquiries that were made concerning the quarter from whence he had received the communication, it was with some difficulty traced to Chatterton. To the menaces of those, who first roughly demanded from him an account of the means by which the paper had come into his hands, he refused to give any reply; but on being more mildly questioned, after some prevaricating, said, that he had got it, together with several other manuscripts, that had been in the possession of his father, by whom they were found in a large box, in an upper room, over the chapel, on the north side of Redcliffe church. That some old parchments had been seen by him in his mother's house is nearly certain; nor is it at all improbable that they might have been discovered in a neglected coffer in the church, according to the account he gave of them. But that either the description of the Fryar's passage over the bridge, or the most considerable of the poems attributed to Rowley were among them, can scarcely be credited. The delusion supposed to have been practised on the public by Macpherson, and that acknowledged to have been so by Walpole, in passing off the Castle of Otranto for a translation from the Italian, were then recent; and these examples might have easily engaged Chatterton to attempt a fraud, which did not seem likely to be more injurious in its consequences than either of them.

About the same time he became known to a Mr. Catrott, and to a Mr. Barrett, a chirurgeon at Bristol, who intended to publish a history of that city, and was then collecting materials for the purpose. To the former he showed the Bristowe Tragedy, the Epitaph on Robert Canynge, and some other short pieces; to the latter several fragments, some of considerable length, affirming them to be portions of the original manuscripts which had fallen into his hands. From both he received at different times some pecuniary reward for these communications, and was favoured by the loan of some books. Among those which he borrowed of Mr. Barrett, there were several on medical subjects; and from him he obtained also some instructions in chirurgery. He is represented by one of his companions to have extended his curiosity, at this time, to many other objects of inquiry; and to have employed himself not only in the lighter studies of heraldry and English antiquities, but in the theory of music, mathematics, metaphysics, and astronomy.

He now became a contributor of prose and verse to the Magazines. Among the acknowledgments to correspondents in the Town and Country Magazine for November, 1768, one of his letters appears to be noticed; but nothing of his writing in that miscellany, the first with which he is known to have corresponded, has been discovered before the February of the following year.

The attention he had drawn to himself in his native city soon induced him to aspire after higher notice. In March he addressed the following letter to the Honourable Horace Walpole;

Sir,—Being versed a little in antiquities, I have met with several curious manuscripts, among which the following may be of service to you in any future edition of your truly entertaining Anecdotes of Painting. In correcting the mistakes (if any) in the notes, you will greatly oblige

Your most humble servant,

THOMAS CHATTERTON.

Bristol, March 25th, Corn Street.

This was accompanied by a manuscript, entitled "The Ryse of Peyneteyne in Englande, wroten by T. Rowleie, 1469, for Mastre Canynge:" to which Chatterton had annexed his own remarks. Walpole returned a polite answer, and asked for further communications. On the receipt of a second letter from Chatterton, Walpole repeated his wish to know more concerning Rowley and his poems; in reply to which, Chatterton took occasion to represent his own situation, that he was the son of an indigent widow, and clerk to an attorney, but that his inclinations led him to more elegant pursuits; and he intimated a hope that Walpole would assist in placing him where he might be able to gratify such propensities. His letter was accompanied by more of the Rowleian poems, and contained an assurance, that the person who had lent them to him to transcribe, possessed other valuable relics of ancient poetry. Some inquiries which Walpole made, confirmed the account given by Chatterton of himself; but in answer to his solicitation for patronage, Walpole declared that he had not the means of exerting it; and recommended a sedulous attention to business, as the most certain way of recompensing his mother for her care, and of securing his own independence. He mentioned that more competent judges, than he pretended to be, were not satisfied of the manuscripts being genuine; and at the same time stated their reasons for concluding them to be of another age than that to which they were assigned. Shortly after, Chatterton wrote to him two letters, which though querulous, are not disrespectful. In the first, while he thanks his correspondent for the advice he had given him, he professes his resolution "to go a little beyond it, by destroying all his useless lumber of literature, and never using his pen again but in the law;" and in the other, declaring his settled conviction that the papers of Rowley were genuine, he asks him to return the copy which had been sent him. Owing to the absence of Walpole, who was then in Paris, some time elapsed without any notice being taken of this request; and on his return Walpole found the following letter, which he terms singularly impertinent.

Sir,—I cannot reconcile your behaviour to me with the notions I once entertained of you. I think myself injured, Sir; and did you not know my circumstances, you would not dare to treat me thus. I have sent for a copy of the M.S. No answer from you. An explanation or excuse for your silence would oblige

Thomas Chatterton.

July 24th.

The manuscripts and letters were all returned in a blank cover, on the fourth of August, and here the intercourse was at an end. Gray and Mason were the friends whom Walpole had consulted about the manuscripts, and they had no hesitation in pronouncing them to be forgeries. It may seem strange, that with such men, the uncommon beauty of the poetry they contained did not create some interest for the author. But Gray was now in a state of health that, perhaps, left him little power of being interested in anything; or the wonder may resolve itself into that blindness which poets, no less than patrons, too frequently discover for the excellence of their contemporaries. Chatterton himself spoke with contempt of the productions of Collins. As to Walpole, he had no doubt more pleasure in petting the lap-dog that was left to his care by the old blind lady at Paris, than he could ever have felt in nursing the wayward genius of Chatterton.

During his residence in Lambert's house, his constitutional reserve had assumed an air of gloomy sullenness: he had repeatedly betrayed to the servants an intention of committing suicide; and at length a paper, entitled the last Will and Testament of Thomas Chatterton, which was found lying on his desk, manifested a design of perpetrating this act on the ensuing day, Easter Sunday, April 15th, 1770. On so unequivocal a proof as this appeared to be of his desperate resolution, his master no longer thought it safe to retain him.

A few months before, he had written letters to several booksellers and printers in London, and from them received assurances of protection and employment if he should remove to the capital. This decided him as to his future course. When he was questioned by Thistlethwaite as to the plan of life he intended to pursue, if the prospect which was thus held out, should fail him, he answered: "The promises I have had are sufficient to dispel doubt; but should I be deceived I will turn Methodist preacher. Credulity is as potent a deity as ever, and a new sect may easily be devised. But if that too should fail me, my last and final resource is a pistol." It is almost unnecessary to observe, that when he thus speculated on his future proceedings, his mind had been strongly tainted with infidelity.—Towards the conclusion of April he set forth on his ill-omened journey. He had never yet gone farther than a Sunday's walk from his native city; and at the age of seventeen, equally inexperienced and confident, without a friend or a guide, and with principles shaken and perverted, he was about to enter on a new and perilous theatre; nor could it have been difficult to divine what the event must soon be. On the 26th of April 1770, immediately after his arrival in London, he writes to his mother, and speaks in high spirits of the encouragement he has met with from the booksellers to whom he has applied, "who," says he, "all approve of my design." On the sixth of the next month, he informs her that "he gets four guineas a month by one Magazine, and that he shall engage to write a history of England and other pieces, which will more than double that sum." "Mr. Wilkes had known him by his writings, since he first corresponded with the booksellers. He is to visit him the following week, and by his interest would ensure Mrs. Ballance the Trinity House." In short he is in raptures at the change in his condition and views; and talks as if his fortune were already made. He now inhabited the house of Walmsley, a plasterer, in Shoreditch, where his kinswoman Mrs. Ballance also lived.

The other letters to his mother and sisters betray the same intoxication. At the Chapter Coffee-house, he meets with a gentleman "who would have introduced him as a companion to the young duke of Northumberland in his intended general tour, had he not been unluckily incapacitated for that office by his ignorance of any tongue but his own. His present profession obliges him to frequent places of the best resort. He employs his money in fitting himself fashionably, and getting into good company; this last article always brings him in good interest. He has engaged to live with a gentleman, the brother of a lord (a Scotch one indeed) who is going to advance pretty deeply into the bookselling branches, and is to have lodging and boarding, genteel and elegant, gratis, besides no inconsiderable premium. He is introduced to Beckford, the Lord Mayor, to whom he had addressed an Essay, and who received him with all the politeness a citizen could assume, and warmly invited him to come again. He might have a recommendation to Sir George Colebrook, an East India Director, as qualified for an office no ways despicable; but he shall not take a step to the sea while he can continue on land. If money flowed as fast upon him as honours, he would give his sister a portion of L5000." The kind-hearted boy did indeed find means out of the little profits arising from his writings, to send her, his mother, and his grandmother, several trifling presents. In July he removed to lodgings at Mrs. Angel's, a sack-maker in Brook Street, Holborn. He assigned no reason for quitting those he had occupied in Shoreditch; but Sir Herbert Croft supposes, not without probability, that it was in order to be nearer to the places of public entertainment, to which his employment as a writer for ephemeral publications, obliged him to resort. On the 20th of July, he acquaints his sister that he is engaged in writing an Oratorio, which when finished would purchase her a gown, and that she might depend on seeing him before the first of January, 1771. "Almost all the next Town and Country Magazine," he tells her, "is his." He boasts that "he has an universal acquaintance; that his company is courted every where; and could he humble himself to go behind a compter, he could have had twenty places, but that he must be among the great: state matters suit him better than commercial." Besides his communications to the above mentioned miscellany, he was a frequent contributor of essays and poems to several of the other literary journals. As a political writer, he had resolved to employ his pen on both sides. "Essays," he tells his sister, "on the patriotic side, fetch no more than what the copy is sold for. As the patriots themselves are searching for a place, they have no gratuities to spare. On the other hand, unpopular essays will not be accepted, and you must pay to have them printed; but then you seldom lose by it. Courtiers are so sensible of their deficiency in merit, that they generally reward all who know how to daub them with an appearance." But all his visions of emolument and greatness were now beginning to melt away. He was so tired of his literary drudgery, or found the returns it made him so inadequate to his support, that he condescended to solicit the appointment of a chirurgeon's mate to Africa, and applied to Mr. Barrett for a recommendation, which was refused him, probably on account of his incapacity. It is difficult to trace the particulars of that sudden transition from good to bad fortune which seems to have befallen him. That his poverty was extreme cannot be doubted. The younger Warton was informed by Mr. Cross, an apothecary in Brook Street, that while Chatterton lived in the neighbourhood, he often called at his shop; but though pressed by Cross to dine or sup with him, constantly declined the invitation, except one evening, when he was prevailed on to partake of a barrel of oysters, and ate most voraciously. A barber's wife who lived within a few doors of Mrs. Angel's, gave testimony, that after his death Mrs. Angel told her, that "on the 24th of August, as she knew he had not eaten anything for two or three days, she begged he would take some dinner with her; but he was offended at her expressions, which seemed to hint that he was in want, and assured her he was not hungry." The stripling whose pride would not let him go behind a compter, had now drunk the cup of bitterness to the dregs. On that day he swallowed arsenic in water, and on the following expired. His room was broken into, and found strewn over with fragments of papers which he had destroyed. He was interred in the burying-ground of Shoe Lane work-house. Such was the end of one who had given greater proofs of poetical genius than perhaps had ever been shown in one of his years. By Johnson he was pronounced "the most extraordinary young man that had ever encountered his knowledge;" and Warton, in the History of English Poetry, where he discusses the authenticity of the Rowleian poems, gives it as his opinion, that Chatterton "would have proved the first of English poets if he had reached a maturer age."

