and pronounced it a clumsy forgery; the script not of the fifteenth
century, but unmistakably modern. Southey describes another as written,
for the most part, in an attorney's regular engrossing hand. Mr. Skeat
"cannot find the slightest indication that Chatterton had ever seen a MS.
of early date; on the contrary, he never uses the common contractions,
and he was singularly addicted to the use of capitals, which in old MSS.
are rather scarce."

Boswell tells how he and Johnson went down to Bristol in April, 1776,
"where I was entertained with seeing him inquire upon the spot into the
authenticity of Rowley's poetry, as I had seen him inquire upon the spot
into the authenticity of Ossian's poetry. Johnson said of Chatterton,
'This is the most extraordinary young man that has encountered my
knowledge. It is wonderful how the whelp has written such things.'"

In 1777, seven years after Chatterton's death, his Rowley poems were
first collected and published by Thomas Tyrwhitt, the Chaucerian editor,
who gave, in an appendix, his reasons for believing that Chatterton was
their real author, and Rowley a myth.[11] These reasons are convincing
to any modern scholar. Tyrwhitt's opinion was shared at the time by all
competent authorities--Gray, Thomas Warton, and Malone, the editor of the
_variorum_ Shakspere, among others. Nevertheless, a controversy sprang
up over Rowley, only less lively than the dispute about Ossian, which had
been going on since 1760. Rowley's most prominent champions were the
Rev. Dr. Symmes, who wrote in the _London Review_; the Rev. Dr. Sherwin,
in the _Gentleman's Magazine_; Dr. Jacob Bryant,[12] and Jeremiah Milles,
D.D., Dean of Exeter, who published a sumptuous quarto edition of the
poems in 1782.[13] These asserters of Rowley belonged to the class of
amateur scholars whom Edgar Poe used to speak of as "cultivated old
clergymen." They had the usual classical training of Oxford and