Edmond Malone

“ I will not stay to take notice of the impotent attempts that Chatterton’s new commentators have made to overturn the very satisfactory and conclusive reasoning of Mr. Tyrwhitt’s Appendix to the former edition of the fictitious Rowley’s Poems. That most learned and judicious critick wants not the assistance of my feeble pen: Non tali auxilio, nec defensoribus istis——. If he should come into the field himself (as I hope he will) , he will soon silence the Anglo-Saxon batteries of his opponents. ”

“ Who has not seen the various beautiful Mss. of the works of Gower and Chaucer, in several publick and private libraries, on parchment and on vellum, a small part of any one of which would have been sufficient to contain all the poems of Rowley, in the manner in which they are pretended to have been written?—But any speculation on this point is but waste of time. If such a man as Rowley had existed, who could troul off whole verses of Shakspeare, Dryden, and Pope, in the middle of the fifteenth century, he would have had half the parchment in the kingdom at his command ”

“ Much stress is laid upon Chatterton’s having been seen frequently writing, with old crumpled parchments before him. No doubt of the fact. How else could he have imitated old hands in any manner, or have been able to form even the few pretended originals that he did produce? But to whom did he ever show these old Mss. when he was transcribing them? To whom did he ever say—“Such and such characters denote such letters, and the verse that I now show you in this old parchment is of this import?” ”

“ If this had been a mere frolick, what need of this earnest injunction of secrecy?—His friend scrupulously kept his word till the year 1779, when, as the Dean of Exeter informs us, “on the prospect of procuring a 57 I gratuity of ten pounds for Chatterton’s mother, from a gentleman who sought for information concerning her son’s history, he thought so material a benefit to the family would fully justify him for divulging a secret, by which no person living could be a sufferer.” ”

“ Any quotation from particular parts of old poetry is liable to suspicion, and may be thought to be selected by the advocates on one side as remarkably harmonious, or by those on the other as uncommonly rugged and uncouth. I will therefore transcribe the first four lines of as many ancient poems as are now lying before me; and I request that they may be compared 5 with the opening of the Battle of Hastings, No 1, the piece which happens to stand first in the new quarto edition of Chatterton’s works. ”

“ George Hardinge’s Rowley and Chatterton in the Shades brilliantly depicts various scenes in the other world after news of the Rowley controversy is carried there. The most hilarious performance of the year—indeed, of the entire controversy—was the Archaeological Epistle to Dean Milles, published by John Nichols at the end of March,29 which turned the language of the Rowley poems ingeniously against the two fumbling historians. Such pieces would have appeared whether or not Malone had written the Cursory Observations. ”

“ After his arrival in London, if his forgeries had met with any success, he would undoubtedly have produced ancient poetry without end; but perceiving that the gentleman in whom he expected 50 to find at once a dupe and a patron, was too clear-sighted to be deceived by such evident fictions, and that he could earn a livelihood by his talents, without fabricating old Mss. in order to gain a few shillings from Mess. Barrett and Catcott, he deserted his original plan, and we hear little more of Rowley’s verses. ”

“ And here the cautious conduct of Chatterton’s new commentator is very remarkable. All the similies that poor Chatterton borrowed 16 from Pope’s or Chapman’s Homer, to embellish his Battle of Hastings, are exhibited boldly; but then “they were all clearly copied from the original of the Grecian Bard,” in whom we are taught, that Rowley was better read than any other man, during the preceding or subsequent century: but in the tragedy of Ella, and other pieces, where we in almost every page meet with lines and half-lines of Shakspeare, Dryden, &c. ”

“ Every poetical reader will find instances of modern phraseology in almost every page of these spurious productions. I will only add, before I quit the subject of style, that it is observable, that throughout these poems we never find a noun in the plural number joined with a verb in the singular; an offence against grammar which every ancient poet, from the time of Chaucer to that of Shakespeare, has frequently committed, and from which Rowley, if such a poet had existed, would certainly not have been exempted. ”

“ While they are perusing the poems of the fictitious Rowley, they constantly compare them with the poetry of the fifteenth century; and are ready every moment to exclaim, how much he surpasses all his contemporaries. While the verses that Chatterton acknowledged as his 47 own, are passing under their eyes, they still recollect that they are the productions of a boy of seventeen; and are slow to allow them even that merit which they undoubtedly possess. ”

“ Desist from attempting to deceive the learned; you can only deceive the vulgar.”
Beside the marks of forgery already pointed out, these poems bear yet another badge of fraud, which has not, I believe, been noticed by any critick. Chatterton’s verses have been shown to be too smooth and harmonious to be genuine compositions of antiquity: they are liable at the same time to the very opposite objection; they are too old for the era to which they are ascribed. This sounds like a paradox; yet it will be found to be true. The versification is too modern; the language often too ancient. ”

“ In London (as the same writer observes) was to be learned that which even genius cannot teach, the knowledge of life. Extemporaneous bread was to be earned more suddenly than even Chatterton could write poems for Rowley ”

“ In his comparison of “Rowley’s” smooth versification with the work of authentic late-medieval poets—the passage which, as we shall see, Tyrwhitt thought so effective—Malone introduced two further quotations and substituted the first lines from Bradshaw’s Holy Life for those he had quoted in the magazine.25 Malone’s additions to his essay, which taken together amount to some twenty pages (in a pamphlet of sixty-two pages) , represent a careful effort to support with an irresistable battery of arguments the main line of attack which he had thrown against the Rowleians. ”

“ It is sufficient, that Chatterton thought this was the case; that he made the attempt in the presence of a credible witness, to whom he acknowledged the purpose for which the manœuvre was done. We are asked indeed, why he did not prepare his pretended original before he published the copy. To this another question is the best answer. Why is not fraud always uniform and consistent, and armed at all points? Happily for mankind it scarcely ever is. ”

