biography. He talked with Barrett and Catcott, and with many of the
poet's schoolmates and fellow-townsmen, and visited his mother and
sister, who told him anecdotes of the marvelous boy's childhood and gave
him some of his letters. Croft also traced Chatterton's footsteps in
London, where he interviewed, among others, the coroner who had presided
at the inquest over the suicide's body. The result of these inquiries he
gave to the world in a book entitled "Love and Madness" (1780).[26]
Southey thought that Croft had treated Mrs. Chatterton shabbily, in
making her no pecuniary return from the profits of his book; and
arraigned him publicly for this in the edition of Chatterton's works
which he and Joseph Cottle--both native Bristowans--published in three
volumes in 1803. This was at first designed to be a subscription edition
for the benefit of Chatterton's mother and sister, but, the subscriptions
not being numerous enough, it was issued in the usual way, through "the
trade."

It was in 1795, just a quarter of a century after Chatterton's death,
that Southey and Coleridge were married in St. Mary Redcliffe's Church to
the Misses Edith and Sara Fricker. Coleridge was greatly interested in
Chatterton. In his "Lines on Observing a Blossom on the First of
February, 1796," he compares the flower to

"Bristowa's bard, the wondrous boy,
An amaranth which earth seemed scarce to own,
Blooming 'mid poverty's drear wintry waste."

And a little earlier than this, when meditating his pantisocracy scheme
with Southey and Lovell, he had addressed the dead poet in his indignant
"Monody on the Death of Chatterton," associating him in imagination with
the abortive community on the Susquehannah: