clamorous daws that fall asleep in the ancient belfry to the sound of the
drowsy chimes. Rossetti, in so many ways a continuator of Keats'
artistry, devoted to Chatterton the first of his sonnet-group, "Five
English Poets,"[29] of which the sestet runs thus:

"Thy nested home-loves, noble Chatterton;
The angel-trodden stair thy soul could trace
Up Redcliffe's spire; and in the world's armed space
Thy gallant sword-play:--these to many an one
Are sweet for ever; as thy grave unknown
And love-dream of thine unrecorded face."

The story of Chatterton's life found its way into fiction and upon the
stage. Afred de Vigny, one of the French romanticists, translator of
"Othello" and "The Merchant of Venice," introduced it as an episode into
his romance, "Stello ou les Diables Bleus," afterward dramatized as
"Chatterton," and first played at Paris on February 12, 1835, with great
success. De Vigny made a love tragedy out of it, inventing a sweetheart
for his hero, in the person of Kitty Bell, a role which became one of
Madame Dorval's chief triumphs. On the occasion of the revival of De
Vigny's drama in December, 1857, Théophile Gautier gave, in the
_Moniteur_,[30] some reminiscences of its first performance, twenty-two
years before.

"The parterre before which Chatterton declaimed was full of pale,
long-haired youths, who firmly believed that there was no other worthy
occupation on earth but the making of verses or of pictures--art, as they
called it; and who looked upon the bourgeois with a disdain to which the
disdain of the Heidelberg or Jena 'fox' for the 'philistine' hardly
approaches. . . As to money, no one thought of it. More than one, as in