CHATTERTON.

A STORY OF THE YEAR 1770.*

PART I.-BRISTOL.

CHAPTER I.-WILKES AND LIBERTY.

WAS there ever a time that did not think highly of its own importance? Was there ever a time when the world did not believe itself to be going to pieces, and when alarming (pamphlets on "the present crisis" did not lie unbought on the counters of the booksellers? Poor mortals that we are, how we do make the most of our own little portion in the general drama of history! Nor are we quite wrong, after all. There is nothing really to laugh at in our laborious anxieties about this same "present crisis," which is always happening, and never over. "We live in earnest times"-what is there in the incessant repetition of this stereotyped phrase, but an explicit assertion, as it were, by each generation for itself, that the great sense of life, transmitted already through so many generations, is now, in turn, passing through it? The time that we ourselves are alive, the time that our eyes behold the light, and that the breath is strong in our nostrils, that is the crisis for us; and although it belongs to a higher than we to determine the worth of what we do, yet that we should do every thing with a certain amount of vehemence and bustle, seems but the necessary noise of the shuttle, as we weave forth our allotted portion of the general web of existence.

* A portion of this sketch appeared in the numbers of the Dublin University Magazine for July, August, and October, 1851. The rest is now published for the first time.

Well, eighty years ago, there was "a crisis" in England. That was the time, reader, when our great-grandfathers, laudably intent on bringing about your existence and mine, were, for that purpose, paying court to our reluctant great-grandmothers. George III., an obese young sovereign of thirtythree, had then been ten years on the throne. Newspapers were not so numerous as now; parliament was not open to reporters; and had gentlemen of the liberal press been alive, with their present political opinions, every soul of them would have been hanged. Nevertheless, people got on very well; and there was enough for a nation of seven millions to take interest in and talk about, when they were in an inquisitive humour. Lord North, for example, an ungainly country gentleman, with goggle eyes and big cheeks, had just succeeded the Duke of Grafton as the head of a Tory ministry; Lord Chatham, throwing off his gout for the occasion, had, at the age of sixty-two, resumed his place in the public eye as the thundering Jove of the Opposition; Bute and Scotchmen were still said to be sucking the blood of the nation; and Edmund Burke, then in the prime of his strength and intellect, was publishing masterly pamphlets, and trying to construct, under the auspices of the Marquis of Rockingham, a new Whig party. Among the notabilities out of parliament were-Dr. Samuel Johnson, then past his sixty-first year, and a most obstinate old Tory; his friend Sir Joshua, fourteen years younger; Goldy, several years younger still; and Garrick, fifty-four years of age, but as sprightly as ever. In another circle, but not less prominently before the town, were Parson Horne and Mrs. Macaulay; and all England was ringing with the terrible letters of the invisible Junius. But the man of the hour, the hero of the self-dubbed crisis, was John Wilkes.

Arrested in 1763, on account of the publication of No. 45 of the North Briton, in which one of the King's speeches had been severely commented on; discharged a few days afterwards in consequence of his privilege as a member of parliament; lifted instantaneously by this accident into an unexampled blaze of popular favour; persecuted all the more on this account by the Court party; at last, in January, 1764,

expelled from his seat in the House of Commons by a vote declaring him to be a seditious libeller; put on his trial thereafter, before the Court of Queen's Bench, and escaping sentence only by a voluntary flight to France-this squint-eyed personage, known up to that time only as a profligate wit about town, who lived on his wife's money, and fascinated other women in spite of his ugliness, had now been for six years the idol and glory of England. For six years "Wilkes and Forty-five" had been chalked on the walls; "Wilkes and Liberty" had been the cry of the mobs; and portraits of Wilkes had hung in the windows of the print-shops. Remembering that he was the champion of liberal opinions, even pious Dissenters had forgotten his atheism and his profligacy. They distinguished, they said, between the man and the cause which he represented.

