=2. Thomas Chatterton (1752–70).= Chatterton was born at Bristol, and was apprenticed to an attorney. At the age of eighteen he went to London to seek his fortune as a poet. Almost at once he lapsed into penury, and, being too proud to beg, poisoned himself with arsenic. He was eighteen years old. The brevity and pathos of Chatterton’s career have invested it with a fame peculiar in our literature. He is held up as the martyr of genius, sacrificed by the callousness of the public. His fate, however, was largely due to his own vanity and recklessness, and his genius has perhaps been overrated. In 1768, while still at Bristol, he issued a collection of poems which seemed archaic in style and spelling. These, he said, he had found in an ancient chest lodged in a church in Bristol; and he further stated that most of them had been written by a monk of the fifteenth century, by name Thomas Rowley. The collection received the name of _The Rowley Poems_, and includes several ballads, one of which is _The Battle of Hastings_, and some descriptive and lyrical pieces, such as _Songs to Ælla_. A slight knowledge of Middle English reveals that they are forgeries thinly disguised with antique spelling and phraseology; but, especially after their author’s death, they gained much currency, and had some influence on their time. There is much rubbish in the poems, but in detached passages there is real beauty, along with a marvelous precocity of thought. =3. William Blake (1757–1827).= Blake was a Londoner, being born the son of a City hosier. At the age of ten he was an artist; at the age of twelve he was a poet; and thereafter his father apprenticed him to an engraver. All his life Blake saw visions and dreamed dreams, hovering on the brink of insanity; and his mental peculiarities are abundantly revealed in the two arts that he made his own. His engravings and his poems, conceived on wild and fantastic lines, kept him fully occupied all his life, though they brought him neither money nor fame. But his desires were easily satisfied, and he died poor and unknown, but cheerful and serene, in the city of his birth. His chief poetical works are _Poetical Sketches_ (1783), _Songs of Innocence_ (1789), and _Songs of Experience_ (1794). They are extraordinary compositions, full of unearthly visions, charming simplicity, and baffling obscurity. His genius is undoubted, but it is wayward and fitful, the sport of his unbalanced mind. His astonishing lines on the tiger are well known, and are a good specimen of his poetical gifts: Tiger, tiger, burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? * * * * * And what shoulder and what art Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And, when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand and what dread feet? * * * * *