her departure she instantly accompanies him. On their way he seeks to ravish her. She is rescued, and he slain, by a body of Danes escaped under the leadership of Hurra from the fatal field. In requital for the remembered magnanimity of Ella, who once before had vanquished, captured, and spared them, they conduct her to Bristowe. Meanwhile, Ælla, disdaining his hurt, and impatient to rejoin her, had returned thither, to be overwhelmed by the tidings that she had fled. Believing her faithless, he stabs himself, living just long enough to discover, on her arrival with the Danes, her innocence, and to die happy in her loyal love. Seldom has suitor exaggerated with a finer grace than Ella in his wooing: Layde the whol worlde a falldstole atte thie feete, One smyle would be suffycyll mede for mee." As seldom has the agony of parting of bride and bridegroom been more tenderly described-the struggle between fondness and a Chieftain's sense of duty to his people bleeding from a scolle of locusts caste oppe bie the sea." Sublimity and pathos interchange and blend throughout. The bitterness to the Saxon champion is sharpened by the young wife's inability to reconcile herself. He pleads the imperative call of honour : My country waits my march: I must away: And joyous see my arms dight out in war's array. For a moment his Birtha resigns herself. She feels herself a warrior's consort: Difficult is the penance, yet I'll strive To keep my woe deep hidden in my breast, It was an ache too mastering to be borne, Without a flood of tears, and breast with sighing torn. Then again the grief overpowers. She appeals against his care for honour above love. In vain; he bids a last adieu : I may not here abide ; I fly myself in flying from thy side. And she, in agony : O Ælla, friend, and lord, and husband, stay!— He's gone, he's gone; alas! what if he's gone for aye ! 3 A willow song, with its keynote from Shakespeare who himself had adapted it, at once foreshadows, and sweetens the doom impending over them and their brief wedded love : O! sing unto my roundelay, O drop the briny tear with me, Like a running river be; My love is dead, Gone to his death-bed, All under the willow tree. Black eyes as the winter night, Ruddy his face as the morning light, My love is dead. Even in death Ella's spirit is dominant in Bristol. Rowley appeals to it to continue to be the city's tutelary genius; as When Dacia's sons, whose hair of blood-red hue, Upon the deadly day, Spread far and wide on Watchet's shore, And by thy valiant hand, Dragged by thy falchion fell, Oh thou where'er-thy bones at rest— The dismal cry of war, Or see'st some mountain made of corpses slain, Or viewst th' emblazoned steed, Where the stark Castle aye thy scutcheon wears; Like Avon's stream circle it round, And let no spark harm hallowed ground, Till in one flame the whole wide world expire ! 10 It is a fine whole, in which the 'swetie moonthe of Maie' variegates battles, treachery, heartache, and heartbreak, with singing of ouzle åndgreie morn lark', and the soft verdure of meadows starred with spring flowers. Only the superficial archaic form accounts for the general ignorance still of a poem like Ella. Rendered into modern spelling, it must have delighted a thousand readers where now it counts hardly ten. Its fame, were it fairly spread, would have lit up the rest of the so-called Rowley Poems. Even as it is, the popular neglect of a dirge like the brave ballad on the execution for high treason of Sir Baldwin Fulford, here styled Sir John Bawdin, is inexcusable. How grand a touch is ruthless King Edward's own testimony to the Lancastrian's dauntlessness : 'To hym that soe much dreaded dethe Ne ghastlie terrors brynge. Behold the manne! hee spake the truthe, To pass from Chatterton in the priestly robe of Rowley to the eighteenth-century satirist conscious that he was versifying for bread, is like stepping from an illuminated ballroom into the grey London dawn. It is not that genius A has failed the writer; the failure is in the motive. commonplace of criticism has been the assumption of so entire a want of merit in the Acknowledged Poems as to argue the absence of all remarkable gifts in their author. I do not myself recognize any such poverty in the modern verse as reflects upon the intellect of Chatterton. For me, unsympathetic, even repulsive and tedious, as most of the modern pieces are, they show extraordinarily mature force of declamation, and imaginativeness also. Considered as by one absolutely unacquainted with the proper scenery and conditions of an African Eclogue, The Death of Nicon is a fine rhetorical exercise. Political satire paid, particularly if directed against the Government. It harmonized with the poor starveling's rage; with the unlucky way of raillery', to which, 'sparing neither friend nor foe, when the strong fit of satire is upon me,' he penitently confesses in the strange Will of April 14, 1770. For some time before his four months' raid from Bristol upon Grub Street it was the principal occupation of his pen. Already he had hurled his Kew Gardens against his unsympathetic native town. I do not understand how it can be disputed that the piece is as full of vigour as it is of exasperation against 'my prudent neighbours', who, contemptuous of the attorney's clerk', never sought to brighten a sombre life: Few are the pleasures Chatterton e'er knew.12 He fancied, not very unreasonably, had Bristol not been anticipated by London, that it would have gone far towards preparing for the self-willed youngster the fate of Another Savage to be starved in me.13 From Bristol still he had followed Kew Gardens up with |