Thomas Chatterton's brief life and quasi-archaic verse (much of which he endeavoured to pass off as the output of an imaginary 15th century monk called Thomas Rowley) ensured this Bristol attorney's apprentice became the darling of the Romantic Age and an inspiration to the Pre-Raphaelites. Keats, who dedicated his Endymion to Chatterton, described him as 'the purest writer in the English language' and Wordsworth referred to him as 'the marvellous boy'. A legend surrounds his tragic death - tradition has it that in a fit of despair he committed suicide by eating arsenic (but the literary biographer Richard Holmes has argued, convincingly, that he could well have died trying to cure a bout of venereal disease). This tends to overshadow any assessment of his poetry, which, although mainly pastiche, does contain flashes of lyrical originality.