LOVE AND MADNESS. A Story Too True. In a Series of Letters between Parties, whose Names would perhaps be mentioned, were they less known, or less lamented.

pp. viii, 296. 8vo in 4s. Workaday half calf, marbled boards, later binding. Tilte slightly browned. 1st edition. ODNB.This rather sensational volume went through seven editions, with many variations in the text, and deals with the clandestine love of James Hackman, a one-time army officer and Norfolk clergyman, for Martha Ray, the mistress of Lord Sandwich, who was shot by Hackman as she was leaving Covent Garden Theatre on 7 April 1779. Into this work Croft inserted a huge interpolation on Chatterton. Many years later this circumstance inflicted an indelible stain on Croft's reputation. In a letter inserted in the Monthly Magazine for November 1799 he was accused by Robert Southey of having obtained in 1778 Chatterton's letters from the boy's mother and sister under false pretences, of having published the letters without consent, and without awarding to the owners an adequate remuneration from the large profits he had himself made by their publication, and of having kept the originals for twenty-one years. To these charges Croft made a very unsatisfactory answer in the pages of the Gentleman's Magazine, which was subsequently published separately as Chatterton and love and madness: a letter from Denmark to Mr Nichols, editor of the Gentleman's Magazine, 1800.…