{Horace Walpole = Horace Walpole (1717-1797), a prolific writer,
connoisseur, and collector, best known for his extensive
correspondence; he established a taste for literary collecting by
would-be cultured gentlemen in England}

Some ten years later still--about the time, by the bye, when
Chatterton's career came to such a miserable close in London, and
when Gilbert was dying in a hospital at Paris--it happened that a
worthy physician, well known in the town of Southampton for his
benevolence and eccentricity, was on a professional visit to the child
of a poor journeyman trunk-maker, in the same place. A supply of old
paper had just been brought in for the purpose of lining trunks,
according to the practice of the day. A workman was busy sorting
these, rejecting some as refuse, and preserving others, when the
doctor stopped to answer an inquiry about the sick child.

{Chatterton = Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770), British poet, who
created an imaginary Thomas Rowley, a supposed medieval monk, to
whom he ascribed some of his poems. Chatterton committed suicide
at the age of 18 when a poem of his, allegedly by Rowley, was
rejected; he was buried in a pauper's grave. Susan Fenimore Cooper
no doubt has this in mind in naming a character in this story
Theodosia Rowley.

{Gilbert = Nicolas Gilbert (1751-1780), French poet, who died in
Paris at the age of 29. The French writer Count Alfred de Vigny
(1797-1863), in his book of essays "Stello" (1832), popularized a
legend that Gilbert had died insane and in abject poverty at the
charity hospital of the Hotel Dieu in Paris, and compared his
miserable end with that of Chatteron; it seems likely that Vigny,