"He was proud," says his sister, "and exceedingly imperious;" but both she and his school-fellow Thistlethwaite, vindicated him from the charge of libertinism, which was brought against him by some who thought they could not sufficiently blacken his memory. On the contrary, his abstemiousness was uncommon; he seldom used animal food or strong liquors, his usual diet being a piece of bread and a tart, and some water. He fancied that the full of the moon was the most propitious time for study, and would often sit up and write the whole night by moonlight. His spirits were extremely uneven, and he was subject to long and frequent fits of absence, insomuch that he would look stedfastly in a person's face without speaking or seeming to see him for a quarter of an hour or more. There is said to have been something peculiarly pleasing in his manner and address. His person was marked by an air of manliness and dignity that bespoke the superiority of his mind. His eyes, one of which was more remarkable than the other, were of a grey colour, keen, and brilliant, especially when any thing occurred to animate him.

Of all the hypotheses concerning those papers which have been the subject of so much controversy, none seems more probable than that suggested by Warton, who, in the History of English Poetry, admits that some of the poems attributed to Rowley might have been preserved in Canynge's chest; and in another publication allows that Chatterton "might have discovered parchments of humble prose containing local memoirs and authentic deeds illustrating the history of Bristol, and biographical diaries, or other notices, of the lives of Canynge, Ischam, and Gorges. But that many of the manuscripts were not genuine, is proved not only by the dissimilitude of the style to any composition of the age of Henry VI. and Edward IV. and by the marked resemblance to several passages in modern poets, but by certain circumstances which leave little or no doubt of their having been fabricated by Chatterton himself." One of his companions, at the time that he was an apprentice to Lambert, affirms, that he one day produced a piece of parchment on which he wrote several words, if not lines, in a character that appeared to his companion totally unlike English, that he then held it over a candle to give it the appearance of antiquity, which changed the colour of the ink, and made the parchment appear black and contracted. Another person declares, that he saw him rub a piece of parchment in several places in streaks with yellow ochre, and then rub it on the ground which was dirty, and afterwards crumple it in his hand. Having concluded the operation, he said it would do pretty well, but he could do it better at home. The first part of the Battle of Hastings, he confessed to Mr. Barrett, that he had written himself.

Some anachronisms as to particular allusions have been pointed out. The irregular, or Pindaric measure as it has been called, used in the song to Aella, in the verses on the Mynster, and in the chorus in Goddwyn, was not employed till a much later aera. There are also in the Aella some lines in blank verse, not introduced among us till the time of Surrey, who adopted it from the Italian.

Another criterion of a more general nature, which has not yet, at least that I am aware, been applied to those compositions, is, I think, very strongly against the antiquity of them; and that is, that the intention and purpose of the writer in the longer pieces is not sufficiently marked and decisive for the remoter ages to which they are ascribed. In the early stages of a language, before conventional phrases have been formed, and a stock of imagery, as it were, provided for the common use, we find that the plan of a work is often rude and simple indeed, but that it almost always bears evident signs of having subsisted anteriorly in the mind of the writer as a whole. If we try Aella, the longest of the poems, by this test, we shall discover strong evidence of its being modern. A certain degree of uniformity is the invariable characteristic of the earlier productions of art; but here is as much desultoriness and incoherence, as can well he possible in a work that makes any pretensions to a plan. On this internal proof alone I should not hesitate in assigning it to Chatterton rather than to Rowley, to the one who luxuriated in an abundance of poetic materials poured out before him for his use or his imitation, rather than to the other who had comparatively but a few meagre models to work upon.