marked, having been pursued by none of his contemporaries, if we except, perhaps, Macpherson, in the poems of Ossian; and these it is not probable that Chatterton had ever seen or heard of; for buried as he must have been amidst the Babel confusion of antique glossaries, he had but little time to spare for his own age; occupied as he was in pondering over those memorials of antiquity which time had rendered fixed, he could not direct his attention from them to the changes which it was every day making in the present state of things, and, not the least, certainly, in Chatterton's peculiar province, polite literature. Literary forgeries were things almost unheard of during the last century and were therefore well calculated by their novelty to attract the attention of those who did not feel or fancy disgust at their falsehood. The writers of the last century, whether of prose or poetry, had not yet learned to conceal themselves under a mask, which if they were successful, increased the reputation of the unknown through the magnifying power of mystery, and which, if they failed, threw their literary sins upon some one of the thousand sprites with which, modern invention has shown that terra incognita of letters is so fully peopled, and who are invoked from their inhabitation so often in modern times to grace an anonymous title page. There have been many squeamish critics who have decried the poems of Chatterton on the score of their being palpable forgerics. They have endeavored to dishonor the poet by injuring the character of the man. They have endeavored to render that literary fiction which is used to please the imagination a crime of the same nature with those forgeries which deprive us of fortune. But we cannot for our own parts perceive any greater want of moral feeling in deceptions of this kind, than in the every day practice of writing a tale or ballad introducing particular persons who never had existence except in the imagination, and following them through all the incidents of their history. It is a privilege which we conceive belongs undoubtedly to every man to draw at will upon the treasures of the muses, and, if his motives are honorable, if he interferes with the rightful interests of no other persons, if he binders no one from riding his particular hobby according to his own pleasure, he may appear at their shrines in any mask and make his offering under any name which may suit his fancy or his interest. Literary property is common to the whole world. The best title is that of having either created it or having been the first to appropriate it while it lay open to all other searchers, as well as ourselves. Whether we manage the prize properly, is our own risk; but as for the expediency and good taste of this form of literature every one may form such judgment as he pleases. And on this point, after acquitting Chatterton of every imputation of literary dishonesty, we think he was guilty of this great error of judgment. The course which he pursued was, perhaps, the chief cause of the disappointment of his hopes. Owing to the changes of the times, all living languages become so essentially altered (in their orthography, at least,) during the lapse of three or four centuries, that the words in common use for writing and speaking during the earlier, seem to the people of the later age, more like the members of a foreign language than the mere changes of dialect which time has affected. Thus, in the time of Cicero, the language in use under the Roman kings, and during the infancy of the republic, had become a dead letter to the people in general, and was only kept alive by the curiosity and learning of antiquarians. A few years afterwards, during the Augustan age, the celebrated Carmen Saliare of King Numa was absolutely unintelligible. It requires a constant recurrence to a glossary for a modern English scholar to read the tales of Chaucer, or the ancient version of the ballad of Chevy Chase. Nay, so quaint and obsolete is the ancient phraseology, that we, at times, ponder over the stanza, after we have rung the changes on the meaning of every word, and are as much at a loss to understand the sentiment and arrange the sentence, in the “lucidus ordo," as a school boy while puzzling over an intricate passage in his Sallust or Minora. In this manner the English of the time of Chatterton had been a different language from that of the days of the Plantagenets; and in his compositions, he must have felt himself fettered by his ignorance of the idiom and niceties of an unknown tongue. To be in any degree ignorant of a language in which it is proposed to write, is, we conceive, especially in poetry, the greatest embarrassment which can be put in the way of the efforts of genius; and we also think it impossible for a man to obtain a perfect knowledge of more than one language in the course of a life, and that one language must be the one of his childhood, of his youth, and of his manhood, the language in which he has always thought, which he has always been accustomed to hear, and which is connected with all his recollections and interwoven with his very existence. We could never admire the Horatian odes of Johnson, nor do we put much faith in the Ciceronian Latin of Dr. Parr ;, and if Byron himself had fully pursued his purpose of choosing the Italian language for his poettry, we fear that with all its natural sweetness and with all the inspiration of the poet, the work would hardly have equalled the English Corsair or Childe Harold. We should have had a medley of English idioms with Italian words which could not be understood by the mass of the readers of one nation, and would not be read but by a very small portion of the other. Independently, too, of the alterations of language, Chatterton had other difficulties to contend with, owing to the necessary differences of feeling and thinking between his own era and that of his forgeries. He was obliged to become an imitator and a copyist, instead of following the bent of his own genius. It was necessary that he should be able to breathe the spirit of antiquity into his modern compositions. If he could not do this, his writings must appear like sickly imitations, instead of the vigorous outpouring of the spirit of ancient song. The truth is, that, in this species of composition, we moderns must endeavor to catch the tone of feeling which has now been buried for ages. We must endeavor to render the inflated language of ancient poetry