Dodsley copies should be sent.' The publisher returned no answer.
Chatterton waited two months, then wrote again and enclosed a specimen
passage from _AElla_. He could procure a copy of this work, he wrote,
upon payment of a guinea to the present owner of the MS. Again Mr.
Dodsley lay low and said nothing, and so the incident closed.
Dodsley having failed him, Chatterton next took the bolder step of
writing to Horace Walpole, who must have been much in his mind for
some years before his sending the letter. Some one has made the
ingenious suggestion that a consideration of Walpole's delicate
connoisseurship sensibly coloured Chatterton's account of the life
of Mastre William Canynge. More than this, his delight in the
Mediaeval--the Gothic--and his content with what may be termed a
purely impressionistic view of the past, was singularly akin to the
Bristol poet's own outlook on these matters. Walpole had further some
three years before this time indulged in the very harmless literary
fraud of publishing his _Castle of Otranto_ as a translation from a
mediaeval Italian MS.
Pages:
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31