Cambridge graduates, but no precise knowledge of old English literature.
They had the benevolent curiosity of Mr. Pickwick, and the
gullibility--the large, easy swallow--which seems to go with the
clerico-antiquarian habit of mind.

Nothing is so extinct as an extinct controversy; and, unlike the Ossian
puzzle, which was a harder nut to crack, this Rowley controversy was
really settled from the start. It is not essential to our purpose to
give any extended history of it. The evidence relied upon by the
supporters of Rowley was mainly of the external kind: personal
testimony, and especially the antecedent unlikeliness that a boy of
Chatterton's age and imperfect education could have reared such an
elaborate structure of deceit; together with the inferiority of his
acknowledged writings to the poems that he ascribed to Rowley. But
Tyrwhitt was a scholar of unusual thoroughness and acuteness; and, having
a special acquaintance with early English, he was able to bring to the
decision of the question evidence of an internal nature which became more
convincing in proportion as the knowledge necessary to understand his
argument increased; _i.e._, as the number of readers increased, who knew
something about old English poetry. Indeed, it was nothing but the
general ignorance of the spelling, flexions, vocabulary, and scansion of
Middle English verse, that made the controversy possible.

Tyrwhitt pointed out that the Rowleian dialect was not English of the
fifteenth century, nor of any century, but a grotesque jumble of archaic
words of very different periods and dialects. The orthography and
grammatical forms were such as occurred in no old English poet known to
the student of literature. The fact that Rowley used constantly the
possessive pronominal form _itts_, instead of _his_; or the other fact
that he used the termination _en_ in the singular of the verb, was alone