We were ushered up a flight of narrow stone stairs, from one of the transepts, into a room where yet remains a dusty chest, formerly belonging to a wealthy merchant in the reign of Edward IV. It was in this that Chatterton said he found his manuscripts,--declaring that, after being sealed up for centuries, these documents, among others, were there in 1727 when the chest was opened. It was in this room, with its unglazed openings, with the rooks as his companions, his only light that of the moon,--for he claimed that by her illumination he could write best,--were penned these remarkable impositions. History says that during the entire Sundays he would wander in the fields of Bristol, and lay for hours on the grass, gazing, rapt in meditation, on the tower of this old church. We can hardly forbear stating briefly the nature of his remarkable deception. Let it be remembered that Chatterton died at the age of eighteen. His father, who was one of the schoolmasters of Bristol, died three months before his birth. At the age of five he was sent to school; so obtuse was his intellect, that in a year and a half "he was dismissed as an incorrigible dunce." His mother finally taught him to read, and to the astonishment of all he became at once an intellectual prodigy. At the age of eight he was again sent to school, and remained till his fifteenth year. He took little interest in his associates, but gave his attention to miscellaneous reading. In 1767, the year he left school, he was apprenticed to a Bristol attorney. Very studious, but remarkably eccentric, he kept his own counsel, employing his leisure time in the study of theology, history, and especially the phraseology of Old English. The next season, when in his seventeenth year, he performed the work which immortalizes his name. The old chest was opened by the proper authorities a half-century before. The parchments were of no especial value, and they remained undisturbed, till Chatterton's father used some of them as covers for schoolbooks. Some of them his son obtained; their curious chirography and phraseology excited his attention, and he conceived the idea of writing something of the kind himself. He asserted that some were written by Canynge, the original owner of the _cofre_, or trunk, and others by Thomas Rowley, the ecclesiastic and poet. He carefully copied the style of writing, followed the phraseology, and, by a process known only to himself, succeeded in giving a stained and timeworn look to his parchments, deceptive to all who examined them.