At last, after a vain attempt to obtain an appointment as a surgeon's mate to Africa, he made up his mind to suicide. A guinea had been sent him by a gentleman, which he declined. Mrs Angel, his landlady, knowing him to be in want, the day before his death offered him his dinner, but this also he spurned; and, on the 25th of August 1770, having first destroyed all his papers, he swallowed arsenic, and was found dead in his bed. He was buried in a shell in the burial-place of Shoe-Lane Workhouse. He was aged seventeen years nine months and a few days. Alas for 'The sleepless soul that perished in his pride!' Chatterton, had he lived, would, perhaps, have become a powerful poet, or a powerful character of some kind. But we must now view him chiefly as a prodigy. Some have treated his power as unnatural--resembling a huge hydrocephalic head, the magnitude of which implies disease, ultimate weakness, and early death. Others maintain that, apart from the extraordinary elements that undoubtedly characterised Chatterton, and constituted him a premature and prodigious birth intellectually, there was also in parts of his poems evidence of a healthy vigour which only needed favourable circumstances to develop into transcendent excellence. Hazlitt, holding with the one of these opinions, cries, 'If Chatterton had had a great work to do by living, he would have lived!' Others retort on the critic, 'On the same principle, why did Keats, whom you rate so high, perish so early?' The question altogether is nugatory, seeing it can never be settled. Suffice it that these songs and rhymes of Chatterton have great beauties, apart from the age and position of their author. There may at times be madness, but there is method in it. The flight of the rhapsody is ever upheld by the strength of the wing, and while the reading discovered is enormous for a boy, the depth of feeling exhibited is equally extraordinary; and the clear, firm judgment which did not characterise his conduct, forms the root and the trunk of much of his poetry. It was said of his eyes that it seemed as if fire rolled under them; and it rolls still, and shall ever roll, below many of his verses. BRISTOWE TRAGEDY. 1 The feathered songster, chanticleer, Hath wound his bugle-horn, And told the early villager The coming of the morn. 2 King Edward saw the ruddy streaks Of light eclipse the gray, And heard the raven's croaking throat Proclaim the fated day. 3 'Thou'rt right,' quoth he, 'for by the God That sits enthroned on high! Charles Bawdin and his fellows twain To-day shall surely die.' 4 Then with a jug of nappy ale His knights did on him wait; 'Go tell the traitor that to-day He leaves this mortal state.' 5 Sir Canterlone then bended low, With heart brimful of woe; He journeyed to the castle-gate, And to Sir Charles did go.