C.D. Warner, et al., comp.
The Library of the World’s Best Literature. An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
Thomas Chatterton (1752–1770)
Chatterton, Thomas. An English poet, reputed the “marvelous youth” of literature; born in Bristol, Nov. 20, 1752; committed suicide at London, Aug. 25, 1770. He had precocious taste and considerable poetic talent, perhaps overrated from the interest of his pathetic fate and youth, and the literary sensation of his spurious “Rowley” poems,—supposed to have been found in the chest of a mediæval “clerk,” but written by Chatterton in a palpably impossible dialect. ‘An Excelente Balade of Charitie’ is much the best. His poems and plays in common English are mere boy’s-work, but show fertility and facility, which with his manly taste might have matured into greatness. (See Critical and Biographical Introduction).