In 1726 James Thomson had called for a revival of the sublime in poetry, which
had inspired mankind ‘from Moses down to Milton’. William Collins
(1721–1759), author of the Ode to Evening(1747), refers to Thomson as a druid.
(Ofthe druids, pagan British priests put to death by the Romans, little is known.)
In the 1740s Robert Lowth lectured in Latin – to, among others, Christopher
Smart – on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, dwelling especially on the sublime
rhythms of the prophets. In 1756 Edmund Burke argued in The Sublime and the
Beautiful that the aesthetic pleasure of the sublime arose from pain at the sight of
the immense, the obscure and the traumatic. Poetry could now inhere not only in
a work of perfected art but also in the ‘infinite beauty’ of fragments by an inspired
genius, enthusiast, druid or bard. Sophisticated 18th-century craftsmen liked to
imagine wild ancestor s.
The Romantics thought ofThomas Chatterton (1753–1770) as the archetypal
boy genius dead of neglect. Chatterton copied medieval manuscripts kept at St
Mary Redcliffe,Bristol, and then invented a local 15th-century poet, Fr. Thomas
Rowley, and wrote poems for him. His attempt to pass these off on Horace
Walpole failed; Walpole had lost faith in Macpherson. Spelling which threw dust
into the eyes of the Romantics can no longer hide non-medieval sentiment.
Rowley’s ‘Mynstrelles Songe’ begins: ‘O! synge untoe mie roundelaie, O! droppe
the brynie teare wythe mee.’ Thirty years later, Coleridge was still using
Chatterton’s ‘medieval’ final -ein the first edition of his ‘Rime of the Ancyent
Marinere’.Gothic fiction
Manuscripts were all the rage. In a preface Horace Walpole (1717–1797) pretends
that The Castle of Otranto (1764) is translated from a work written by Onuphrio
Muralto, Canon of Otranto, placing its composition a little earlier than 1529. When
this hoax succeeded, Walpole admitted his own authorship, and changed the subti-
tle to ‘A Gothic Story’. Horace, the fourth son of Sir Robert Walpole, brought up in
the Palladian splendour of Houghton Hall, Norfolk, gradually turned a Thames-side
house at Strawberry Hill, west of London, into a small Gothic castle, where he
pr inted Gray’s Odes.
His story begins with Conrad being killed at his wedding by a vast falling helmet.
His father Manfred, tyrant of Otranto, imprisons the suspected murderer inside210 6 · AUGUSTAN LITERATURE: TO 1790
‘The Death of Chatterton’ by
Henry Wallis, 1856. Thomas
Chatterton’s suicide at 17 (in
1770) made him a type of the
neglected genius for Romantic
poets. Wallis’s model was the
novelist George Meredith.