THE VERDICT.--These poems at once became famous, and the critics began to
investigate the question of their authenticity. From this investigation
Chatterton did not shrink. He sent some of them with letters to Horace
Walpole, and, as Walpole did not immediately answer, he wrote to him quite
impertinently. Then they were submitted to Mason and Gray. The opinion of
those who examined them was almost unanimous that they were forgeries: he
could produce no originals; the language is in many cases not that of the
period, and the spelling and idioms are evidently factitious. A few there
were who seemed to have committed themselves, at first, to their
authenticity; but Walpole, the Wartons, Dr. Johnson, Gibbon the historian,
Sheridan, and most other literary men, were clear as to their forgery. The
forged manuscripts which he had the hardihood afterwards to present, were
totally unlike those of Edward the Fourth's time; he was entirely at fault
in his heraldry; words were used out of their meaning; and, in his poem on
_The Battle of Hastings_, he had introduced the modern discoveries
concerning Stone Henge.
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