gleam of his wild heart's yet wilder hopes. In London he entered upon the field of politics, and soon became a caterer for a party newspaper. Then followed the grinding meanness of booksellers and editors; and maddened by the consciousness that his genius was poured out only as water on the dust--that the exertions which he had trusted would make him great among men, did not suffice to clothe him and allay hunger,--maddened with the knowledge of these sad truths, are we to marvel that poor Chatterton should "have done his own death?" Chatterton was not unlike Byron. The morbid misanthropy hanging unfixedly about the former--fully developed in the latter--was in both but a retort upon their fellows. Both had hearts which only detraction or cold neglect could harden into a hatred of humanity. Both threw out venom against their enemies. But whence came this venom? The affections of both were at one time as pure as the sap of the fabled honey-tree. It was only by a fermentation produced by the hot atmosphere of hostility or cruel slight, that the sap, once blander than honey, became a bitter poison. Chatterton was like Byron too in many other respects,--in his hunger after immortality--in his alternations of excess and abstinence--in his self-consciousness of genius--and in the most dark and deistic views of death. Need I, after all that I have said of his ambition, his struggles, and his most reckless tone of writing, say that Chatterton's was a fiery and determined spirit? "His affections were subordinate to the sterner leanings of the brain. He had the stout soul and the tender heart of the old-time troubabour; but his heart was less tender than his soul was stout." Chatterton could never have been happy. The presence of ambition--that brain-ache--would have made him miserable, had he lived beyond the green season of youth even to its gratification. But why do I say that he could have never been happy? There are surely more kinds of happiness than the one quiet kind of which Darby and Joan are a fit instance. Is there _not_ a thunder-storm kind? The mysterious joy which we see thrown from the heart to the face in the picture of "Byron on the sea-shore," is surely a species of happiness. Chatterton, with hope to support him, might have been happy in the darkest struggles of a dark career. With hope to support him! But "that was the misery." Despair came to him and he died, (not out of his boyhood) with no thought of future renown--with no thought but of present obscurity and present wretchedness.