to himself.”—­Chatterton’s physiognomy would at least have enabled him to pass incognito.  It is quite different from the look of timid wonder and delight with which Annibal Caracci has painted a young Apollo listening to the first sounds he draws from a Pan’s pipe, under the tutelage of the old Silenus!  If Mr. Croft is sublime on the occasion, Dr. Knox is no less pathetic.  “The testimony of Dr. Knox,” says Dr. Anderson, (Essays, p. 144.), “does equal credit to the classical taste and amiable benevolence of the writer, and the genius and reputation of Chatterton.”  “When I read,” says the Doctor, “the researches of those learned antiquaries who have endeavoured to prove that the poems attributed to Rowley were really written by him, I observe many ingenious remarks in confirmation of their opinion, which it would be tedious, if not difficult, to controvert.”

Now this is so far from the mark, that the whole controversy might have been settled by any one but the learned antiquaries themselves, who had the smallest share of their learning, from this single circumstance, that the poems read as smooth as any modern poems, if you read them as modern compositions; and that you cannot read them, or make verse of them at all, if you pronounce or accent the words as they were spoken at the time when the poems were pretended to have been written.  The whole secret of the imposture, which nothing but a deal of learned dust, raised by collecting and removing a great deal of learned rubbish, could have prevented our laborious critics from seeing through, lies on the face of it (to say nothing of the burlesque air which is scarcely disguised throughout) in the repetition of a few obsolete words, and in the mis-spelling of common ones.

“No sooner,” proceeds the Doctor, “do I turn to the poems, than the labour of the antiquaries appears only waste of time; and I am involuntarily forced to join in placing that laurel, which he seems so well to have deserved, on the brow of Chatterton.  The poems bear so many marks of superior genius, that they have deservedly excited the general attention of polite scholars, and are considered as the most remarkable productions in modern poetry.  We have many instances of poetical eminence at an early age; but neither Cowley, Milton, nor Pope, ever produced any thing while they were boys, which can justly be compared to the poems of Chatterton.  The learned antiquaries do not indeed dispute their excellence.  They extol it in the highest terms of applause.  They raise their favourite Rowley to a rivalry with Homer:  but they make the very merits of the works an argument against their real author.  Is it possible, say they, that a boy should produce compositions so beautiful and masterly?  That a common boy should produce them is not possible,” rejoins the Doctor; “but that they should be produced by a boy of an extraordinary genius, such as was that of Homer or Shakspeare, though a prodigy, is such a one as by no means exceeds the bounds of rational credibility.”