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shortly to be provided, as it happened, by the same Thomas Tyrwhitt who had edited Chaucer and corrected earlier impressions about the pronunciation of his verse. In 1777 Tyrwhitt produced an edition of Poems, supposed to have been written at Bristol, by Thomas Rowley, and others, in the fifteenth century. In the third edition, published a year later, he added—and issued as a separate publication—an Appendix: containing some observations upon the language of the poems attributed to Rowley; tending to prove that they were written, not by any ancient author, but entirely by Thomas Chatterton.

At the same time, though, we might note that Johnson, whatever his incredulity about Rowley, was quite willing to praise Chatterton, the poet Wordsworth would later call “the marvelous boy”54 to whom Keats would dedicate his “Endymion,” whose modern poems were so unsuccessful, became a sensation, beloved of the early Romantics, and a herald of the new medievalism that would interest Lamb, Hazlitt, Rossetti, and William Morris. Undoubtedly, his tragic death had something to do with it—Wordsworth describes him as “The sleepless soul that perished in his pride”—but Keats’s friend Benjamin Bailey stressed the fact that Keats was taken with Chatterton’s poetry:

Methinks I now hear him recite, or chant, in his peculiar manner, the following stanza of the “Roundelay sung by the minstrels of Ella”:

“Come with acorn cup & thorn,

Drain my hertys blood away;

Life & all its goods I scorn,

Dance by night or feast by day.”

The first line to his ear possessed the great charm. Indeed his sense of melody was quite exquisite, as is apparent in his own verses; & in none more than in numerous passages of his Endymion.55

The issue of the authorship and authenticity of the Rowley poems continued to be debated in some circles at least until W. W. Skeat’s edition in 1871, a hundred and one years after Chatterton’s death. But we should note that by that time, the context was a volume called The Poetical Works of Thomas Chatterton, with an essay on the Rowley poems. The “trouvaille” about which Walpole had jested, the “found” poems and “found” poet of the fifteenth century, were now proudly repackaged as the works of Chatterton. Somewhat ironically, we may think, Skeat’s introduction noted that the spelling in the longest and most important of the Rowley poems had been modernized, an improvement he thought long overdue, “so as to render them at last, after the lapse of a century, accessible for the first time to the general public.”56 The inventive orthography that had distinguished these poems as “authentically” of the fifteenth century, painstakingly gleaned by Chatterton from a Chaucer glossary, from the ballads collected by Bishop Percy, and from the words marked obsolete in two etymological dictionaries, was now, by an editorial decision about accessibility to the general public, made to disappear.

As for the fictional Ossian (the same Celtic hero Yeats would write of as Oisin), James Macpherson had claimed that he translated authentic documents written by a third-century Irish bard. No manuscripts were ever produced or found, and Dr. Johnson, never a fan of Scots or Scotland, famously (and accurately) accused Macpherson of “imposture.”57 Chatterton died a spectacular death and become a celebrity; Macpherson lived almost till the end of the eighteenth century, traveled briefly to Florida, worked for Lord North’s government, wrote history, and ended as a member of Parliament, buried in Westminster Abbey a short distance from his detractor, Dr. Johnson. But The Poems of Ossian, the Son of Fingal, purportedly translated and edited by Macpherson, would continue to appear from 1765 through the end of the following century, usually reprinted with an essay by Hugh Blair, a celebrated professor of rhetoric at the University of Edinburgh, defending the authenticity of the works.58

Ossian’s other admirers included Walter Scott, the young J. W. von Goethe (who translated sections of it for The Sorrows of Young Werther), Johann Gottfried von Herder, and the