BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES IO

qf Charitie, which affords either true émotion or présents sufficient perfection or originality to be termed a definite achievement rather than promising work.

Therefore, however hasty our inquiry may hâve been, we may perhaps safely conclude that, were it not for the undue amount of controversy raised by such spurious poems, were it not for the due amount of sympathy aroused by the poet's sad life and tragical death, the precocious genius of Chatterton, for lack of some perfect pièce embodying its originahty, would be quite forgotten. The interest which attaches to him being more human than literary or, even literarily speaking, more historical than aesthetic, the childpoet remains as one of the most pathetic représentatives of that superior degeneracy which shone even more brilliantly, if not so tragically, in such compeers of his as Villon, Greene, and Poe, for instance ; they ail together with him appeal to our pity in the very words of a saner and serener master : —

We poets in our youth begin in gladness;

But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness.