trickster, now mystifying a blind old woman at Paris; now sending open letters, privately nullified, recommending the bearers to his friend the envoy at Florence; now, with the mechanic aid of village carpenters and bricklayers, rearing a frail edifice bristling with false points, and persuading the world that it was all pure Gothic, perhaps chuckling at his assurance--even this shrewd mummer gravely shook his head at Chatterton, and frowned on him as a cheat! True; they were both cheats; Horace Walpole from apprehensive vanity; Chatterton from proud oblique humility. The Bristol boy knew his worth; but, doubting the equity as well as the sagacity of his judges, he did not venture to produce it as his own. He supposed that an obscure and penniless youth, such as he, could have little chance of attention or fair play in the world if he appeared in his proper character; so he painfully assumed another, of a nature that could not long have been supported even had he been a various linguist deeply versed in etymologies, and especially proficient in our extinct idioms, and their several dates of usage, instead of wanting even Latin enough to understand the easiest parts of Skinner's Etymology of the English tongue, one of the books that he consulted and guessed at. Of all modern suicides this youth was the most interesting; of all literary impostors the least unpardonable, though his ways were, unhappily for himself, of indefensible crookedness. He neither ascribed his fictions to a great name as Ireland did, nor did he, like Macpherson, steal the heart out of national ballads and traditions, to stuff a Bombastes Penseroso of his own making. Any competent, yet moderately indulgent reader, who should for the first time take up Chatterton's works, and beginning at the beginning, in Tyrwhitt's first edition, for example, peruse no more than sixty or seventy pages, would probably lay down the volume somewhat disappointed not to have found the very extraordinary merit he had expected. The compositions that this partial examination would take in are three--Eclogues, Elinour and Juga, Verses to Lydgate, with Song to Ella, Lydgate's Answer, and the Tournament. The first Eclogue is a conversation between two fugitive shepherds, who bewail the wretched condition to which the barons' wars have reduced them. It contains some pleasing lines. As the rustics discuss their grievances in a valley under cover of