In the centre of this print is an obelisk, decorated with an unpleasant image of a skeleton eating a baby; the baby holds a quill pen in one hand and a copy of Rowley's Poems in the other. Below is an inscription 'To the Memory of the |mmortal Chatterton who wrote 400 years before he was born - a Stranger erects his Monument'. Gillray is here making fun of the memorial which Thicknesse had erected in his garden in Bath to the poet Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770). Chatterton claimed to have found a manuscript of poems by a fifteenth-century poet and monk named Thomas Rowley; in fact Chatterton had written the poems himself. Doubts had been raised about the authenticity of the Rowley poems, though the matter was still controversial when this print was published; Gillray's inscription makes his opinion on the matter quite clear.

Detail from: James Gillray, Lieutenant Govenor Gall-Stone, inspired by Alecto; -or- The Birth of Minerva. The British Museum

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