Rowley

“ I will take no such words from no man, and from no woman neither.”
“Leave this room, fellow,” says she haughtily.
“Sink me, if I do,” I says. “Here I have come and here I stay; and what is more, I design to taste those pretty lips on this instant”—with which I made as if to approach her.
But she started away with an evil countenance on her, and Old Rowley sat in his seat, balancing a crown upon the spaniel’s nose, and paying no heed to us. But, presently, her ladyship’s face changed very smartly, when she saw me advance, and she called to old Rowley. ”

“ In an instant Rowley had dexterously jumped out on to the pavement; the occupant of the other hansom, whose wheel was locked into theirs, obeying the same instinct, had done the same.
"Why, if ain't Teddy Vere. Oh my!" ejaculated one feminine voice shrilly, while from under a red parasol, still open, another groaned, "Rowley! it can't be! Oh, what will become of me?"
Self-preservation is the first law of nature; the woman who hesitates is lost. Before another minute had passed Nina was out of one cab and into another close by. ”

“ But she then, coming forward very rapidly, started aback slightly, on seeing me and drew herself up, questioning His Majesty with her eyes.
“Madam,” says Old Rowley, bowing very gravely, “’Tis a friend of mine—this good gentleman, to whom your name being used with all admiration, he conceived a warm desire to be presented to you; the which, as one acquainted with your catholicity, I have made bold to grant. Like myself, he stands without the Law, following an illicit calling.” ”

“ How they could have found out about the account so early is more than I can fathom; some strange coincidence must have played me false! But there the fact is; and, Rowley, I’ll not only have to say farewell to you presently, I’ll have to ask you to stay indoors until I can say it. Remember, my boy, it’s only so that you can serve me now.”
“W’y, sir, you say the word, and of course I’ll do it!” he cried. “’Nothink by ’alves,’ is my motto! I’m your man, through thick and thin, live or die, I am!” ”

“ Meanwhile I observed Rowley fretting visibly at the bit; another moment, and he would have added a last touch of the ridiculous to our arrival by coming to his hands with the postillion.
“Rowley!” cried I reprovingly.
Strictly it should have been Gammon; but in the hurry of the moment, my fault (I can only hope) passed unperceived. At the same time I caught the eye of the postmaster. He was long and lean, and brown and bilious; he had the drooping nose of the humorist, and the quick attention of a man of parts. ”

“ CHAPTER LXXVI. "WE SHALL BE SO POOR."
Mr. Glascock at that moment was not only in Florence, but was occupying rooms in the very hotel in which the Rowleys were staying. Lady Rowley, when she heard that he was engaged to marry an American lady, became suddenly very sick at heart,—sick with a sickness that almost went beyond her heart. She felt ill, and was glad to be alone. The rumour might be untrue. Such rumours generally are untrue. But then, as Lady Rowley knew very well, they generally have some foundation in truth. ”

“ That divine cockney, if the word may be used—and 'why in the name of glory,' to borrow the phrase of another immortal fellow-townsman, should it not be?—as a term of no less honour than Yorkshireman or Northumbrian, Cornishman or Welshman, has lavished upon Rowley such cordial and such manfully sympathetic praise as would suffice to preserve and to immortalize the name of a far lesser man and a far feebler workman in tragedy or comedy, poetry or prose. ”

“ Rowley! And there’s one thing to be said for my cousin—I mean for Mr. Powl’s Viscount—he has a very fair figure.”
“O, don’t you be took in, Mr. Anne,” quoth the faithless Rowley: “he has to be hyked into a pair of stays to get them things on!”
“Come, come, Mr. Rowley,” said I, “this is telling tales out of school! Do not you be deceived. The greatest men of antiquity, including Cæsar and Hannibal and Pope Joan, may have been very glad, at my time of life or Alain’s, to follow his example. ’Tis a misfortune common to all ”

“ Snip to the Fraction, as they peeped through the hedge. “Lucy persuaded him to come.”
Anthony himself looked rather sad and depressed; he sighed, and said “Heigho!” But Rowley-Powley, Gammon, and Spinach were three of the liveliest imps you ever saw. Anthony Rowley bowed to the Grand Panjandrum, his three imps only set faces.
“Go on, tell all you know, and don’t ‘Heigho’ more than you can help,” whispered the Young Man.
“Heigho,” sighed Anthony Rowley. “Life is a tragedy, and I, poor, miserable creature that I am, know only too well the discomfort of uncongenial surroundings.” ”

“ Coining and forging, indeed, he was bent upon, and meant to join himself, some day or other, to a company which, in their eyes, would have appeared stranger than a troop of gipsies. He was already, child as he was, forging the name and deeds of Thomas Rowley, and fathering upon him the glorious coinage of his own brain. A great and immortal guest was theirs, and they did not know it. One of themselves was marked by the passing angel of destiny as the one of all his generation [Pg 273] doomed to the fearful sacrifice of a sad but eternal fame. ”

“ I said, "let us abandon committees and return to Mrs. Rowley."
"Well," she said, "we soon got on to the War."
"You might easily do that," I said. "The subject has its importance. What does Mrs. Rowley think of it?"
"Mrs. Rowley thinks it's all perfectly splendid. She hasn't the least doubt about anything. She knows the uncle of a man whose cousin is in the War Office and often sees Lord Kitchener in the corridors, and he's quite certain——"
"Who? ”

