magistrates, and other ancient civic worthies stirred into life under his
intense and brooding imagination; his mind took color from the red and
blue patterns thrown on the pavement by the stained glass of the windows;
and he may well have spelled out much of the little Latin that he knew
from "the knightly brasses of the tombs" and "cold _hic jacets_ of the
dead."

It is curious how early his education was self-determined to its peculiar
ends. A dreamy, silent, solitary child, given to fits of moodiness, he
was accounted dull and even stupid. He would not, or could not, learn
his letters until, in his seventh year, his eye was caught by the
illuminated capitals in an old music folio. From these his mother taught
him the alphabet, and a little later he learned to read from a
black-letter Bible. "Paint me an angel with wings and a trumpet," he
answered, when asked what device he would choose for the little
earthenware bowl that had been promised him as a gift.[4] Colston's
Hospital, where he was put to school, was built on the site of a
demolished monastery of Carmelite Friars; the scholars wore blue coats,
with metal plates on their breasts stamped with the image of a dolphin,
the armorial crest of the founder, and had their hair cropped short in
imitation of the monkish tonsure. As the boy grew into a youth, there
were numbered among his near acquaintances, along with the vintners,
sugar-bakers, pipe-makers, apothecaries, and other tradesmen of the
Bristol _bourgeoisie_, two church organists, a miniature painter, and an
engraver of coats-of-arms--figures quaintly suggestive of that mingling
of municipal life and ecclesiastical-mediaeval art which is reproduced in
the Rowley poems.

"Chatterton," testifies one of his early acquaintances, "was fond of
walking in the fields, particularly in Redcliffe meadows, and of talking