There is a wide distance between the achievements of this untaught lad of humble birth and narrow opportunities, and the works of the great Sir Walter, with his matured powers and his stores of solid antiquarian lore. But the impulse that conducted them to their not dissimilar tasks was the same. In "Yarrow Revisited," Wordsworth uses, _a propos_ of Scott, the expression "localized romance." It was, indeed, the absorbing local feeling of Scott, his patriotism, his family pride, his attachment to the soil, that brought passion and poetry into his historical pursuits. With Chatterton, too, this absorption in the past derived its intensity from his love of place. Bristol was his world; in "The Battle of Hastings," he did not forget to introduce a Bristowan contingent, led by a certain fabulous Alfwold, and performing prodigies of valor upon the Normans. The image of mediaeval life which he succeeded in creating was, of course, a poor, faint _simulacrum_, compared with Scott's. He lacked knowledge, leisure, friends, long life--everything that was needed to give his work solidity. All that he had was a creative, though undisciplined imagination, together with an astonishing industry, persistence, and secretiveness. Yet with all his disadvantages, his work, with all its imperfections, is far more striking than the imitative verse of the Wartons, or the thin, diffused medievalism of Walpole and Clara Reeve. It is the product of a more original mind and a more intense conception. In the muniment room over the north porch of St. Mary Redcliffe's were several old chests filled with parchments: architectural memoranda, church-wardens' accounts, inventories of vestments, and similar parish documents. One of these chests, known as Master Canynge's coffer, had been broken open some years before, and whatever was of value among its contents removed to a place of safety. The remainder of the parchments had been left scattered about, and Chatterton's father had carried a number of them home and used them to cover copy-books. The boy's eye was attracted by these yellow sheep-skins, with their antique script; he appropriated them and kept them locked up in his room.