Among the lighter honours of social distinction, we can fancy his reception as a London "lion," by the fair and noble in proud places. Still pleasanter is the vision of his less public hours of idleness spent among congenial spirits. We can fancy him, the patriarch of living poets, seated as a guest at the breakfast-table of Samuel Rogers, who is about twelve years his junior, and those fine lads, Lisle Bowles, James Montgomery, and William Wordsworth, and those promising children, Tom Moore and Tom Campbell, and that braw chiel John Wilson--(_palmam qui meruit ferat_)--the youngest of the party something, perhaps, but not much, under seventy, except the bard of the Isle of Palms, who is no chicken; and unless the master of the feast have summoned those pretty babes from the Wood, the two Tennysons. But alas for Chatterton! the vision will not hold: he disappears from his chair at the feast, like Banquo--"and, when all's done, you look but on a stool." The ghost of the slayer of himself, after long haunting Strawberry Hill, to rebuke the senile complacency of the chronicler of royal and noble authors, repaired, after the death of that prosperous man of wit and fashion, to his native town, to prowl in Redcliff church, and about the graves of his fathers in its churchyard, and the graves which they had successively dug there during a century and a half. His bones were left to moulder among those of other pauper strangers in the burial-ground of Shoelane workhouse. We attach no credit to the story of the exhumation of his body, and its mysterious reinterment in Redcliff. His fathers were sextons; and he, too, was in some sort a sexton also--but spiritually and transcendantly. He buried his genius in the visionary grave of Rowley, "an old chest in an upper room over the chapel on the north side of Redcliff church;" and thence, most rare young conjurer, he evoked its spirit in the shape of fragments of law-parchment, quaintly inscribed with spells of verse and armorial hieroglyphics, to puzzle antiquaries and make fools of scholiasts. Puzzle them he did; and they could not forgive a clever stripling, whom hunger had tempted to don an ancient mask, and impose himself on their spectacled eyes as a reverend elder. Rogue!--vagabond! Profligate impostor! The slim, sleek, embroidered juggler of the Castle of Otranto had not a kind word for this ragged orphan of his own craft. He, whose ambition was to shine among writers who have given intellectual grace to their noble lineage--among whom assuredly he does and will shine--but whose acute consciousness of something meretricious in his metal, made him doubt if the public would accept coinage from his mint; and so caused him to wear tentative disguises, whether he elaborated a romance or a keen and playful witticism--and who really did injustice to his own powers,--not from modesty but meanness,--even he, the son of a prime minister and heir to a peerage--a man who was himself always something of a