“ I. It is very obvious, that the first and principal objection to the antiquity of these poems is the smoothness of the versification. A series of more than three thousand lines, however disfigured by old spelling, flowing for the most part as smoothly as any of Pope’s—is a difficult matter to be got over. Accordingly the learned Mythologist, Mr. Bryant, has laboured hard to prove, either, that other poets of the fifteenth century have written as smoothly, or, if you will not allow him this, that Rowley was a prodigy, and wrote better than all his contemporaries ”

“ With respect to the stanza that Chatterton has employed in his two poems on the Battle of Hastings, Mr. Bryant and the Dean of Exeter seem to think that they stand on sure ground, and confidently quote Gascoigne, to prove that such a stanza was known to our old English poets. “The greatest 14 part of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (says the latter gentleman, p. 30) , and his Legend of Good Women, are in the decasyllabick couplet; but in general Lidgate’s, Occleve’s, Rowley’s, Spenser’s, and a great part of Chaucer’s poetry, is written in stanzas of seven, eight, or nine decasyllabick lines ”

“ On the first of December, Jacob Bryant published his voluminous Observations upon the Poems of Thomas Rowley: in which the authenticity of those poems is ascertained.7 Some ten days later, Jeremiah Milles, Dean of Exeter and President of the Society of Antiquaries, brought out his own “edition” of the poems, with a commentary providing extensive historical proof of what Bryant “ascertained.”8 The remarks of Warton and Tyrwhitt suddenly seemed hasty and superficial. ”

“ I cannot dismiss this gentleman without taking notice of a position which he has laid down, and is indeed the basis of almost all the arguments that he has urged to prove the authenticity of the Bristol Mss. It is this; that as every authour must know his own meaning, and as Chatterton has sometimes given wrong interpretations of words that are found in the poems attributed to Rowley, he could not be the authour of those poems. ”

“ The suicide of the young poet in 1770 made his story of discovering ancient manuscripts all the more intriguing. When Thomas Tyrwhitt published the first collected edition in March of 1777,2 speculation about whether the poems were the work of Rowley or Chatterton began in earnest. ”

“ If however, after all, a little inferiority should be found in Chatterton’s acknowledged productions, it may be easily accounted for. Enjoin a young poet to write verses on any subject, and after he has finished his exercise, show him how Shakspeare, Dryden, and Pope, have treated the same subject. Let him then write a second copy of verses, still on the same theme. This latter will probably be a Cento from the works of the authours that he has just perused. The one will have the merit of originality ”

“ What are we to conclude, if in Chatterton’s imitations of Homer, we discover some circumstances that exist in Pope’s translation, of which but very faint traces appear in the original Greek? Such, I believe, may be found. It is observable, that in all the similies we meet with many of the very rhymes that Pope has used. Will this Commentator contend, that the learned Rowley not only understood Homer, at a time when his contemporaries had scarcely heard of his name, but also foresaw in the reign of Edward IV. those additional 22 graces with which Mr. ”

“ This great man, we have already seen, had an idea of many of the useful arts of life some years before they were practised. Here he appears to have had a confused notion of that noble invention, the printing-press. To prevent misconstruction, I should add, that boke in the above passage means manuscript, no other books being then known; In other parts of his works, as represented by Chatterton, he 61 speaks of Mss. as contradistinguished from books; but in all those places it is reasonable to suppose some interpolation by Chatterton, and those who choose it, may read book instead of manuscript ”

“ M* In Chatterton’s poems many words occur, that were undoubtedly coined by him; as mole, dolce, droke, glytted, aluste, &c. All these his new editor has inserted in a very curious performance which he is pleased to call a Glossary, with such interpretations at the context supplied, without even attempting to support them either by analogy or the authority of our ancient writers. When he could not readily find a word that would suit his metre, he invented oneM*. ”

“ So fought,” &c. &c.—If the reverend Antiquarian can find this kind of phraseology in any one poet of the time of King Edward IV., or even for fifty years afterwards, I will acknowledge the antiquity of every line contained in his quarto volume. Most assuredly neither he nor his colleague can produce any such instance. ”

“ I am sensible (says he, in his Observations, p. 166,) that the plays mentioned above [the Chester Mysteries] seem to have been confined to religious subjects.—But though the monks of the times confined themselves to these subjects, it does not follow that people of more learning and genius were limited in the same manner. ”

“ B. that the hand-writing, indeed, is not that of any particular age, but that it is very difficult to know precisely the era of a Ms., especially when of great antiquity; that our kings wrote very different hands, and many of them such, that it is impossible to distinguish one from the other; and that the diminutive size of the parchments 29 on which these poems were written, F* At the bottom of each sheet of old deeds (of which there were many in the Bristol chest) there is usually a blank space of about four or five inches in breadth. ”

“ On the whole, the reviewer said, “Mr. Malone deserves much praise for his very clear and comprehensive view” of the controversy.34
In their replies to Bryant and Milles, both Warton and Tyrwhitt referred appreciatively to the Cursory Observations. Warton found that he had duplicated Malone’s method of rewriting Chatterton’s acknowledged poetry. In a footnote, he said: “The ingenious author of Cursory Observations on the Poems of Rowley, has been beforehand with me in this sort of tryal. ”

“ He then cites some verses of blind Harry, (who knows not blind Harry?) written in the time of King Edward IV.; and some from the Pilgrimage of the Soul, printed by Caxton in 1483. I will not encumber my page by transcribing them; and will only observe, that they do not at all prove the point for which they are adduced, being by no means harmonious. But were these few verses ever so smooth, they would not serve to decide the matter in controversy. The question is not, whether in Chaucer, or any other ancient English poet, we can find a dozen lines as smooth as ”