In 1802, Southey engaged in a brief but intense feud with the Reverend Herbert Croft over a group of letters written by Thomas Chatterton. Croft and Chatterton represented two divergent, even opposite, attitudes toward authorship, and the feud gave Southey the opportunity to articulate his most progressive version of poetic professionalism. Croft, an Anglican priest and man-of-letters, combined entrepreneurial literary endeavors with an ongoing (if perpetually frustrated) search for preferment within the Church. In addition to the biography of Young discussed in Chapter 1, his literary projects included a never-completed revision of Samuel Johnson's dictionary, a “tract against treason” sparked by the Gordon Riots, and an epistolary novel, Love and Madness, that detailed a widely known love affair which ended in murder. An impoverished baronet as well as a priest and dependent on the support of a genteel readership, he was the type and form of the establishment writer.