Thomas Chatterton, The Marvelous Boy - The Story Of A Strange Life, 1752-1770 (1908) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill The Rift In The Clouds The galley-slave labored with exactitude and full, however reluctant, service, and the activities of the other nature were inexhaustible. We have no record of another mind more insatiable of effort. The regimen at Colston's left him little time for any other employment than his studies, and it must be borne in mind that his attention to his mother and sister never slackened. Yet here are some of the things he found time to do: he studied heraldry until he made himself an expert in the intricate science, until probably no man in England knew more of it or had readier or more understanding command of its terms; he wrote much poetry and some prose; he dug deep into the legends as well as the actual history of Bristol; he studied the works of standard English poets and stored his memory with tales, scenes, songs, and lines from them; he read in history, theology, medicine and what science was then available to the average investigator; gathered a good working knowledge of ancient arms and armor, of medieval life and manners, of old English ballads; studied the forms and shapes of early Englishtext; mastered the quaint penmanship of old parchments; learned much about music and something about drawing; read the newspapers; kept in the current of events; formed acquaintances outside the school (all adults); borrowed and read their books and controverted their opinions. I shall not pretend to say how in a school where the sessions began at seven in the morning and lasted until five in the afternoon, and every boy must be in bed at eight o]clock in the evening, these achievements were possible, but there is the record; he did all these things. He had, to be sure, a mind that seemed to hunger and thirst after labor, a mind intolerant of repose; but such a mi...