this literary _cénacle_, as John Ladgate, and made to exchange verse
epistles with Rowley in eighteenth-century fashion. Such is the
remarkable fiction which the marvelous boy erected, as a scaffolding for
the fabric of sham-antique poetry and prose, which he build up during the
years 1767 to 1770, _i.e._, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth year of
his age.

There is a wide distance between the achievements of this untaught lad of
humble birth and narrow opportunities, and the works of the great Sir
Walter, with his matured powers and his stores of solid antiquarian lore.
But the impulse that conducted them to their not dissimilar tasks was the
same. In "Yarrow Revisited," Wordsworth uses, _à propos_ of Scott, the
expression "localized romance." It was, indeed, the absorbing local
feeling of Scott, his patriotism, his family pride, his attachment to the
soil, that brought passion and poetry into his historical pursuits. With
Chatterton, too, this absorption in the past derived its intensity from
his love of place. Bristol was his world; in "The Battle of Hastings,"
he did not forget to introduce a Bristowan contingent, led by a certain
fabulous Alfwold, and performing prodigies of valor upon the Normans.
The image of mediaeval life which he succeeded in creating was, of
course, a poor, faint _simulacrum_, compared with Scott's. He lacked
knowledge, leisure, friends, long life--everything that was needed to
give his work solidity. All that he had was a creative, though
undisciplined imagination, together with an astonishing industry,
persistence, and secretiveness. Yet with all his disadvantages, his
work, with all its imperfections, is far more striking than the imitative
verse of the Wartons, or the thin, diffused medievalism of Walpole and
Clara Reeve. It is the product of a more original mind and a more
intense conception.