But our reformed view of biography would be better explained by a sketch applied to Cicero's life or to Milton's. In either case we might easily show, consistently with the exposure of enormous errors, that each was the wisest man of his own day. And with regard to Cicero in particular, out of his own letters to Atticus, we might show that every capital opinion which he held on the politics of Rome in his own day was false, groundless, contradictory. Yet for all that, we would engage to leave the reader in a state of far deeper admiration for the man than the hollow and hypocritical Middleton ever felt himself, or could therefore have communicated to his readers.
EDITOR'S NOTE.--The reference on p. 122 is to the famous case of Courvoisier, in 1840, and this fixes 1841 as the date of the essay. Courvoisier was a valet who murdered and robbed his master, putting the plate into the care of an old woman, and making it appear a burglary. He was defended by a barrister named Philips, who received from the prisoner a confession of his guilt, and afterwards, in court, took Heaven to witness that he believed him innocent, though the woman, by accident almost, had been found, and given evidence. Philips was disbarred.
[17] In Mrs. Hannah More's drawing-room at Barley Wood, amongst the few pictures which adorned it, hung a kit-kat portrait of John Henderson. This, and our private knowledge that Mrs. H. M. had personally known and admired Henderson, led us to converse with that lady about him. What we gleaned from her in addition to the notices of Aguttar and of some amongst Johnson's biographers may yet see the light.
_XIV. GREAT FORGERS: CHATTERTON AND WALPOLE, AND 'JUNIUS.'_
I have ever been disposed to regard as the most venial of deceptions such impositions as Chatterton had practised on the public credulity. Whom did he deceive? Nobody but those who well deserved to be deceived, viz., shallow antiquaries, who pretended to a sort of knowledge which they had not so much as tasted. And it always struck me as a judicial infatuation in Horace Walpole, that he, who had so brutally pronounced the death of this marvellous boy to be a matter of little consequence, since otherwise he would have come to be hanged for forgery, should himself, not as a boy under eighteen (and I think under seventeen at the first issuing of the Rowley fraud), slaving for a few guineas that he might procure the simplest food for himself, and then buy presents for the dear mother and sister whom he had left in Bristol, but as an elderly man, with a clear six thousand per annum,[18] commit a far more deliberate and audacious forgery than that imputed (if even accurately imputed) to Chatterton. I know of no published document, or none published under Chatterton's sanction, in which he formally _declared_ the Rowley poems to have been the compositions of a priest living in the days of Henry IV., viz., in or about the year 1400. Undoubtedly he suffered people to understand that he had found MSS. of that period in the tower of St. Mary Redcliff at Bristol, which he really _had_ done; and whether he simply tolerated them in running off with the idea that these particular poems, written on _discoloured_ parchments by way of colouring the hoax, were amongst the St. Mary treasures, or positively _said so_, in either view, considering the circumstances of the case, no man of kind feelings will much condemn him.