‘The first place that I visited was connected with a far deeper tragedy, the beautiful church of St. Mary Redcliffe. I climbed up to the muniment room over the porch, now and forever famous, and sitting down on the stone chest then empty, where poor Chatterton pretended to have found the various writings he attributed to Rowley, and from whence he probably did obtain most of the ancient parchment that served as his material. I could understand the effect that the mere habit of haunting such a chamber might produce upon a sensitive and imaginative boy. Even in that rude and naked room the majesty and grandeur of the magnificent church make themselves strongly felt. The dim light, the massive walls, the echoing pavement under foot, the vaulted roof overhead, all tend to produce the solemn feeling peculiar to a great ecclesiastical edifice. Even the two monuments of Cannynge down below, one in the secular, the other in the priestly habit, impress upon the mind the image of the munificent patron to whom St. Mary Redcliffe owes its sublimity and beauty. The forgeries of Chatterton will always remain among the wonders of genius; but they become less incredible after having breathed the atmosphere of that muniment chamber.
The humbler buildings connected with
The marvelous boy Who perished in his pride,
have been nearly all swept away by the barbarous hand of Improvement; but every one whom I met showed me some site or told me some tradition bearing on his lamentable story.
(From Mary Russell Mitford, Recollections of a Literary Life; or Books, Places, and People (1852), pp. 386-87)
Mary Russell Mitford (1787-1855), a writer best known for her sketches of rural life in Our Village (1824-32), lived all her life in Hampshire. The poem she quotes from here is William Wordsworth's 'Resolution and Independence' (written in 1802 and first published in 1807):
'I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy, | The sleepless Soul that perished in his pride;'