But Horace Walpole roundly and audaciously affirmed in the first sentence of his preface to the poor romance of 'Otranto,' that it had been translated from the Italian of Onuphrio Muralto, and that the MS. was still preserved in the library of an English Catholic family; circumstantiating his needless falsehood by other most superfluous details. _Needless_, I say, because a book with the Walpole name on the title-page was as sure of selling as one with Chatterton's obscure name was at that time sure of _not_ selling. Possibly Horace Walpole did not care about selling, but wished to measure his own intrinsic power as a novelist, for which purpose it was a better course to preserve his _incognito_. But this he might have preserved without telling a circumstantial falsehood. Whereas Chatterton knew that his only chance of emerging from the obscure station of a grave-digger's son, and carrying into comfort the dear female relatives that had half-starved themselves for _him_ (I speak of things which have since come to my knowledge thirty-five years after Chatterton and his woes had been buried in a pauper's coffin), lay in bribing public attention by some _extrinsic_ attraction. Macpherson had recently engaged the public gaze by his 'Ossian'--an abortion fathered upon the fourth century after Christ. What so natural as to attempt other abortions--ideas and refinements of the eighteenth century--referring themselves to the fifteenth? Had this harmless hoax succeeded, he would have delivered those from poverty who delivered _him_ from ignorance; he would have raised those from the dust who raised _him_ to an aerial height--yes, to a height from which (but it was after his death), like _Ate_ or _Eris_, come to cause another Trojan war, he threw down an apple of discord amongst the leading scholars of England, and seemed to say: 'There, Dean of Exeter! there, Laureate! there, Tyrwhitt, my man! Me you have murdered amongst you. Now fight to death for the boy that living you would not have hired as a shoeblack. My blood be upon you!' Rise up, martyred blood! rise to heaven for a testimony against these men and this generation, or else burrow in the earth, and from that spring up like the stones thrown by Deucalion and Pyrrha into harvests of feud, into armies of self-exterminating foes. Poor child! immortal child! Slight were thy trespasses on this earth, heavy was thy punishment, and it is to be hoped, nay, it is certain, that this disproportion did not escape the eye which, in the algebra of human actions, estimates _both_ sides of the equation.