beadle, were obliged distinctly to declare themselves.

Meanwhile, Wilkes was in the King's Bench, Southwark. His consolations, we may suppose, were that by all this his popularity had been but increased, that Parson Horne and the Society for the Protection of the Bill of Rights had organised a subscription in his favour, which would more than pay his fine, and that the whole country was waiting to do him honour on the day when he should step out of prison.

It came at last: Tuesday, the 17th of April, 1770. There was a considerable show of excitement all day in the vicinity of the prison; and it was with some difficulty that the patriot, getting into a hackney-coach late in the afternoon, made his way, past the cordial clutches of the mob, into the country. That evening and the next there were huzzas and illuminations in his honour; the house of Beckford, the Lord Mayor, in the then aristocratic region of Soho Square, was conspicuously decorated with the word "Liberty; and public dinners to celebrate the release of the patriot were held in various parts of the city.

In

The rejoicings were not confined to London. many other towns in England there were demonstrations in honour of Wilkes. A list of the chief places may still be culled from the newspapers of the day. From these newspapers we learn, what indeed might

have been independently surmised, that not the least eager among the towns of England, in this emulous show of regard for Wilkes, was the ancient mercantile city of Bristol. The following appeared in the Public Advertiser of London, as from a Bristol correspondent, on the very day of Wilkes's release:

Bristol, April 14th.-We hear that on Wednesday next, being the day of Mr. Wilkes's enlargement, forty-five persons are to dine at the Crown,' in the passage leading from Broad Street to Tower Lane. The entertainment is to consist of two rounds of beef, of 45 lbs. each; two legs of veal, weighing 45 lbs.; two ditto of pork, 45 lbs.; a pig, roasted, 45 lbs.; two puddings of 45 lbs.; 45 loaves; and, to drink, 45 tankards of ale. After dinner, they are to smoke 45 pipes of tobacco, and to drink 45 bowls of punch. Among others, the following toasts are to be given :1. Long live the King; 2. Long live the supporters of British Liberty; 3. The Magistrates of Bristol. And the dinner to be on the table exactly 45 minutes after two o'clock."

Whether the precise dinner thus announced by the Bristol correspondent of the Public Advertiser was held or not must, we fear, remain a mystery; but that there were several dinners in Bristol on the occasion is quite certain. On Thursday, the 19th, in particular, a public entertainment (possibly the above, with the day altered) was given in honour of the patriot by

"an eminent citizen," and attended by many of the

most influential men in the place.

On that same

Ah! the poetry of coincidences! Thursday evening, while the assembled guests in the "Crown" were clattering their glasses in the hot room, puffing their tobacco-smoke, and making the roof ring with their tipsy uproar, there was walking moodily through the streets of Bristol a young attorney's apprentice, who, four days before, had been discharged from his employment because he had alarmed his master by threatening to commit suicide. This attorney's apprentice was Thomas Chatterton.

CHAPTER II.

THE ATTORNEY'S APPRENTICE OF BRISTOL.

IT was in the month of August 1760 that a poor widow, who supported herself and two children by dressmaking, and by keeping a small day-school in one of the back streets of Bristol, gained admission for her younger child, a boy of seven years and nine months old, into Colston's School, a charitable foundation similar in some respects to Christ's Hospital in London. The husband of this widow, a rough, drunken fellow, who had been a singer, or sub-chaunter, in the cathedral choir of Bristol, as well as the master of a kind of free school for boys, had died a month or two before his son's birth. An old grandmother, however either the widow's own mother or her husband's -was still alive, dependent, in some degree, on the family.

For nearly seven years, or from August 1760 to July 1767, the boy remained an inmate of Colston's

School, wearing, as the Christ's Hospital boys in London still do, a blue coat and yellow stockings, and receiving, according to the custom of the institution, such a plain education as might fit him for an ordinary mercantile or mechanical occupation. But, from the very first, the boy was singular. For one thing, he was a prodigious reader. The Bible, theological treatises, scraps of history, old magazines, poetry, whatever in the shape of a printed volume came in his way-all were eagerly pounced upon and devoured; and it was not long before his reputation in this respect enabled him to lay one or two circulating libraries under friendly contribution. Then, again, his temper, people remarked, had something in it quite unusual in one so young. Generally very sullen and silent, he was liable to sudden and unaccountable fits of weeping, as well as to violent fits of rage. He was also extremely secretive, and fond of being alone; and on Saturday and other holiday afternoons, when he was at liberty to go home from school, it was a subject of speculation with his mother, Mrs. Chatterton, and her acquaintances, what the boy could be doing, sitting alone, for hours, as was his habit, in a garret full of all kinds of out-of-the-way lumber.

When he was about ten years of age, it became known to some of his seniors that the little Bluecoat was in the habit of writing verses. It is supposed that