“ II. THE VALUE OF ROWLEY'S POEMS—PHILOLOGICAL AND LITERARY As imitations of fifteenth-century composition it must be confessed the Rowley poems have very little value. Of Chatterton's method of antiquating something has already been said. He made himself an antique lexicon out of the glossary to Speght's Chaucer, and such words as were marked with a capital O, standing for 'obsolete' in the Dictionaries of Kersey and Bailey. ”

“ Rowley appears to have excelled in describing a certain amiable quietness of disposition and disinterested tone of morality, carried almost to a paradoxical excess, as in his Fair Quarrel, and in the comedy of A Woman never Vexed, which is written, in many parts, with a pleasing simplicity and naiveté equal to the novelty of the conception. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ In order to escape a marriage urged by the king, Canynge retired to the college of Westbury in Gloucestershire, where he enjoyed the society of Rowley, and eventually became dean of the institution. In “The Storie of William Canynge,” one of the shorter pieces of his ingenious romance, his early history is recorded.
This beautiful picture of the childhood of the ideal patron of Rowley is in reality that of the poet himself—“the fate-marked babe,” with his wondrous child-genius, and all his romantic dreams realized. ”

“ But in the underplot of 'A Fair Quarrel' Rowley's besetting faults of coarseness and quaintness, stiffness and roughness, are so flagrant and obtrusive that we cannot avoid a feeling of regret and irritation at such untimely and inharmonious evidence of his partnership with a poet of finer if not of sturdier genius. ”

“ From the engraving in Tyrwhitt's edition.]
[Footnote 3: See Southey and Cottle's edition, quoted in Skeat, ii, p. 123.]
[Footnote 4: Dean Milles has a delightful account of the reception accorded to Rowley in the Chatterton household. Neither mother nor sister would appear to have understood a line of the poems, but Mary Chatterton (afterwards Mrs. Newton) remembered she had been particularly wearied with a 'Battle of Hastings' of which her brother would continually and enthusiastically recite portions.] ”

“ Of Rowley’s origin and birth nothing is known. He first appears as collaborator in a play of Queen Anne’s men in 1607, and, although he may have also acted with this company, there is no evidence of the fact. His name is in the patent of 30 March 1610 for the Duke of York’s men with that of Thomas Hobbes, to whom his pamphlet A Search for Money (1609, Percy Soc. ii.) is dedicated. He acted as their payee from 1610 to 1615, and they played his Hymen’s Holiday or Cupid’s Vagaries, now lost, in 1612. A Knave in Print and The Fool without Book, entered as his on 9 Sept. ”

“ All the similies that poor Chatterton borrowed 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. the reverend Antiquarian is less liberal of his illustrations. ”

“ His declaration that the Battle of Hastings I was his own.
4. Rudhall's testimony.
5. Chatterton first exhibited the Songe to Ælla in his own handwriting, then gave Barrett the parchment, which contained strange textual variations.
6. Rowley's very existence doubtful.
William of Worcester, who lived at his time and was himself of
Bristol, makes no mention of him, though he frequently alludes to
Canynge. Neither Bale, Leland, Pitts nor Turner mentions Rowley.
7. Improbability of there being poems in a muniment chest. 8. Style unlike other fifteenth century writings. ”

“ William Rowley is described as the chief comedian in the Prince of Wales’s company, and it was doubtless during the two years’ union (1614–16) of these players with the Lady Elizabeth’s company that he was brought into contact with Middleton. Rowley joined the King’s Servants in 1623, and retired from the stage about four years later. The fact of his marriage is recorded in 1637, and he is supposed to have died about 1642. Four plays attributed to his sole authorship are extant: A new Wonder, A Woman never Vext (printed, 1632) ”

“ A letter addressed to the Acrobats' Club will reach me.
Sir Rowley came home dispirited and unhappy, and could not give much comfort to his daughter. The magistrate had told him that though the cabman might probably be punished for taking the ladies otherwise than as directed,—if the direction to Baker Street could be proved,—nothing could be done to punish the father. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This being granted, I have nothing to do but to prove, that the language of the poems attributed to Rowley (when every proper allowance has been made) is totally different from that of the other English writers of the XV Century, in many material particulars. It would be too tedious to go through them all; and therefore I shall only take notice of such as can be referred to three general heads; the first consisting of words not used by any other writer; the second, of words used by other writers, but in a different sense ”

“ 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 ”

“ Milles was President of the Society of Antiquaries and his commentary is characterized by Professor Skeat as 'perhaps the most surprising trash in the way of notes that was ever penned.
1782. Mathias' Essay on the Evidence ... relating to the poems called Rowley's—he is pro-Rowleian and criticizes Tyrwhitt's appendix.
1782. Thomas Warton's Enquiry ... into the Poems attributed to Thomas Rowley—Anti-Rowleian. ”

“ One difficulty surmounted, strengthened the capacity for conquering others; perseverance gave facility, till at length his vigorous attention was effectually directed to what he called "antique lore:" and this confirmed bias of his mind, connected as it was, with his inveterate proneness to impose on others, and supported by talents which have scarcely been equalled, reduces the magnified wonder of Rowley, to a plain, comprehensible question. ”

“ And if it appears matter for surprise that there should ever have been any controversy about the authorship of the Rowley writings, in view of the lad's admission that he had written three such signal pieces as the Bristowe Tragedy, the first Battle of Hastings, and Onn oure Ladies Chyrche, it must be considered that the production of the greater part of the poems by a poorly educated boy not turned seventeen would naturally appear a circumstance more surprising than that such a boy should tell a lie and claim some of them as his own. ”