Thus Chatterton's sensitive genius was taking the impress of its
environment. As he pored upon the antiquities of his native city, the
idea of its life did sweetly creep into his study of imagination; and he
gradually constructed for himself a picture of fifteenth-century Bristol,
including a group of figures, partly historical and partly fabulous, all
centering about Master William Canynge. Canynge was the rich Bristol
merchant who founded or restored St. Mary Redcliffe's; was several times
mayor of the city in the reigns of Henry VI. and Edward IV., and once
represented the borough in Parliament. Chatterton found or fabled that
he at length took holy orders and became dean of Westbury College. About
Canynge Chatterton arranged a number of _dramatis personae_, some of
whose names he discovered in old records and documents, such as
Carpenter, Bishop of Worcester, and Sir Theobald Gorges, a knight of
Wraxhall, near Bristol; together with others entirely of his own
invention--as John a Iscam, whom he represents to have been a canon of
St. Augustine's Abbey in Bristol; and especially one Thomas Rowley,
parish priest of St. John's, employed by Canynge to collect manuscripts
and antiquities. He was his poet laureate and father confessor, and to
him Chatterton ascribed most of the verses which pass under the general
name of the Rowley poems. But Iscam was also a poet and Master Canynge
himself sometimes burst into song. Samples of the Iscam and the Canynge
muse diversify the collection. The great Bristol merchant was a
mediaeval Maecenas, and at his house, "nempned the Red Lodge," were
played interludes--"Aella," "Goddwyn," and "The Parliament of
Sprites"--composed by Rowley, or by Rowley and Iscam collaborating.
Canynge sometimes wrote the prologues; and Rowley fed his patron with
soft dedication and complimentary verses: "On Our Lady's Church," "Letter
to the dygne Master Canynge," "The Account of W. Canynges Feast," etc.
The well-known fifteenth-century poet Lydgate is also introduced into