A few months after, at the first annual dinner of the newly founded Royal Academy of Art, Goldsmith,[11] being present, talked at table of a certain extraordinary lad who had come up the year before from Bristol--and had died the summer past--literally of starvation--leaving behind him certain wonderful poems, which in their phrases, he said, had an air of great antiquity. And Horace Walpole being also present--he never omitted being present at a Royal Society dinner, when it was possible for him to go--overhearing the talk and the name, said (we may fancy), "Bless me, young Chatterton, to be sure!--I had some correspondence with the young man; nice poems--but apocryphal--poor fellow; dead is he--starved, eh? dear me?--shocking--quite so!" and I suppose that he took snuff and dusted his ruffles thereafter, and then toyed with his delicate glass of fine old Sercial Madeira. This was like {207} Walpole--wantonly like him. There had been a correspondence, as he condescendingly admitted, that I will tell you of. This Bristol boy, growing up in sight of Durdham downs, and the gorge of the Avon and blue hills of Wales--with poetic visions haunting him--had somehow come upon old parchments--perhaps out of the muniment rooms of St. Mary's Redcliffe church, where his father had been sexton; he had been captivated by the quaint lettering, and awed by the odor of sanctity; and straightway imaged to himself an old mediæval priest, to be clothed upon with his own poetic sensibilities, and in the rusty phrases of the fourteenth century, to unfold to the world the poetic yearnings and aspirations that were seething in the brain of this wonderful boy. The ancient Dictionaries and old copies of Chaucer supplied the language; the antique parchments gave local allusions and the nomenclature; and for inspiration and motive--the winds that blew from over Chepstow and Tintern Abbey, and Caerleon, and whistled round the buttresses of St. Mary's Redcliffe--supplied more than enough. So began {208} the modern antique poems of Thomas Rowley; not a new device in the literary world; for Macpherson, whom we shall encounter presently, only a few years before had launched some of the "Ossian" poems, to the great wonderment and puzzle of the literary world; and Walpole, still earlier, had claimed a false antiquity and Neapolitan origin for his _Castle of Otranto_. To Walpole, therefore, the eager boy sent some fragments of his Rowley poems, which Walpole courteously acknowledged, and asked for a continuance of such favors. Poor Chatterton, presuming on this courtesy wrote again, declaring his dependent condition--apprenticed to a scrivener, and with mother and sister dependent on him--but believing that with God's help, and the encouragement of his distinguished patron, he might find the way to other and better Rowley poems.