Augustine's
Abbey, also in Bristol); together with plays or portions of
plays which they wrote--a Saxon epic translated--accounts of
Architecture--songs and eclogues--and friendly letters in rhyme or
prose. In short, this clever imaginative lad had evolved before he
was sixteen such a mass of literary and quasi-historical matter of
one kind or another that his fictitious circle of men of taste and
learning (living in the dark and unenlightened age of Lydgate and the
other tedious post-Chaucerians) may with study become extraordinarily
familiar and near to us, and was certainly to Chatterton himself quite
as real and vivid as the dull actualities of Colston's Hospital and
the Bristol of his proper century.
Chatterton's own circle of acquaintance was far less brilliant. His
principal patrons were Henry Burgum and George Catcott, a pair of
pewterers, the former vulgar and uneducated but very ambitious to be
thought a man of good birth and education, the latter a credulous,
selfish and none too scrupulous fellow, a would-be antiquary, of
whom there is the most delightfully absurd description in Boswell's
_Johnson_.
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