For a year or two the patriot had been content with the mere echo of this applause as it was wafted to him in Paris ; but, cash failing him there, and the parliament from which he had been ejected having been dissolved, he had returned to England early in 1768, had offered himself as a candidate for the city of London, had lost that election, but had almost instantly afterwards been returned for the county of Middlesex. Hereupon he had ventured to surrender himself to the process of the law; and the result had been his condemnation, in June, 1768, to pay a fine of 1,000l., and undergo an imprisonment of twenty-two months. Nor had this been all. No sooner had parliament met than it had proceeded to expel the member for Middlesex. Then had begun the tug of war between parliament and the people. Thirteen days after his expulsion, the exasperated electors of Middlesex had again returned Wilkes as their representative, no one having dared to oppose him. Again the house had expelled him, and again the electors had returned him. Not till after the fourth farce of election had the contest ceased. On that occasion three other candidates had presented themselves; and one of them, Colonel Luttrell, having polled 296 votes, had been declared by the house to be duly elected, notwithstanding that the votes for Wilkes had been four times as numerous. Tremen

dous then had been the outcry of popular indignation. During the whole of the years 1768 and 1769 "the violation of the right of election by parliamentary despotism" had been the great topic of the country; and in the beginning of 1770 this was still the question of the hour, the question forced by the people into all other discussions, and regarding which all candidates for popular favour, from Chatham himself down to the parish beadle, were obliged distinctly to declare themselves.

Meanwhile, Wilkes was in the King's Bench, Southwark. His consolations, we may suppose, were, that by all this his popularity had been but increased; that Parson Horne and the Society for the protection of the Bill of Rights had organised a subscription in his favour, which would more than pay his fine; and that the whole country was waiting to do him honour on the day when he should step out of prison.

It came at last : Tuesday, the 17th of April, 1770. There was a considerable show of excitement all day in the vicinity of the prison; and it was with some difficulty that the patriot, getting into a hackney-coach late in the afternoon, made his way past the cordial clutches of the mob, into the country. That evening and the next there were huzzas and illuminations in his honour; the house of Beckford, the Lord Mayor, in the then aristocratic region of Soho-square, was conspicuously decorated with the word "Liberty ;" and public dinners to celebrate the release of the patriot were held in various parts of the city.

The rejoicings were not confined to London. In many other towns of England there were demonstrations in honour of Wilkes. A list of the chief places may still be culled from the newspapers of the day. From these newspapers we learn, what indeed might have been independently surmised, that not the least eager among the towns of England in this emulous show of regard for Wilkes, was the ancient mercantile city of Bristol. The following appeared in the Public Advertiser, as from a Bristol correspondent, on the very day of Wilkes's release.

"Bristol, April 14th.-We hear that on Wednesday next, being the day of Mr. Wilkes's enlargement, forty-five persons are to dine at the 'Crown,' in the

passage leading from Broad-street to Tower-lane. The entertainment is to consist of two rounds of beef, of 45 lbs. each; two legs of veal, weighing 45 lbs.; two ditto of pork, 45 lbs. ; a pig, roasted, 45 lbs. ; two puddings of 45 lbs.; 45 loaves; and, to drink, 45 tankards of ale. After dinner, they are to smoke 45 pipes of tobacco, and to drink 45 bowls of punch. Among others, the following toasts are to be given:-1. Long live the King; 2. Long live the supporters of British liberty; 3. The Magistrates of Bristol. And the dinner to be on the table exactly 45 minutes after two o'clock."

Whether this precise dinner, thus announced by the Bristol correspondent of the Advertiser, was held or not, must, we fear, remain a mystery; but that there were several dinners in Bristol on the occasion, is quite certain. On Thursday, the 19th, in particular, a public entertainment (possibly the above, with the day altered) was given in honour of the patriot by “an eminent citizen," and attended by many of the most influential men in the place.

Ah! the poetry of coincidences! On that same Thursday evening, while the assembled guests in the "Crown" were clattering their glasses in the hot room, puffing their tobaccosmoke, and making the roof ring with their tipsy uproar, there was walking moodily through the streets of Bristol a young attorney's apprentice, who, four days before, had been discharged from his employment because he had alarmed his master by threatening to commit suicide. This attorney's apprentice was Thomas Chatterton.

CHAPTER II.

THE ATTORNEY'S APPRENTICE OF BRISTOL.

It was in the month of August, 1760, that a poor widow, who supported herself and two children by dressmaking, and by keeping a small day-school in one of the back streets of Bristol, gained admission for her younger child, a boy of seven years and nine months old, into Colston's school, a charitable foundation, similar in some respects to Christ's Hospital in London. The husband of this widow, a rough, drunken fellow, who had been a singer, or sub-chaunter, in the cathedral choir of Bristol, as well as the master of a kind of free school for boys, had died a month or two before his son's birth. An old grandmother, however—either the widow's own mother