Thomas Chatterton and Neglected Genius, 1760-1830

Long before Wordsworth etherealized him as ''the marvellous Boy / The sleepless Soul that perished in its pride'', Thomas Chatterton was touted as the ''second Shakespeare'' by eighteenth-century Shakespeareans, ranked among the leading British poets by prominent literary critics, and likened to the fashionable modern prose stylists Macpherson, Sterne, and Smollett. His pseudo-medieval Rowley poem...