That written after seeing Wilton House is in the same style, but I prefer concluding with that to the river Lodon, which has a personal as well as poetical interest about it.

      “Ah! what a weary race my feet have run,
      Since first I trod thy banks with alders crown’d,
      And thought my way was all through fairy ground,
      Beneath the azure sky and golden sun: 
      When first my Muse to lisp her notes begun! 
      While pensive memory traces back the round
      Which fills the varied interval between;
      Much pleasure, more of sorrow, marks the scene.—­
      Sweet native stream! those skies and suns so pure
      No more return, to cheer my evening road! 
      Yet still one joy remains, that not obscure
      Nor useless, all my vacant days have flow’d
      From youth’s gay dawn to manhood’s prime mature,
      Nor with the Muse’s laurel unbestow’d.”

I have thus gone through all the names of this period I could think of, but I find that there are others still waiting behind that I had never thought of.  Here is a list of some of them—­Pattison, Tickell, Hill, Somerville, Browne, Pitt, Wilkie, Dodsley, Shaw, Smart, Langhorne, Bruce, Greame, Glover, Lovibond, Penrose, Mickle, Jago, Scott, Whitehead, Jenyns, Logan, Cotton, Cunningham, and Blacklock.—­I think it will be best to let them pass and say nothing about them.  It will be hard to persuade so many respectable persons that they are dull writers, and if we give them any praise, they will send others.

But here comes one whose claims cannot be so easily set aside:  they have been sanctioned by learning, hailed by genius, and hallowed by misfortune—­I mean Chatterton.  Yet I must say what I think of him, and that is not what is generally thought.  I pass over the disputes between the learned antiquaries, Dr. Mills, Herbert Croft, and Dr. Knox, whether he was to be placed after Shakspeare and Dryden, or to come after Shakspeare alone.  A living poet has borne a better testimony to him—­

“I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous boy,
The sleepless soul that perished in his pride;
And him [8] who walked in glory and in joy
Beside his plough along the mountain side.”

I am loth to put asunder whom so great an authority has joined together; but I cannot find in Chatterton’s works any thing so extraordinary as the age at which they were written.  They have a facility, vigour, and knowledge, which were prodigious in a boy of sixteen, but which would not have been so in a man of twenty.  He did not shew extraordinary powers of genius, but extraordinary precocity.  Nor do I believe he would have written better, had he lived.  He knew this himself, or he would have lived.  Great geniuses, like great kings, have too much to think of to kill themselves; for their mind to them also “a kingdom is.”  With an unaccountable power coming over him at an unusual age, and with the youthful confidence it inspired, he performed wonders, and was willing to set a seal on his reputation by a tragic catastrophe.  He had done his best; and, like another Empedocles, threw himself into AEtna, to ensure immortality.  The brazen slippers alone remain!—­