familiar to the pen. This we hold to be almost impossible. What appears to be graceful ease in Chaucer and Shakspeare changes in our hands into labored affectation. As well might a modern soldier attempt to don the armour of proof in which his ancestor marched to the battles of the Roses, as a writer of the present day attempt to use gracefully the quaint obsolete style of the ancient chronicler. Chatterton was aware of this, and, in endeavoring to do justice to his subjects, he has fallen into the opposite error. Scott, in his Life of Byron, observes, that "Chatterton, not considering that in the most ancient authors scarce one word in ten has become obsolete, wrote a set of poems in which every second word was taken from a glossary, and necessarily remitted to one under the idea that he was imitating the language of the ancients." There once was a taste in England, (the Europeans called it by the appropriate name of a "folly") of building new ruins, in imitation of those which were already crumbling under the grasp of time, and which were covered with the genuine moss and ivy of antiquity. The art of man, however, can never equal the workings of nature. Not all the artificial mouldings which the active labor of a day can bestow upon stone and mortar can equal the effect of the quiet lapse of a few fast-fleeting centuries. We may collect together the "scraps and cheese-parings of antiquity," and endeavor to arrange them into an harmonious whole, but a delicate observer will soon detect the blemishes in any structure which is thus attempted by art in mere mockery, as it were, of the power of time. And thus it is with literature. No writers can so abstract themselves from the present as to be uninfluenced by the effects of modern education. They are out of their proper sphere when endeavoring to rake together long disused expressions. They are guilty of literary sacrilege in dressing their modern fictions in the time honored garb of antiquity. is a sin against nature to warp the mind by modes of reflection to which it is unaccustomed. It Chatterton has heaped together, with the greatest profusion, the old words and phrases which he has found during his researches into ancient English literature, but it is easy for a critical reader to observe the essentially modern structure of his poems when they are stripped of their antique ornaments. He has endeavored to add to the effect of his own wonderful talent, by calling in the aid of other times, as the later Romans, after they had lost the art of sculpture, robbed the architectural monuments of their ancestors of their noblest ornaments, in order to decorate the structures of their reigning princes with the specimens of an art which had degenerated with the degeneracy of the age. We are devoted to old books. There is something in the very quaintness of Burton which will bind the reader for hours to his vagaries. In some of the plays of Shakspeare, the curious roughness of the ancient style, softened as it is by the fire of bis own intellect, constitutes the hidden charm which so few duly appreciate, though every man of letters acknowledges the influence of the secret spell. Even a volume of Coke on Lyttleton possesses an attraction for a modern reader, apart from the uninteresting intricacies of the law, which is wholly owing to its being so strongly stamped with the spirit of the age in which it was written. We pity the man who has never felt the delight which a volume of any of the ancient English classics can afford, even setting out of the question its intrinsic merit. We commend antiquarian research, because we consider that every new fact which is brought to light with respect to our forefathers, diminishes the distance between them and ourselves, and renders stronger and stronger every link in the lengthening chain which binds the past to the present. But the more we admire these relics of the olden time, the greater must be our dislike for modern imitations of them. One principal reason of our admiration is owing to their being the types of the manners of the times of their production; because, looking only to the present and the past, they display truly the march of improvement and the state of humanity, as the causes of the changes in these things are gradually developed, while the stream of time rolls onward towards futurity. We can enjoy the true opinions of the leading spirits of the age upon the age in which they lived. We do not, while reading their works, look back through the discoloring medium of the years that have intervened between their times and our own; but we are suddenly transported by a magic of the imagination similar to that physical enchantment which the genii of the lamp and ring used in the story of Aladdin, and placed for the moment among the living and moving actors who in sad truth now. survive but in memory. But as for these imitations of the ancients, this modern Gothic in literature, we fear that such works, if they are encouraged, will give the death-blow to romance and ancient reveries, and we cannot re frain from joining most fervently in the heart-felt exclamation of Jonathan Oldbuck, "Lord deliver me from this Gothic generation." In literature, as in other pursuits, we must adapt ourselves to the tastes and wants of the present age. Ours, for the present, are to be the graces of youth. We must be content to let posterity do homage to our antiquity. The only reward which is to be expected from the present age is that due to industry and talent. Chatterton, however, has the excuse of originality, and he has performed his task with greater success than any one would have believed, when the difficulty of the subject and the extreme youth of the writer are taken into consideration. We can only wish that he had chosen a plan more suited to the spirit of the age. If he had done so, he would not probably have experienced such bitter disappointment-not perhaps have brought himself to an untimely grave; and the efforts of his mature genius would in after times, in all probability, have ranked among the most precious volumes of the British classics. K. K. A MORNING ON THE ANDES. ARISE the Andes, gorgeous, proud, A glorious, burning main. The dawn of day has colored o'er The hills with coral stain. The mountain seems above its cloud A frozen wave of earth; The mists, a silvery curtain, spread Above a universe of dead, Just dawning into birth. The circling sun is sparkling up, To waste upon a waiting world. |