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 C693 
 
 MC-NRLF 
 
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MR. J. PAYNE COLLIER'S REPLY 
 
 To MR. N. E. S. A. HAMILTON'S 
 
 INQUIRY" INTO THE 
 
 IMPUTED SHAKESPEARE FORGERIES. 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 BELL AND DALDY, 186 FLEET STREET. 
 1860. 
 
 Price Two Shillings and Sixpence. 
 
MR. COLLIER'S REPLY 
 
 MR. HAMILTON'S "INQUIRY. 
 
LONDON : 
 Printed by G. BARCLAY, Castle St. Leicester Sq. 
 
MR. J.PAYNE COLLIER'S REPLY 
 
 To MR. N. E. S. A. HAMILTON'S 
 
 INQUIRY" INTO THE 
 
 IMPUTED SHAKESPEARE FORGERIES. 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 BELL AND DALDY, 186 FLEET STREET. 
 1860. 
 
MY Letter in the Athenceum of the 18th Feb. last 
 was necessarily written on the spur of the moment, 
 and it will not surprise the reader that it should 
 have stood in some need of correction : the correc- 
 tions, with additional matter, chiefly in the shape 
 of documents, are supplied in the following pages. 
 Here and there a few new circumstances have since 
 occurred to my memory ; and these I have also 
 inserted, as well as enlarged others. It ought to 
 be borne in mind that the most recent transaction 
 referred to is now more than ten years old, and that 
 others go back to the distance of twenty, thirty, and 
 thirty-five years : it will not be surprising, there- 
 fore, if I have accidentally omitted even particulars 
 which might be important. 
 
 B 
 
 M5809f?8 
 
REPLY, 
 
 THE substance of what here appears in more detail 
 was published in the Athenceum of the 18th ult. ; 
 but the charges against me have been got up with 
 such elaborate pomp and circumstance by the Manu- 
 script Department of the British Museum, of which 
 Mr. N. E. S. A. Hamilton is the mouthpiece, and 
 have been printed in so imposing a shape, that I have 
 thought it necessary to give my " Reply" in something 
 like a corresponding form of permanence and pro- 
 minence, in order, as the question must unavoidably 
 survive the mere interest of the day, that one publi- 
 cation may accompany the other, and that the bane 
 and the antidote may be taken together. 
 
 I can have no right to complain that, if there be 
 fair and reasonable ground for believing that a fraud 
 and imposture has been attempted or committed, one 
 department, or even all the departments, of our great 
 national institution should step forward to guard the 
 public against the delusion. I look upon it, in fact, 
 as part of their duty; but they are bound to dis- 
 
4 Mr. J. Payne Collier's Reply to 
 
 charge that duty with as much expedition as is com- 
 patible with a proper sifting of the case ; and they 
 are bound, moreover, not only to limit themselves, 
 in the execution of their task, to what necessity may 
 require, but to proceed with due regard to the char- 
 acter and dignity of their own position. A dispas- 
 sionate sobriety ought to be observed, if merely for 
 the sake of the effect to be produced ; and the whole 
 inquiry ought to be conducted with the utmost tem- 
 per and moderation. Above all, no personal ani- 
 mosity or individual antipathy ought to be indulged, 
 much less to be apparent. A spirit of judicial im- 
 partiality ought to pervade the proceedings of those 
 who take upon themselves at once to accuse, to in- 
 vestigate, to give evidence, and to decide. 
 
 This is a truism so obvious that I shall not en- 
 deavour so much to enforce it, as to contrast it with 
 the course the Manuscript Department of the British 
 Museum have adopted in reference to the charges 
 they have brought against me. 
 
 In the very beginning of July last, they opened 
 their attacks by the boldest accusations of forgery, 
 confessedly long before they were in possession of evi- 
 dence to support them : all was then mere assertion ; 
 but they promised, without more delay than could not 
 be avoided, to produce their authorities : they should, 
 they said, " shortly lay before the public " all the 
 particulars they could collect. What was the result? 
 They have occupied nearly eight months in their 
 inquiries : in the meantime, if they were believed, I 
 have had to sustain all the odium produced by their 
 preliminary denunciation ; and yet, when their ma- 
 tured imputations are brought forward in the shape of 
 an ambitious pamphlet of 155 quarto pages, they are 
 
Mr. Hamilton s Inquiry. 5 
 
 not found to contain even as mucli as their original 
 statement,* 
 
 In the interval, however, they have been far from 
 idle in other ways; they have carried back their 
 researches not merely to the year 1849, when I 
 bought the corrected folio, 1632, of Shakespeare's 
 Works (which, for brevity's sake, I shall call the 
 Perkins folio) of Rodd the bookseller, but even to 
 the year 1823, when, in fact, my avowed career of 
 authorship was only in its commencement. They 
 have hunted in every dirty hole and obscure corner 
 for information ; and if they happened to light upon 
 anything that, in their opinion, at all contributed to 
 the end of blackening my character, individual and 
 literary, they have not failed, during the whole of the 
 last seven or eight months, to make it public, not only 
 by paragraphs and articles in newspapers, f but by 
 
 '* Independently of documents and other reprinted matter, 
 there are not 50 pages of the 155 that are new. The composition 
 of these 50 pages occupied more than 220 days, or at the rate of 
 considerably less than a quarter of a page per day this, too, 
 supposing only one hand to have been employed upon the work ; 
 whereas it is notorious that the Manuscript Department not only 
 brought all their resources to bear on the subject, but called in the 
 aid of the Mineral Department also. We do not here take into 
 account the separate labours of the lithographer. Is this, I may 
 ask, to be taken as a test of the rate at which business is con- 
 ducted in the Department ? I always thought, and had some 
 reason to think, that it was one of the most industrious and well- 
 conducted departments in the British Museum. 
 
 f I wish to avoid giving personal offence, and therefore 
 mention no names ; but it is generally stated that the Manuscript 
 Authorities of the British Museum specially invited gentlemen 
 to see the book, and to listen to their criticisms upon it, who 
 were engaged in various departments of the public press. The 
 name of one gentleman in particular, for whom otherwise I enter- 
 
6 Mr. J. Payne Collier's Reply to 
 
 laboured attacks upon me in magazines and reviews 
 carefully forwarded to me anonymously. No chance 
 was neglected of discovering something to confirm 
 the impression which the Manuscript Department 
 hoped they had produced by their earliest onslaught 
 in The Times of the 2nd of July last.* 
 
 Surely it will not be said that such a course is 
 creditable to the Manuscript Department of the 
 British Museum, which ought only to be interested 
 in the discovery of truth, for the sake of truth itself, 
 and not for the purpose of injuring private reputa- 
 tion; yet its junior officers, it is said, have from 
 time to time employed themselves in stimulating 
 the public appetite, and in whetting the edge of 
 public curiosity, for the sake, not only of directing 
 
 tain a high respect in his own branch of knowledge, has almost 
 invariably been coupled in paragraphs directed against me and 
 my literary labours. While I had any influences of the same 
 kind, as all my friends and relations knew, I studiously kept my 
 own name from thus attracting public attention. 
 
 * It is to be observed that at that date they had had the 
 Perkins folio, by consent of his Grace the Duke of Devonshire, 
 for nearly two months in their hands. I have always striven to 
 make myself as unobjectionable as I could, but even my small 
 reputation in an inferior department of letters seems to have 
 excited envy ; and I foresaw that, when Lord Campbell, as a 
 kind compliment to that reputation rather than to my merits, 
 addressed to me his letter On the Legal Acquirements of Shake- 
 speare, it would materially tend to exasperate my enemies. It 
 had not long been published before Sir F. Madden (who, in Sep- 
 tember, had intimated to me his wish to see the book) wrote to 
 the Duke of Devonshire in order to borrow the Perkins folio ; 
 and having procured it, Mr. N. E. S. A. Hamilton "seized the 
 opportunity," as he himself expressed it, of subjecting it, with 
 the aid of Sir F. Madden and others, to the most rigorous 
 examination. 
 
Mr. Hamiltoris Inquiry. 1 
 
 renewed attention to Mr. N. E. S. A. Hamilton's 
 promised pamphlet, but for the purpose of increasing 
 the prejudice against me.* 
 
 The whole of this inquiry and discussion has 
 arisen out of my purchase in 1849 of the Perkins 
 folio, from the late Thomas Rodd, a bookseller whom 
 I had known for at least forty years, and who during 
 the whole of that time carried on a most respectable 
 business in Newport Street, Leicester Square. I 
 have told the story of my acquisition of it so often 
 that, as I am weary of it, and perhaps as the par- 
 ticulars are contained in both editions of my Notes 
 and Emendations, and are more than touched upon in 
 my Shakespeare, 6 vols. 8vo. 1858, it may not be 
 necessary to say more on the present occasion than 
 
 * Let me here, with the utmost brevity, advert to Mr. T. J. 
 Arnold's articles, two dozen pages long, in Fraser's Magazine for 
 January and February, so well-timed as just to precede Mr. N. E. 
 S. A. Hamilton's work. Mr. T. J. Arnold does not, it is true, 
 belong to the MS. Department of the British Museum, but he 
 takes the very same line of argument, uses almost the same 
 expressions as Mr. N. E, S. A. Hamilton, and affords internal 
 evidence of the closest connexion. The reader may remark also 
 the most unfair manner in which an attempt is there made to 
 connect me with a disreputable paper called The Freebooter, not 
 merely as a correspondent, but actually as the editor of the publi- 
 cation in which an improper use was once made of my name, and 
 for which the real editor afterwards endeavoured to make amends. 
 I was no more editor than Sir F. Madden, or indeed than Mr. 
 N. E. S. A. Hamilton, who was probably not then born. The 
 transaction occurred so long ago, 1823, that it had quite escaped 
 my memory ; but I think I can say with certainty that I never 
 saw more than one number of The Freebooter. The whole matter 
 was explained to the late Sir H. Nicolas, and to Mr. Pickering, 
 his publisher. If Mr. T. J. Arnold be the son of the late S. J. 
 Arnold the dramatist, perhaps I can understand part of the cause 
 of his undeserved animosity towards me. It may be an entirely 
 different, but not an indifferent person. 
 
8 Mr. J. Payne Collier's Reply to 
 
 that the Perkins folio came out of a parcel of books 
 from the country ; that I was in Kodd's shop when 
 the parcel arrived ; that I bought it for thirty 
 shillings (neither Rodd nor myself being aware of 
 the existence of any manuscript notes in it); and 
 that I left it for a time in the shop.* The truth of 
 this statement has been impugned ; and if it have 
 not been openly and broadly asserted, it has been 
 more than insinuated that the volume had no notes 
 whatever when it came into my hands ; that I subse- 
 quently added them, and that having so inserted 
 them in an old handwriting, or in what was meant 
 to look like it, I palmed upon the world my own 
 alterations and emendations of the text of Shake- 
 speare, as the work of some person who had lived 
 about the middle of the seventeenth century. 
 
 Now, the first answer (besides my own direct 
 and flat contradiction) I shall make to this charge is 
 the following note to me from the distinguished 
 Principal of New Inn Hall, Oxford. 
 
 * An unworthy cavil has been raised because in the Preface 
 to my Notes and Emendations I said I " took the book home," 
 and in my letter in the Athenaum that I " left the volume to be 
 sent home." The fact, I believe, is that I did take the Perkins 
 folio home, and that it was not sent home, but that I left it for a 
 short time in the shop. My frequent course was to call at Rodd's 
 on my way from Kensington, to see what he might have that was 
 new and interesting to me, and if the book or books I had bought 
 were of any size, to go on towards the City, and on my return to 
 carry away my purchase by an omnibus. I did not ordinarily 
 give Rodd the trouble of sending all the way to my house. Such 
 I feel pretty sure was the case with the Perkins folio : I left it in 
 the shop until my return, and then I " took it home" with another 
 folio. My enemies must be hard pressed to rely on such a paltry 
 quibble as this, or indeed to put it forward at all, as a reason for 
 doubting the veracity of my statement. I did not sufficiently 
 speak "by the card." 
 
Mr. Hamilton's Inquiry. 9 
 
 Dr. Henry Wellesley happened to hear (as who 
 could avoid hearing ?) in July last the imputations cast 
 upon me and my conduct by Mr. Hamilton, and feel- 
 ing certain that he had seen the Perkins folio, in its 
 annotated state, in Rodd's shop, before the volume 
 arrived at my house, he said so to a mutual friend, 
 who communicated the fact to me. Dr. Wellesley 
 must have entered the shop just after I quitted it, 
 and there saw the book in question. He examined 
 it more than Rodd, or I had done,* saw, to use his own 
 words, " an abundance of manuscript notes in the 
 margins," and wished to become the purchaser of the 
 volume ; but Rodd told Dr. Wellesley that it was al- 
 ready sold to a customer (probably naming me), 
 and the Principal therefore looked at it no farther. 
 Learning that Dr. Wellesley had so spoken of the 
 transaction, I took the liberty of writing to him, al- 
 though personally unknown, and of requesting such 
 particulars as he could readily furnish, impressing 
 upon him tlieir importance to me, in order to repel 
 the calumnies with which I had been assailed. I 
 was very soon favoured with the following reply, 
 which in every respect tallied, not merely with what 
 I had heard, but with what I had myself seen : 
 
 " Woodmancote Rectory, Hurstpierpoint, 
 
 "August 13th, 1859. 
 " SIR, 
 
 " Although I do not recollect the precise date, I 
 remember some years ago being in the shop of Thomas Rodd 
 on one occasion when a case of books from the country had 
 just been opened. One of those books was an imperfect folio 
 
 * Perhaps by a better light. The front shop, where the 
 parcel had been opened by Rodd, was dark from the books in the 
 window, but the back shop was lighted by a large sky-light. 
 
10 Mr. J. Payne Collier's Reply to 
 
 ShaJcspeare, with an abundance of manuscript notes in the mar- 
 gins. He observed to me that it was of little value to col- 
 lectors as a copy, and that the price was thirty shillings. I 
 should have taken it myself; but, as he stated that he had put 
 it by for another customer, I did not continue to examine it ; 
 nor did I think any more about it, until I heard afterwards 
 that it had been found to possess great literary curiosity and 
 value. In all probability, Mr. Rodd named you to me; but 
 whether he or others did so, the affair was generally spoken of 
 at the time, and I never heard it doubted that you had become 
 the possessor of the book. 
 
 " I am, Sir, 
 
 " Your faithful and obedient Servant, 
 
 " H. WELLESLET." 
 "To J. P. Collier, Esq," 
 
 Dr. Wellesley, therefore, saw the Perkins folio, 
 with " an abundance of manuscript notes in the 
 margins/' in 1849, for Eodd died in that year ; and 
 it remained long in my possession before I became 
 acquainted with its " great literary curiosity and 
 value." As soon as I knew it, I proclaimed it with- 
 out reserve everywhere. I wrote several letters on 
 the subject in the Athenceum: I laid it before a 
 Council of the Shakespeare Society, specially sum- 
 moned for the purpose, which was attended by nearly 
 all the members : I also produced it at the general 
 meeting of the Society. Besides showing it at two, 
 if not three, evening meetings of the Society of An- 
 tiquaries, I published a letter stating that it would 
 be upon their library-table for four hours by daylight, 
 when everybody interested was invited to inspect it.* 
 
 * Preface to Collier's Shakespeare, 1858, p. xi. It was not 
 perhaps convenient to Mr. Hamilton to notice this daylight ex- 
 hibition at all, as there mentioned ; nor does he say that the 
 Perkins folio was shown first at a Council of the Shakespeare 
 Society, and afterwards at the general meeting of the members. 
 
Mr. Hamilton's Inquiry. 11 
 
 I did not see there any of the officers of the Manu- 
 script Department of the British Museum ; but I do 
 not know what more I could have done to secure their 
 attention to the book, unless I had carried it to them 
 and begged them to look at it, and to afford it the 
 sanction of their judgment. I have been told, but I do 
 not believe it, that Sir F. Madden and his colleagues 
 were irritated by this piece of supposed neglect ; and 
 that they also took it ill that I presented the Perkins 
 folio to the kindest, most condescending, and most 
 liberal of noblemen,* instead of giving it to their in- 
 stitution. When I placed it in the hands of the Duke 
 of Devonshire, I knew that, for any literary purpose, 
 it would be just as accessible, and just as safe, in his 
 Grace's library, as in that of the British Museum. 
 
 I shall make no other remarks in connexion with 
 the preceding note from Dr. Wellesley than that, 
 notwithstanding the lapse of more than ten years 
 since the transaction, it agrees most precisely with 
 my narrative in the Prefaces to the two impressions 
 of my Notes and Emendations in 1853 : " the case 
 of books from the country," the " abundance of 
 manuscript notes in the margins," the very price of 
 " thirty shillings " which I had paid for it, and the 
 fact that, according to the Principal's belief, the book 
 
 * The Duke of Devonshire had the highest reverence for any 
 degree of literary merit, and he was never tired of depreciating 
 his own rank, and elevating that of men of learning and talents. 
 He would not hesitate to show me infinitely more kind attention, 
 than on any score I could lay claim to : as a trifling instance, I may 
 be allowed to mention that, when I was at work in the library at 
 the time he took lunch, he never failed to bring me, with his own 
 hands, a glass of sherry and a biscuit from the ante-room where 
 he sat. Neither was there in this condescension the slightest 
 ostentation of humility. 
 
12 Mr. J. Payne Collier's Reply to 
 
 had devolved into my hands : all these facts show 
 that it could have been no other than the Perkins 
 folio. I consider myself most fortunate to have thus 
 secured such unimpeachable testimony : Dr. Wel- 
 lesley might have died in the interval between 1849 
 and 1859 ; or I might myself have expired, and left 
 my memory to be blotted by such unscrupulous 
 adversaries as have recently assailed me. I can 
 never enough thank Dr. Wellesley for the manner 
 in which he has come forward, in the face of all the 
 denunciations of the British Museum against me. 
 
 Thus I am warranted in asserting, as I do in the 
 most unqualified manner, that when the volume 
 came into my house it contained all the manuscript 
 alterations for which credit has been given to it by 
 me. Their real date and origin is another question ; 
 and not long after the publication of the first edi- 
 tion of my Notes and Emendations, I was led firmly 
 to believe that I could establish that they were in 
 existence early in the present, if not late in the last, 
 century. My book had been out only a short time 
 before I was favoured by the receipt of the following 
 letter by post : 
 
 " Hyde Park Gate, Kensington, 
 
 "25th April, 1853. 
 " SIR, 
 
 " You will, I trust, forgive one who has not the 
 honour of knowing you, for intruding on your leisure, when 
 I state that the subject on which I am about to trouble you is 
 the copy of the folio 1632 of Shakespeare, with the MS. emen- 
 dations, which you have lately given to the world, and for 
 which every lover of Shakspeare is so deeply indebted to 
 you. 
 
 " The information which I wish to give you may, if fol- 
 lowed up, enable you to trace the ownership of that copy for 
 at least a century back. 
 
Mr. Hamilton's Inquiry. 13 
 
 " A friend of mine, Mr. Parry, with whom I was lately 
 conversing on your extraordinary and interesting discovery, 
 told me he many years ago possessed a copy of THE FOLIO 1632 
 which had marginal notes in manuscript, and which, being in 
 bad order, he never consulted. This copy he lost, he did not 
 know how, and gave himself no concern about it. 
 
 " When I showed him the fac-simile of the page out of 
 Henry VI., which forms the frontispiece to your work, Mr. 
 Parry told me he had no doubt that the copy was the same as 
 that which he lost, as he remembered very well the hand-writing, 
 and the state of preservation. I pressed him to give me all par- 
 ticulars about the work, and how it came into his possession. 
 He told me that it was given him, ivith many old books, by an 
 uncle of the name of Grey, WHO WAS A LITERARY MAN, AND FOND 
 OF CURIOUS WORKS. Mr. Parry believes that Mr. Grey got the 
 copy at the sale of the Perkins library ; and all I could learn 
 of these Perkins's is, that they were related to Pope's Arabella 
 Fermor, and that all the family were dead when the sale of 
 their library took place. I urged Mr. Parry to inform you of 
 these circumstances, thinking that they might interest you 
 greatly, and hoping that if you could once trace the copy into 
 the hands of one of the name of Perkins upwards, it might be 
 a clue to further discovery. Whether from indolence or from 
 modesty, Mr. Parry, I find, has not communicated with you ; 
 and I therefore told him that I assuredly would, as every 
 fragment of information on such a subject had its value. 
 
 " Trusting to your indulgence, and your zeal for our great 
 poet, to excuse the liberty I have taken, believe me to be, sir, ] 
 
 ef Your faithful and obedient Servant, 
 
 " JOHN CARRICK MOORE. 
 " J. Payne Collier, Esq." 
 
 I knew that Mr. J. Carrick Moore was the 
 nephew of the gallant General, Sir John Moore, 
 who fell before Corunna in 1809, and I need not say 
 how strong a feeling of interest and expectation his 
 zealous note excited in me. I wrote to Mr. Parry, 
 Mr. J. C. Moore having favoured me with his address, 
 but received no answer, owing to a fall Mr. Parry 
 
14 Mr. J. Payne Collier's Reply to 
 
 had just suffered. I waited for about ten days, 
 when I ventured to call upon Mr. Moore, who told 
 me of Mr. Parry's accident, and advised me to see 
 him at his residence at St. John's Wood. I did so ; 
 and, without repeating what I printed and reprinted 
 in my Prefaces, I may observe that Mr. Parry en- 
 tirely confirmed every part of Mr. J. C. Moore's 
 communication. He described his uncle, Mr. Grey, 
 as a man fond of old books, and as having a 
 turn for literature* and perfectly recollected the 
 appearance of the folio 1632, both inside and out- 
 side, especially dwelling on its rough calf-binding. 
 He was strong in his belief that the book had come 
 out of the library of a Roman Catholic family of the 
 name of Perkins, residing at Ufton Court, Berkshire ; 
 and he added, that an old priest had there shown 
 him, some fifty years before, the empty shelves that 
 had once been filled with the books. 
 
 Mr. Parry was so distinct and positive, and so 
 sure as to the identity of the hand- writing in the 
 notes, &c., that I returned home quite convinced 
 that I had certain information as to the existence of 
 those notes in the Perkins folio, at the end of the 
 last or in the beginning of the present century. 
 I was then living in the house of my brother-in-law, 
 about three miles from Maidenhead, and I made an 
 
 * Such, it will be observed, was Mr. Parry's statement to Mr. 
 J. C. Moore and to myself ; yet in a letter from him, published by 
 Mr. Hamilton in The Times of August 1, 1859, Mr. Parry observes, 
 " I may also add, that I certainly did not tell, and could not have 
 told, Mr. Collier, that Mr. Gray was partial to the collection of 
 old books, for I believe he set no value at all upon them." Mr. 
 Parry's memory is obviously here defective, for he had told 
 Mr. J. C. Moore that his, Mr. Parry's, "uncle was a literary 
 man and fond of curious works" 
 
Mr. Hamilton's Inquiry. 15 
 
 expedition to Reading, in order to institute some 
 inquiries regarding Ufton Court and the Perkins 
 family. I did not succeed in obtaining any ad- 
 ditional information of the slightest importance ; but 
 I was fortunate enough to meet with some old books, 
 which had very possibly come out of the Perkins 
 library, two being imperfect tracts by Robert Greene, 
 the celebrated Elizabethan pamphleteer, and the 
 other a copy of Spenser, dated 1611, which had 
 once been the property of Michael Drayton.* 
 
 My Preface to the second edition of Notes and 
 Emendations was nearly completed when I first 
 heard of Mr. Parry's ancient ownership of the 
 Perkins folio. I finished it upon the strength of 
 Mr. Parry's personal assurances ; and although the 
 press was kept waiting, I carried that Preface with 
 me to St. John's Wood, in order to be quite sure 
 that what I said accorded entirely with Mr. Parry's 
 recollection and statement. I feel no doubt what- 
 ever that I then added in that preface the parenthesis 
 
 * The conduct of the Museum authorities on this question 
 would make people almost afraid of owning that they have on their 
 shelves any books of value with contemporaneous notes ; but I 
 have been all my long life collecting such relics, and I could with 
 ease enumerate several that belong to me, for some of which, in 
 my sanguine days, I gave high prices. I have Chapman's Twelve 
 Books of Homer's Iliad, with his autograph inscription at the back 
 of the title to Sir Henry Crofts, and manuscript emendations in 
 various places. I have also the same old poet's Hymns of Homer, 
 with a long autograph dedication ; I have Ben Jonson's copy of 
 B. Yong's translation from Montemayor, 1598 ; Daniel's copy 
 of his Poems, 1602, inscribed to Lady Pembroke ; the Earl of 
 Essex's copy of Dray ton's Pastorals, 1593, with many valuable 
 corrections, &c. Dray ton's copy of Spenser's Poems, folio 1611, 
 has also corrections, but whether by Drayton, I have not yet been 
 able absolutely to decide. I have made use of them in the edition 
 of Spenser I am now printing. 
 
16 Mr. J. Payne Colliers Reply to 
 
 that his uncle, Mr. George Grey, " was partial to 
 the collection of old books" at Mr. Parry's express 
 instance ; and I remember the- words the better, be- 
 cause they tallied so precisely with what was stated 
 in Mr. J. Carrick Moore's letter, and, above all, ren- 
 dered it so probable, that Mr. Grey had once been 
 the owner of the Perkins folio. 
 
 I was in haste to get my Preface to the printer, 
 and I did not, on that occasion, carry the volume 
 itself to St. John's Wood with me ; but I afterwards 
 did so, and met Mr. Parry a short distance from 
 his house, walking lame, and aided by a stick. 
 Mr. Parry has since said that he was " using sticks; " 
 but this is a slight mistake, which Mr. Hamilton 
 has, possibly only by error, exaggerated into crutches, 
 a word employed by nobody. Mr. Parry was 
 walking with a stick ; and after expressing my 
 regret at his recent accident, and stating that I 
 had the Perkins folio under my arm, I said that, 
 under the circumstances, I could not think of asking 
 him to return home in order to examine it : he 
 replied, " If you will let me see it now, I shall be 
 able to state at once, whether it was ever my book." 
 I therefore produced it to him on the spot, and held 
 his stick while he looked at the book in several 
 places, including the cover : he then returned it to 
 me with these words, " That was my book ; it is 
 the same, but it has been much ill-used since it 
 was in my possession." I then gave him back his 
 stick, and, thanking him for his most satisfactory 
 assurance, I wished him good morning. 
 
 Very soon after reaching home, that is to say, 
 within a day or two, it occurred to me that I ought 
 to record Mr. Parry's expressions, and I did so with 
 
Mr. Hamilton's Inquiry. 17 
 
 a pencil at the foot of page iv. of my Preface to the 
 second edition of Notes and Emendations, in these 
 words, which, it will be observed, differ from those 
 above used, by having " This " for That, and " mis- 
 used " for ill-used, but the meaning is of course ex- 
 actly the same. 
 
 " I afterwards showed him [i. e. Mr. Parry] the 
 book itself, and having looked at it in several places, 
 he said, ' This was my book : it is the same; but it 
 has been much misused since it was in my posses- 
 
 sion: 
 
 Therefore, I can be more certain of nothing than 
 that I exhibited the Perkins folio to Mr. Parry, and 
 that he employed the words regarding it I have im- 
 puted to him. In his letter in The Times of August 
 1, 1859, he observes, "I cannot remember that Mr. 
 Collier ever showed me the book, but I well remem- 
 ber his showing me the fac-simile." Here are at 
 once two mistakes of memory. I most assuredly 
 did show him the book, and as assuredly I did not 
 show him the fac-simile ; for Mr. J. Carrick Moore, as 
 he himself states in his letter to me, " showed him the 
 fac-simile of the page out of Henry VI.," when Mr. 
 Parry had " no doubt that the copy was the same " 
 as the volume he had owned many years before. 
 Mr. Parry, in his letter in The Times, only says that 
 he "cannot remember : *' he does not say positively 
 that I did not show the book to him, merely that his 
 memory does not serve him upon the point ; mine 
 does serve me most distinctly, that he not only saw 
 the book, but that he turned over several of its 
 leaves, looked at the outside, and then replaced it 
 in my hands. I put the fact on record very soon 
 after the transaction. My evidence is clear and 
 
 c 
 
18 Mr. J. Payne Collier's Reply to 
 
 affirmative, while that of Mr. Parry is indistinct and 
 negative. 
 
 J do not impute the slightest blame to Mr. Parry. 
 I am confident that he does not mean to deceive or 
 misstate : I merely assert that his memory is defec- 
 tive on this point. I only wish that it were as good 
 as mine ; and then I should have no difficulty in 
 establishing that the Perkins folio of 1632, with its 
 emendations (the peculiar hand- writing of which Mr. 
 Parry told Mr. J. C. Moore he at once recognised) 
 had been the property of Mr. Parry early in the 
 commencement of the present century. 
 
 I have no personal acquaintance with Mr. Parry 
 beyond what I have seen of him in connexion with 
 the book in question ; but I believe him to be a man 
 of honour and probity, and he is known to individuals 
 for whom I have the highest respect and esteem. 
 He is, like myself, advanced in years, and cer- 
 tainly little able to compete with the imposing autho- 
 rities at the British Museum. When he went there 
 on 14th July last, for the purpose of inspecting the 
 Perkins folio, in the presence of Sir F. Madden, Mr. 
 Hamilton, Mr. Maskelyne, and others, he may easily 
 have been confused by the rapid passing and re- 
 passing of the folios of 1623 and 1632 before his 
 eyes ; and at last he may not have been able to re- 
 member which edition had really been his own book, 
 although he had first told Mr. J. C. Moore, and 
 afterwards myself repeatedly, that his corrected copy 
 had been the edition of 1632. The figures 1623 
 and 1632 are precisely the same, only with an inver- 
 sion, which may have added to Mr. Parry's confu- 
 sion ; * but I should not be disposed to criticise too 
 
 * This is the more probable, because, in one of Mr. T. J. 
 
Mr. Hamilton's Inquiry. 19 
 
 nicely what may have passed on the occasion at the 
 Museum, because I am sure, whatever he said, that 
 Mr. Parry had no intention to state what was un- 
 true. He spoke to the best of his memory, but his 
 memory was bad ; and he may have been, as it were, 
 cajoled out of his own conviction. 
 
 Without Mr. Parry's evidence, which, however, 
 under all the circumstances, I am far from relin- 
 quishing (and without having since attempted to see 
 him and to reconvert him to his old opinion, that the 
 Perkins folio of 1632, and no other, had been his 
 long before I bought it) I am able to prove conclu- 
 sively by the Rev. Dr. Wellesley's ready and welcome 
 assistance, that when I purchased the book of Rodd 
 for thirty shillings, out of a parcel just received 
 from the country, it contained "an abundance of 
 manuscript notes in the margins." 
 
 These manuscript notes I never altered, added 
 to, nor diminished. How much they may have been 
 altered or diminished, while the Perkins folio was 
 in the hands of the officers of the British Museum, 
 it is impossible for me to judge ; but, I apprehend, 
 on the showing of my antagonists, that something 
 has been obliterated, with or without the consent of the 
 present noble owner of the book. Mr. Maskelyne, 
 before the Duke of Devonshire was applied to for 
 permission, talks of having tested the ink by his 
 tongue, which ink "evidently yielded to the action 
 of damp :" therefore, a portion of the writing may 
 have been thus removed, which was valuable as an 
 
 Arnold's papers in Fraser's Magazine, he makes a similar blunder, 
 viz., 1853 for 1835 : he represents me as having published my 
 New Facts only as long since as 1853, whereas they came out 
 nearly twenty years earlier, in 1835. 
 
20 Mr. J. Payne Collier's Reply to 
 
 emendation, or with reference even to the question 
 of authenticity. How many pages or parts of pages 
 may have been licked over, and licked out, by the 
 tongues of the officers and under-officers of the 
 Manuscript Department, it is impossible for me now 
 to ascertain. Those who may make the same experi- 
 ment with the book in future will not have a very 
 agreeable duty. 
 
 Mr. Maskelyne also cannot deny that some of the 
 writing, which he charges as artificial, has been 
 made with " ordinary ink," or with " a mixture con- 
 taining ordinary ink;" and who shall say, in the 
 course of the many years that this book must have 
 been more or less under the hands of the cor- 
 rector, (perhaps in circumstances of difficulty with 
 which we are not at all acquainted,) what inks he 
 may, so long ago, have been under the accidental 
 compulsion of employing ? I know that such has not 
 unfrequently been the case with notes I have from 
 time to time made in my own books, especially in a 
 copy of England's Parnassus, 1600, on which I have 
 been engaged for the last twenty-five years in supply- 
 ing the names of authors and their works. I have 
 even sometimes resorted in the first instance to pencil, 
 and when next I had a pen and ink at hand, I have 
 written in ink over my own pencillings. Such a 
 course is surely not unnatural, and therefore, I ap- 
 prehend, not unusual. 
 
 That I did so in tfce case of the Perkins folio I 
 utterly and absolutely deny ; yet that is the im- 
 pression which has been endeavoured to be produced 
 against me. But, if it be true that pencils of plum- 
 bago were at that time in common use, as I believe 
 they were, the old corrector may himself have now 
 
Mr. Hamilton's Inquiry. 21 
 
 and then adopted this mode of recording on the 
 spot changes which, in his judgment, ought hereafter 
 permanently to be made in Shakespeare's text. Mr. 
 Hamilton speaks of the bold modern character of the 
 words still to be traced in pencil ; but for how much 
 of this boldness and modernness (which for my own 
 part I do not perceive) may we not be indebted 
 to the unconscious lithographer who, under such 
 watchful instructions, made the single fac-simile 
 with which we are favoured.* In his letter in The 
 Times of July 2d, 1859, Mr. Hamilton told us that 
 there are an " infinite number " of these pencil-marks; 
 yet his lithograph presents us with only fifteen of 
 that "infinite number," and those fifteen relate to 
 the most trifling and insignificant matters. Such 
 specks and atoms as he has construed into letters, 
 and even into words, might have been made in 
 thousands, even during the time the Perkins folio was 
 in the custody of the Manuscript Department. I 
 certainly do not mean to say that this unworthy trick 
 has been played : I am bound here to acquit my 
 adversaries of such paltry and discreditable frauds : 
 what I mean to say is, that if such specks and 
 spots of plumbago be made, there is no word in our 
 
 * Without meaning at all to imply that it was so, is it not 
 possible that even in giving these instructions, and pointing out 
 to the lithographer the real, or supposed, course of the old pencil- 
 marks, especially if it were done with the point of a pencil, some 
 atoms of new plumbago may have found their way to the paper 
 of the Perkins folio, and have been, on all hands, innocently 
 mistaken for old plumbago ? If the real or supposed course were 
 pointed out with a dry pen, may we not imagine that the dry 
 pen itself might easily make some suspicious indentation on the 
 soft paper of the old book ? I am told that both pencil and dry pen 
 were at times used for the purpose ; and that where plumbago was 
 not to be found in the Perkins folio, indentation was relied upon. 
 
22 Mr. J. Payne Collier's Reply to 
 
 language to which, with the smallest ingenuity, they 
 may not be adapted.* Supposing, however, that 
 such a word as "begging" (one of Mr. Hamilton's 
 illustrations) were ever so plain in the Perkins folio, 
 what is gained by it ? There is actually no cor- 
 responding emendation of the old printed copy, so 
 that " begging " must have been written in the mar- 
 gin, not as a suggestion for a change of language, 
 but merely as an explanation, and a bad explanation 
 too, if it refer to " pregnant " in the poet's text. No 
 man who pretends to understand Shakespeare would 
 
 * On this point and some others I may be allowed to borrow 
 the following note from the Athenceum of the 25th Feb. It comes 
 from the most trustworthy and experienced lithographer in Europe, 
 whose opinion is constantly sought and relied upon in our courts 
 of justice : 
 
 "113 St. Martin's Lane, February 22. 
 
 " Seeing in the Athenceum of last Saturday that my name has 
 been used both by Mr. Collier, and also in your critique on Mr. 
 Hamilton's < Inquiry,' &c., and, as the general reader may suppose 
 I have been engaged by both parties, permit me to state, that not 
 myself, but my son, F. Gr. Netherclift, who is separated from me 
 and in business alone, was employed by the party at the British 
 Museum on the fac-similes in Mr. Hamilton's pamphlet. I had 
 no knowledge of it or part in it, nor, under the circumstances, 
 would I have attempted to show pencil-marks over or under any 
 ink writing by any mode of printing ; whilst, from my knowledge 
 of facts, and my high respect for the character of Mr. Collier, for 
 whom I have made very numerous fac-similes in the course of the 
 last thirty years, I could not have joined in any way to aid this 
 causeless and cruel persecution against him. As I am continually 
 subpoenaed in the Law Courts to give evidence in matters relating 
 to handwriting, and some kind cross-examining counsel may make 
 a * mare's nest ' of the above circumstance, may I request the 
 favour of your inserting this letter in the Athenceum ? 
 
 " I remain, &c., 
 
 " JOSEPH NETHERCLIFT, Sen." 
 
Mr. Hamilton's Inquiry. 23 
 
 think of placing "begging" in the margin as the 
 true sense of "pregnant." 
 
 Is it not strange, if pencil-marks can be pointed 
 out, as supposed instructions for such words, and 
 fragments of words, as Mr. Hamilton has given 
 us, that not the smallest trace of pencil is to be 
 found in connexion with the entire lines, sentences, 
 and parts of sentences, which abound in the Perkins 
 folio ? There the old corrector has left ex confesso 
 no vestige of a mark. Mr. Hamilton does not pre- 
 tend to have found one atom of plumbago there, and, 
 if it had been to be found, the powerful microscope 
 which he and his coadjutors employed could riot have 
 failed to detect it.* Supposing for an instant, 
 I only suppose it that anybody had maliciously 
 and surreptitiously introduced these specks and 
 
 * In my letter in the Athenceum of the 18th Feb., I committed 
 an error when I applied the terms Simonides Uranius to a micro- 
 scope. I have no pretensions to science of any kind, and I mis- 
 understood Mr. Maskelyne's parenthesis. I correct my own blunder 
 here (which no doubt many others have already set right), because, 
 irrelevant as it is, even that might in some way, for aught I know, 
 be tortured into proof of fraud. It is just as much so as the 
 twenty odd pages Mr. N. E. S. A. Hamilton has filled with real 
 or supposed omissions in Hamlet, many of which I never dreamed 
 at any time of including. How does it prove forgery if it could 
 be shown that I had carelessly left out of my emendations all the 
 proposed changes in Hamlet? The authorities of the Manuscript 
 Department are no great logicians, or they would have been 
 sensible that the emphasis they lay on the emendations in Hamlet 
 is an unwilling tribute to their importance, if not to their ex- 
 cellence. The same remark will apply to Mr. Hamilton's osten- 
 tatious display of the few manuscript emendations in the Bridge- 
 water folio, 1623, of which, by the way, he himself omits two. 
 The fact is that few things are more difficult than to be utterly 
 faultless in such extracts. I spared no pains to be accurate, but 
 how often may the eye be deceived in turning over 900 folio pages 
 in double columns, full of minor, as well as of major alterations. 
 
24 Mr. J. Payne Collier's Reply to 
 
 spots for the purpose of discrediting the ink emenda- 
 tions, it would have been very easy to have applied 
 them as hints for a lithographer in forming such 
 short words as "wall," "now," or "over" (which 
 Mr. Hamilton has relied upon), but impossible to 
 have annexed them to whole lines and sentences 
 without their being observed in an instant, and fol- 
 lowed by the naked eye. For instance, if the two 
 substituted lines in Hamlet, Act V., had been first 
 entirely written in pencil, and then inserted in ink, 
 the pencil could have been traced, more or less, 
 through the whole course of the couplet ; it would not 
 have been a mere dot or touch, and nothing besides. 
 I declare most positively, in the face of the whole 
 world, that, while the Perkins folio was in my hands, 
 I never saw a pencil-mark in it that I had not made 
 myself, either as a note of reference to some other 
 book, or as a point of observation connected with the 
 book itself. If I wanted to be sure not to forget to 
 look at a particular passage in Malone, or in any 
 other commentator, or if I wished to note something 
 that required again to be examined in the folio, I 
 took the ordinary method with a pencil that I always 
 kept at hand ; but that I thus added the slightest 
 hint with reference to any projected alteration of the 
 language of the poet I deny in the strongest form in 
 which it is possible to clothe a denial. If a fancy 
 should ever cross the mind of any one who has ever 
 seen me write, that such and such a word or letter 
 in Mr. Hamilton's lithograph is not unlike my hand, 
 I can only say that for the last fifty years my hand- 
 writing must have been familiar to many in the 
 British Museum ; and that if the likeness have been 
 more than merely accidental, the fact has an origin 
 
Mr. Hamilton's Inquiry. 25 
 
 not much to the credit of our national establishment. 
 I do not impute it:* I only assert that no letter, 
 syllable, or word of so-called bold and modern wri- 
 ting in Mr. Hamilton's fac- simile was placed in the 
 Perkins folio by me. I never saw Mr. Hamilton's 
 writing, but he must, from his position, often have 
 have seen mine, and I will venture to say, that his 
 lithograph of supposed pencil-words is quite as like 
 his hand as mine. 
 
 It may be urged that my eyes are bad, even when 
 aided by spectacles ; that the late Duke of Devon- 
 shire's eyes (though about two years younger than 
 my own) were also bad ; but it is a fact that, neither 
 together nor separately, did we ever discover a single 
 pencil-mark. I exhibited the Perkins folio by candle- 
 light and by day -light, and it was turned about in 
 every possible direction by those who inspected it, 
 and I never yet heard of an individual who saw pencil- 
 marks, until after the volume had been deposited in 
 
 * Other people, however, may not be so charitable. I lent the 
 book for a week to a very intimate and most intelligent Shake- 
 spearian friend in my own neighbourhood, who writes me a note 
 containing the following supposed address to Mr. Hamilton and 
 his coadjutors : " Gentlemen of the Manuscript Department, who 
 impute fraud and forgery to Mr. Collier, what could you reply 
 to any one who declared his suspicion, that, to serve your turn, 
 you had fabricated the pencilling s on the side of the old corrector's 
 notes and emendations ? " My friend goes on to assert that, " in 
 the whole week that the Perkins folio was every day under his 
 eyes, when he examined every page of it, he never saw a single 
 pencil-mark, nor any indication which would lead him to doubt 
 the bona fides of the whole body of the emendations." He doubted 
 many of them as a matter of criticism, but never doubted that they 
 were genuine. Surely, if pencil-marks were required, as instruc- 
 tions for the subsequent insertion of trifling expletives, they would 
 be doubly necessary for long, new passages, so confessedly Shake- 
 spearian. 
 
26 Mr. J. Payne Colliers Reply to 
 
 the Manuscript Department of the British Museum : 
 there, according to Mr. Hamilton, an " infinite num- 
 ber" were discovered. Even now I defy him to show 
 any such " infinite number ; v and it is not immaterial 
 to mention that the able and most pains-taking litho- 
 grapher I employed never saw one of them. Mr. 
 Netherclift, senior, had the book in his hands, while 
 it was still mine, several times, and for an indefinite 
 period ; for he and his assistants not only executed 
 the fac-simile which accompanied both editions of 
 my Notes and Emendations, but eighteen other fac- 
 similes from as many different parts of the volume, 
 which were privately made for me, as the severest 
 tests of the genuineness and importance of the emen- 
 dations. Yet he assures me, in a letter now before 
 me, that he and his assistants never once discovered 
 a pencil-mark from the first page to the last, except- 
 ing my avowed pencillings and lines round the pass- 
 ages I wished to be imitated. I placed my book 
 unreservedly in his hands, with no other charge than 
 to take care of it : he might show it to whom he 
 pleased ; and, if he had doubted, he would have done 
 me a favour to have asked any competent authority. 
 
 All I maintain is that the pencil- marks are so 
 few, so small, and so indistinct, that it is only by the 
 exercise of the most tortuous ingenuity that they can 
 be transformed into words and letters ; and that if 
 they were brought before any intelligent and well- 
 educated jury, as proofs, not merely of mine, but 
 of Mr. Hamilton's, or of any other man's hand- writing, 
 the case would at once be scouted out of every court 
 of justice in the empire. 
 
 I am tired of this subject of pencillings : but 
 there is one observation upon them, growing out of 
 
Mr. Hamilton } s Inquiry. 27 
 
 Mr. Maskelyne's Letter in The Times , dated 13th 
 July, 1859, which I must be allowed to make. He 
 is mysteriously great upon the question, whether in 
 some places the pencil overlies the ink, or the ink the 
 pencil, apparently forgetting that if the pencil-mark 
 overlies the ink, the pencil-mark must have been 
 made last : he admits, however, without reserve, that 
 " in several places the pencil stops abruptly at the 
 ink." Is not this decisive ? Why does it " stop 
 abruptly at the ink," but because the ink had been 
 previously written, and the person who made the 
 pencil-mark went no farther than the ink would allow 
 him? Truly, all this discussion about " the lustre of 
 the plumbago," arid about the plumbago " just trace- 
 able under the ink," is too paltry and puerile for a 
 man of Mr. Maskelyne's scientific attainments ; and 
 it almost makes one smile to read his grave and au- 
 thoritative denunciation of the u in Richard II., and 
 of the "tick" which "intersects each limb of that 
 letter." If, as he tells us, the pencil sometimes stops 
 at the ink 9 there is an end of the question, as far as 
 every word so circumstanced is concerned. 
 
 And now let me ask, what has become of the 
 wonderful binding-discovery which Mr. Hamilton 
 declared in his Letter in The Times of 2d July, 1859, 
 that he had made? He says not one syllable about 
 it in the body of his pamphlet, but in his appendix 
 (p. 133) he has thrust in a note, which does not at 
 all explain away his original contradiction, when he 
 first called the binding, as I myself had done in my 
 Prefaces, "rough calf;" and afterwards, "rough 
 sheep." Besides, a mighty fuss was made in his first 
 letter regarding the water-mark on the fly-leaf. I 
 dispute neither the "rough sheep" nor the water- 
 
28 Mr. J. Payne Collier's Reply to 
 
 mark. It is no part of ray case to do so ; for I ex- 
 pressly said in my Prefaces to Notes and Emenda- 
 tions, 1853, that it was not even the second coat the 
 Perkins folio had worn. The fly-leaf, with its " G. R. 
 and Dutch Lion," so exultingly dwelt upon by Mr. 
 Hamilton, may easily have been inserted even later ; 
 but, later or earlier, it has been abstracted from the 
 book; and when it came from the Manuscript Depart- 
 ment, no fly-leaf was found in it. I do not deny 
 the " G. R." nor the " Dutch Lion ;" but, for aught 
 that appears, all this was a pure invention by Mr. 
 Hamilton. He, or somebody else, has deprived us of 
 the means of testing his assertion: as his " calf" has 
 been metamorphosed into a " sheep," so his " G. R." 
 may by this time have been turned into C. R., and 
 his "Dutch Lion" into an English one. Hence, 
 possibly, the present absence of the fly-leaf. 
 
 How and why the Manuscript authorities of the 
 British Museum have been heated into such ani- 
 mosity towards me I cannot pretend to explain. I 
 was always upon good terms with Sir F. Madden, 
 whom I have known for more than a quarter of a 
 century, and upon two occasions I was of some ser- 
 vice to him. Of one of them I can say no more; 
 but of the other I may remark that it occurred within 
 the last two or three years, and it was when he had 
 involved himself in an awkward scrape by purchasing 
 manuscripts, which he ought to have known had 
 been dishonestly come by. They had in some way 
 escaped from Lord Ellesmere's Collection, and the 
 most obvious and important of them had actually 
 been printed in a volume, with which Sir F. Madden 
 ought to have been well acquainted. The late 
 Earl Ellesmere heard of the strange circumstance, 
 
Mr. Hamilton's Inquiry. 29 
 
 put the matter into the hands of his solicitor, and 
 asked me to inquire of Sir F. Madden as to the 
 facts. I did so; and finding, as I of course ex- 
 pected, that Sir F. Madden had innocently, though 
 ignorantly and most incautiously, become pos- 
 sessed of the documents, they were restored to 
 the noble owner, and the matter was dropped. Sir 
 F. Madden showed me some of the manuscripts he 
 had thus purchased, possibly all. One of them was 
 an entire volume relating to the Mint in the reign 
 of Elizabeth, with the handwriting of Sir Thomas 
 Egerton (afterwards Lord Chancellor and Baron 
 Ellesmere) on nearly every page, which Sir F. 
 Madden, with his great skill and experience in 
 palaeography, might have recognised ; and the other 
 was a very remarkable document on parchment 
 so remarkable, that it is astonishing how Sir F. 
 Madden could have become possessed of it without 
 suspicion. It was an Address from all the Members 
 of Lincoln's Inn to the Queen in 1584, declaring that 
 they would defend her to the last against Spain, and 
 against all her open or concealed enemies ; and the 
 very first name at the bottom of the instrument (and 
 it contained very many) was that of Sir Thomas 
 Egerton, then Solicitor-General. This document was 
 printed at full length in the Egerton Papers by the 
 Camden Society in 1840, and when it was printed it 
 attracted much attention. Nevertheless, Sir F. Mad- 
 den had bought the original ; and the late Earl of 
 Ellesmere wished the matter to be investigated, 
 though, as far as I am aware, it was never his de- 
 sign to prosecute. Really and truly, if Sir F. Mad- 
 den had then been indicted for receiving stolen goods, 
 knowing them to have been stolen, it might have 
 
30 Mr. J. Payne Collier's Reply to 
 
 gone hard with him. I should willingly have been 
 one of his witnesses to character. 
 
 Some men can forget an injury who never can 
 forgive an obligation ; but I assure Sir F. Madden 
 that he was not in the slightest degree indebted 
 to me on the occasion : all along the Earl of 
 Ellesmere was convinced that the Keeper of the 
 Manuscripts had only acted carelessly, not criminally. 
 The crime indeed lay elsewhere. Therefore I cannot 
 for a moment suppose that Sir F. Madden and the 
 younger officers of his department have taken any 
 antipathy to me on this score. If the late Earl 
 of Ellesmere, and my always kind and bountiful 
 patron, and I may call him friend, the late Duke of 
 Devonshire, had any ultimate design of placing me 
 in a distinguished, but invidious position in the 
 British Museum, which design secured me enemies 
 there, I can only say that I never heard of it from 
 either. They wished me well, I am certain ; but 
 whether they attempted and failed in doing well for 
 me in this respect, I cannot decide. I heard of it, it 
 is true, but not from them. When the highest office 
 in that great national establishment was, not very 
 long since, vacant, I was urged to send in my name 
 as a candidate for the place ; but I was not only 
 well acquainted with tjie feebleness of my own 
 claims, but with the strength of the interest, and the 
 greatness of the abilities, that were opposed to me. 
 
 If the Duke and Earl had succeeded in any such 
 project, I could hardly have experienced more bitter 
 hostility than has been displayed towards me in my 
 merely private capacity, as a writer of many pro- 
 ductions tending to the illustration of our native 
 language, and of the great authors who have em- 
 
Mr. Hamilton's Inquiry. 31 
 
 ployed it. The earliest work I published on the 
 subject was in 1820, but I had previously written 
 various anonymous essays and articles ; and I was 
 called to the Bar too late in life to have a chance 
 of success against younger competitors. I there- 
 fore devoted myself mainly to letters, occupying 
 all my spare time in a way that was sufficiently 
 remunerative, but extremely fatiguing, generally 
 keeping me up so late at night that I seldom got 
 to bed until others were rising. My time and pen 
 were thus fully occupied ; and I never had the 
 leisure, even if I had possessed the inclination, to 
 devote myself to the writing and acquisition of 
 feigned hands of any period, much less to the ex- 
 tremely difficult task of imitating the writing of two 
 or three centuries ago. The general reader must 
 here take my word for it, but I have not a relation 
 or friend who does not know that in every way I was 
 incapable of it. Here the charge is, not only that I 
 acquired one, but many ancient hands that I 
 manufactured public and private documents at will ; 
 and, beyond all, that I filled the Perkins folio with 
 thousands of emendations and corrections, besides 
 altering the old and incorrect punctuation in an 
 incalculable number of instances. 
 
 There is one point that my antagonists, in their 
 eagerness to convict me, have entirely forgotten : 
 indeed I apprehend that they are hardly qualified 
 to form a judgment upon the literary excellence 
 of not a few of the alterations suggested in the 
 margins of the Perkins folio. Their vision is 
 only not microscopic when they look back ten, 
 twenty, thirty, and even forty years into the inci- 
 dents of my long life, and fancy that with telescopic 
 
32 Mr. J. Payne Collier's Reply to 
 
 power they behold me sitting with manufactured 
 inks in a close and obscure study, and hard at work 
 upon old-seeming fabrications. They have left no 
 stone unturned, in the hope of finding a poisonous 
 toad under it no place unsearched for some dirty 
 and neglected imputation ; but as to the faculty of 
 judging of what is good or bad in criticism of 
 what is excellent or mistaken in illustration, or of 
 what is valuable or worthless as a wide question 
 of composition and poetry they prudently do not 
 pretend to it. These are points to which the manu- 
 script authorities do not affect to be competent ; but 
 whatever can be done by microscope, and even by a 
 more powerful moral magnifier, they eagerly " seize 
 the opportunity" to undertake ; or if upon such 
 matters they hesitate, they call for the aid of other 
 departments. Then, indeed, the distorted monstro- 
 sities in an atom of plumbago are equalled only by 
 the magnified horrors of a drop of Thames water. 
 
 These gentlemen forget, therefore, that the indis- 
 putable emendations of the Perkins folio, which have 
 called forth the admiration even of the most bigoted 
 and antiquated editors, must be assigned to some- 
 body. If I forged them, the least they can do is 
 to give me credit for them ; and I can only say that 
 I would fain accept them upon any other terms 
 than that of having been their fabricator. Only 
 make out for me a legal and legitimate paternity, 
 and I will adopt the numerous and well-looking 
 family with joy and gratitude. 
 
 The fact, however, is, as almost everybody who 
 knows me can bear witness, that I have never 
 enjoyed facilities absolutely necessary to such elabo- 
 rate trickery. I have not only wanted time and 
 

 Mr. Hamilton's Inquiry. 33 
 
 skill, but place and means. I was married forty -four 
 years ago, and in five out of the eight houses I have 
 since occupied I never had a study to myself: my 
 dwellings were too small and my family too large 
 to allow of it. The common eating-room was there- 
 fore my common writing -room, liable to all sorts of 
 interruptions, through which, by long habit, I con- 
 tinued my occupations ; and if it were possible to 
 accumulate into one point of view all that my pen 
 then produced, by day and by night, people would 
 be astonished at the mass of writing which, by the 
 exercise of unwonted mental energy and power of 
 abstraction, I was able to accomplish. I was always 
 a hard-working man, and often was called upon to 
 perform tasks I would fain have avoided. When I 
 have had a study, I defy the world to show that I 
 ever turned the key to prevent intrusion : everybody 
 was admitted, and at all hours. Such impositions 
 as are charged against me could not be attempted 
 without seclusion and secresy ; yet I had no secrets : 
 my wife opened every letter I received ; and in my 
 study was always kept a chest of drawers to which 
 every member of the family had access for some of 
 the most ordinary requirements.* 
 
 Therefore upon nobody could this charge of 
 fraud and forgery against me have come with 
 greater astonishment than upon my children : if my 
 wife had lived, I believe, it would have killed her to 
 have known that such a base accusation had been 
 
 * I cannot forbear quoting here a brief passage from the 
 letter of an old friend of eighty-four, now residing in the west 
 of England, who, many years since, called upon me for a 
 literary purpose. He is speaking of my " Reply," as it appeared 
 in the Athenceum of 18th Feb. : " The paragraph in your letter 
 
 D 
 
34 Mr. J. Payne Collier's Reply to 
 
 kept hanging over her husband's head for eight 
 months, when she was well aware that it could be 
 refuted in about as many minutes. 
 
 I really have not patience, and, well as I can 
 usually command my feelings, I fear not temper, to 
 enter in detail into a discussion of Mr. Hamilton's 
 supplemental and subsidiary imputations, all of them 
 trumped up with the view to giving some appearance 
 of plausibility to the accusation, that I am myself the 
 author of the pen and pencil emendations in the 
 Perkins folio. 
 
 I admit, without reserve, that the weakest part of 
 my case relates to the finding of Shakespeare docu- 
 ments among the late Earl of Ellesmere's MSS. at 
 Bridge water House. And why is it the weakest part 
 of my case ? For this sole reason, that I never could 
 have had any direct corroboration of my own testi- 
 mony as to the discovery of them : nobody was with 
 me at the precise moment, although the noble owner 
 of the papers had been in the room only a few 
 minutes before. Mr. Hamilton, boldly begging the 
 whole question, styles them " the Bridge water Shake- 
 speare Forgeries." They may be "forgeries," but 
 at that time it never entered my head that they could 
 be so ; and at that time I had never heard the fact, 
 since mentioned, that Steevens had formerly been 
 admitted into the rooms which held both the books 
 and manuscripts. I do not believe that he had 
 
 alluding to your study and your private mode of life affected 
 me much, recollecting, as I perfectly do, the room in which you 
 kindly received me, when I called upon you about Robin Hood 
 Ballads. I well remember that one of your daughters was in the 
 front part of your parlour, while you retired into the back part to 
 examine your book- shelves." 
 
Mr. Hamilton's Inquiry. 35 
 
 any more hand in the "forgeries" than the Eev. 
 H. J. Todd, with whom I once conversed about the 
 papers,* and who had, as I understood, for some 
 years filled the office of Librarian. 
 
 I never suspected the papers to be anything but 
 what they purported to be, and the moment I disco- 
 vered them and had hastily read them over, I carried 
 them to the Earl of Ellesmere (then Lord Francis 
 Leveson Gower) and read them to him, At his 
 Lordship's instance I copied them, and left both ori- 
 ginals and copies with his Lordship. Going again to 
 Bridgewater House (I think it must have been on the 
 very next day, for I was all eagerness to pursue my 
 search) I overtook his Lordship about to enter the 
 door, having just alighted from his horse. He told 
 me that he had seen Mr. Murray, the publisher, who 
 offered to give me 50 or 100 (I believe the smaller 
 to have been the sum) if I would put the documents 
 into shape and write an introduction to them. I 
 declined the proposal at once, saying that I could 
 not consent to make money out of his Lordship's 
 property. Lord Ellesmere appeared a little surprised 
 at my hyper-squeamishness, and replied, with his 
 habitual generosity, that the documents were as 
 much mine as his, for though I had found them in 
 his house, but for me, they might never have been 
 discovered till doomsday. 
 
 This circumstantiality may surprise some of my 
 
 * My object was to gain from him some information respect- 
 ing the MS. where the performance of" Othello" before the Queen 
 at Sir Thomas Egerton's was mentioned. Mr. Todd was very 
 deaf, and I could learn no more from him than that he knew that 
 such a circumstance was mentioned in some MS. In fact, part of 
 the direction of a letter to the Rev. Mr. Todd .remained between 
 the leaves to keep the place, when I saw the book. 
 
36 Mr. J. Payne Collier's Reply to 
 
 antagonists, and they may (like Mr. T. J. Arnold 
 in Fraser's Magazine) endeavour to turn it against 
 me with a more suo, &c. ; but, although twenty -five 
 years have since elapsed, I have the clearest re- 
 collection of the main facts, and I give them as they 
 occurred. From Bridge water House I took all the 
 papers, originals and transcripts, to Rodd's, the 
 bookseller, where we examined them carefully ; 
 and, although I at first agreed that he should 
 sell some copies of them when printed, I after- 
 wards (upon my own principle, as stated to Lord 
 Ellesmere) altered my resolution, and only a few 
 New Facts were passed over Eodd's counter to his 
 customers. 
 
 New Facts was therefore privately printed in 
 1835 at my own expense, and the same was the case 
 with New Particulars and Farther Particulars; if 
 any copies of these three tracts were sold, it was 
 without my knowledge, and without my advan- 
 tage : I do not believe it, as Eodd was a very 
 conscientious and scrupulous man of business. In- 
 deed, until the appearance of the first edition of 
 my Shakespeare in 1843, I had never received 
 one farthing for anything I had written regarding 
 Shakespeare or his works. Of course, I do not 
 include the few scattered points relating to him 
 and his plays in my History of English Dramatic 
 Poetry and the Stage. My Memoirs of Alley n^ the 
 Alleyn Papers, Gosson's School of Abuse, Nash's 
 Pierce Penniless, and perhaps other works, were 
 edited for the Shakespeare Society (of which I 
 happened to be Director) before 1843, and it was 
 the principle of that association that nobody should 
 be paid for trouble of that kind. I am confident 
 
Mr. Hamilton's Inquiry. 37 
 
 that I place it much below the amount, when I say 
 that I was 100 positively out of pocket for printing, 
 paper, &c., in illustration of my favourite pursuits. 
 
 After the discovery of the Perkins folio, and after 
 I had laid it on the table of the Council of the Shake- 
 speare Society, for the inspection of about twenty 
 gentlemen and scholars, I told them, in all sincerity, 
 that far from wishing to make money by it, I hoped 
 that they would accept from me, as a free gift, a 
 volume of Notes and Emendations founded upon it, 
 then in rapid preparation. Time was taken to con- 
 sider of the matter, and I was afterwards informed 
 that, as the book would certainly secure a consider- 
 able sale, the Council were of opinion that it would 
 neither be fair to me, nor to the trade, that the 
 Shakespeare Society should first print it. I yielded 
 (as everybody knows who was present) with some re- 
 luctance, and Notes and Emendations was afterwards 
 published by Messrs. Whittaker and Co. as a sup- 
 plemental volume to my Shakespeare of 1843. Part 
 of this information is in some sort necessary to my 
 case, but I should not have said so much about it, if 
 I had not seen a few of the facts detailed in print by 
 the literary newspaper called the Critic. It really 
 has only done me justice in the matter; and I thank 
 it, in perfect ignorance, as far as my own know- 
 ledge is concerned, of what it may have said about 
 me at other times and on other subjects. Lite- 
 rary newspapers must usually take opposite sides 
 upon questions of the day; and if the Critic have 
 been, as I am informed, strongly opposed to me, 
 it is partly, perhaps, because others have been 
 energetic in my favour. 
 
 I am not of a money -getting, or of a money- 
 
38 Mr. J. Payne Collier's Reply to 
 
 saving turn, as all my friends and relations can 
 witness ; and I am sure that the Duke of Devon- 
 shire and the Earl of Ellesmere never thought me 
 unprincipled or mercenary. 
 
 For the first I have often laid out large sums, 
 once 1400 in a single month ; and for the last I 
 have frequently bought very expensive books : his 
 Lordship allowed me always to lay out a certain sum 
 per annum for the gradual formation of a Shake- 
 speare Library; and neither the Duke nor the Earl 
 ever expected from me receipt or memorandum. 
 
 My brochure, New Facts regarding the Life of 
 Shakespeare, was in the form of a letter addressed to 
 my old and constant friend Thomas Amyot, Esq. 
 (not George Amyot, as Mr. Hamilton calls him) for 
 above twenty years Treasurer of the Society of An- 
 tiquaries ; who, had he now been living, could have 
 afforded me most essential aid in my defence against 
 the calumnies so industriously got up. My enemies 
 have waited (I do not at all mean purposely) until, 
 as might be expected in a series of scarcely less than 
 forty years, I have been deprived by death of nearly 
 all the witnesses I could have adduced in support of 
 my own testimony. I say nothing of the Duke of 
 Devonshire, because he knew little that was im- 
 portant of his own knowledge ; but the late Earl of 
 Ellesmere could have given most valuable testimony 
 on many points : so with the late Sir Harris Ni- 
 colas ; my old contemporary Mr. Barren Field ; John 
 Allen, Esq., Master of Dulwich College ; the Eev. 
 H. J. Todd ; James Boswell, the nephew of Mr. Ma- 
 lone ; Mr. Lemon, senior ; Mr. Frederick Devon, 
 formerly of the Chapter House : the Right Hon. 
 .J. W. Croker; Mr. Hallam ; Mr. Thorpe; and Mr. 
 
Mr. Hamilton s Inquiry. 39 
 
 Rodd. My late wife and my eldest daughter were 
 always willing helpmates, especially in the colla- 
 tion of proofs, and knew more or less of almost 
 everything of a literary nature that proceeded from 
 my pen. These are all no more, and yet all could 
 have rendered me some degree of assistance in re- 
 pelling an attack like the present : I am now left 
 almost alone, and write in the country, without 
 the opportunity of even consulting a friend. In 
 the case of the two last, my wife and my eldest 
 daughter, I can hardly regret that they did not 
 survive to witness the suffering and irritation that, 
 even in my innocence from all just imputation, I 
 have been compelled for many months to endure. 
 The losses I have sustained in friends and relations 
 must in some measure account for any noticeable 
 deficiencies in my narrative. 
 
 Besides the manuscripts found at Bridgewater 
 House, which formed the main substance of my New 
 Facts, another document (at what date I am uncer- 
 tain) subsequently turned up in the same collection, 
 which rendered it most probable that the account of 
 the claims of the Players and Proprietors of the 
 Blackfriars' Theatre, on their proposed removal from 
 that precinct, was authentic : Lord Ellesmere in- 
 sisted that I should keep it, as it was no necessary 
 part of the other documents. It was a sort of sum- 
 mary of the account of the claims, in an Italian hand 
 of the period, and underneath, in the hand- writing of 
 Sir George Buck, the Master of the Revels to James I. 
 was his memorandum that the Players and Propri- 
 etors demanded more than their interest was worth 
 by 1500 : he first wrote 2000, but subsequently 
 altered the sum to 1500. We know that the 
 
40 Mr. J. Payne Collier's Reply to 
 
 Blackfriars' Theatre was in use as a private place of 
 dramatic entertainment long afterwards ; and it is to 
 be concluded that the treaty for the purchase of it, 
 either by the Crown or by the City of London, was 
 broken off. 
 
 The copy of a letter signed H. S. (supposed to 
 represent the initials of Henry Earl of Southampton) 
 has attracted more attention than, perhaps, any of 
 the other documents discovered in the same deposi- 
 tory. It introduced, or has been supposed to have 
 introduced, Shakespeare and Burbadge to the first 
 Lord Ellesmere, then Lord Chancellor; but it is not 
 necessary that I should further describe a paper, 
 which has been at least thrice printed by myself, and 
 which has been inserted in every recent Life of our 
 great Dramatist. As it was in my possession, and had 
 been so for some years, I produced it at a meeting 
 of the Council of the Shakespeare Society about the 
 year 1843 or 1844. I forget what individual mem- 
 bers were present, but the authenticity of it seemed 
 generally admitted, and I afterwards had a facsimile 
 of it made by Mr. Netherclift, senior. 
 
 I put him under no restriction as to showing 
 " the H. S. Letter " to anybody ; and when he re- 
 delivered it to me, I asked him his opinion of it, 
 knowing that he had paid great attention to the 
 modes of writing at the period of its supposed date : 
 his answer was in these words, " If at any time 
 you happen to want a witness that it is a genuine 
 document, I will be that witness." He subsequently 
 (I cannot fix the precise date) lithographed in fac- 
 simile the other documents I discovered at Bridge- 
 water House. A few weeks since I replaced the 
 whole of them in his hands, and, after looking over 
 
Mr. Hamilton's Inquiry. 41 
 
 them, he acknowledged the fac-si miles as his own 
 work, and reiterated his opinion that the originals, 
 to the best of his belief, were authentic. A separate 
 sheet of the water-marks of the paper on which they 
 were written was added by Mr. Netherclift, in order 
 that no information on a point, which, from time to 
 time, has led to the exposure of much fraud, might 
 in this case be wanting. 
 
 If I had manufactured the " Bridgewater House 
 Shakespeare Forgeries," as Mr. Hamilton is pleased 
 to call them, surely it is not likely that I should have 
 placed them, without the slightest scruple or caution, 
 in such skilful and knowing hands. 
 
 Let us see how these fac-similes were received 
 by very capable judges. I sent copies of them to 
 the Rev. Alexander Dyce (then my intimate friend 
 in spite of his self-regretted attack upon me, as an 
 editor of Shakespeare, in his Remarks, &c., 1844) 
 but in the first instance only of u the H. S. Letter," 
 for that was lithographed some time before the 
 rest. What was his answer, not sent in haste, 
 but after considerable delay and deliberation ? It 
 was in these very words, which I copy from a note 
 in his own hand- writing : 
 
 " The fac-simlle has certainly removed from my 
 mind all doubts about the genuineness of the letter.' 1 
 
 This opinion, be it observed, was given while the 
 Rev. A. Dyce was printing his " Beaumont and 
 Fletcher," and before he entertained any immediate 
 project of publishing a Shakespeare. Although I 
 had known him very intimately from the year 1828 to 
 the time I quitted London in 1850, it is remarkable 
 that he never, on a single occasion, intimated to me a 
 doubt as to the authenticity of any of " the Bridge- 
 
42 Mr. J. Payne Collier's Reply to 
 
 water House Shakespeare Forgeries." In his Shake- 
 speare of 1857 I learned, for the first time, that he 
 reiterated the suspicions some had expressed ; and 
 it was then, be it remembered, that he was actually 
 engaged on an edition of Shakespeare intended to 
 rival mine; and it was then that he, for the first 
 time, threw all sorts of discredit on my discoveries. 
 As he had formerly given a decided opinion in 
 favour of the genuineness of " the H. S. Letter," 
 surely, when he subsequently, in his Shakespeare, 
 expressed his doubts, and quoted the doubts of 
 others, he might have added, that at one time he 
 had misled Mr. Collier on the subject, by strength- 
 ening his belief that " the H. S. Letter " was a ge- 
 nuine manuscript of the period. The Kev. A. Dyce 
 did not pursue this obvious course for his own 
 reasons, but I doubt how far they are at present 
 satisfactory even to himself. 
 
 If Mr. Halliwell have seen ground to alter his 
 decision on the same question, I can have no right 
 to complain : all I know is, that with regard to "the 
 H.S. Letter," up to the year 1848, he gave it as his 
 positive conviction, not merely that it was a genuine 
 manuscript of the period, but that it could hardly (for 
 a reason he assigned, and which at least convinced 
 himself) be a forgery. In his Life of Shakespeare, 
 8vo. 1848, after giving a fac-simile of the conclusion 
 of " the H.S. Letter," p. 225, he observes : " The 
 fac-simile of that portion of it relating to Shake- 
 speare, which the reader will find at the commence- 
 ment of this volume, will suffice to convince any one 
 acquainted with such matters that it is a genuine 
 manuscript of the period. No forgery of so long a 
 document could present so perfect a continuity of 
 
Mr. Hamilton's Inquiry. 43 
 
 design; yet it is right to state that grave doubts 
 have been thrown on its authenticity. A portion of 
 the fac-simile will exhibit on examination a peculi- 
 arity few suppositions documents would afford, part 
 of the imperfectly formed letter A, in the word 
 Shakespeare, appearing by a slip of the pen in the 
 letter y immediately beneath hV' 
 
 Mr. Halliwell then refers to Mr. Wright, who 
 also had seen the original, as a highly competent 
 judge of such matters, a point few will dispute ; and 
 he subjoins in a note, " In the library of the Society 
 of Antiquaries, No. 201, Art. 3, is preserved ' a 
 copye of the commyssion of Sewers in the countye 
 of Kent,' marked as vera copia, and singularly 
 enough, written apparently by the same hand that 
 copied the letter of H.S." As I have never seen 
 this " copy of a commission," I can offer no opinion 
 upon the identity of handwriting, but it is a matter 
 upon which no man can be better qualified to give 
 final judgment than Mr. Halliwell. 
 
 Upon opinions such as those I have acted in 
 uniformly attaching the weight and value of authen- 
 ticity to the documents in question. I may be 
 wrong, or others may be in error ; but all the facts 
 within my knowledge are before the world. The 
 documents themselves, after I had printed them, 
 remained for many years in my possession, at 
 least from 1836 to about 1845 : Lord Ellesmere 
 never asked for them, nor inquired regarding them ; 
 but one day, after 1845, Lord Ellesmere either told 
 me, or wrote to me, that Mr. J. Wilson Croker 
 had questioned their genuineness. His Lordship, 
 therefore, desired me to send the original papers 
 to his house : I did so instantly, and expressed my 
 
44 Mr. J. Payne Collier's Reply to 
 
 satisfaction that he had resumed possession of what 
 was his own property, though he had kindly permitted 
 it to remain so long in my custody. When I saw 
 Lord Ellesniere next, some weeks had elapsed, and 
 he informed me that in the interval the documents 
 had been " tested:'' he did not say by whom, nor in 
 what way ; but he added that he was perfectly satis- 
 fied. Afterwards Mr. Croker learned that I had, 
 among my other manuscripts, an original poem by 
 Pope, as the fact certainly was : he applied to me 
 for it for his new edition, and I sent it to him, 
 and he returned it to me with thanks, adding, 
 that there was no doubt as to Pope's hand-writing. 
 This introduced the topic of the Ellesniere Shake- 
 speare manuscripts, and he informed me that he was 
 now a believer in them, after having inspected them. 
 The late Mr. Hallam at a dinner, while I filled the 
 office either of Treasurer, or of one of the Vice- 
 presidents of the Society of Antiquaries, gave me 
 similar information.* While, therefore, I freely 
 acknowledge the finding of those documents, the 
 forging of them I as firmly deny. 
 
 I do not think that the Earl of Ellesniere would, 
 in 1847, have appointed me Secretary to the Royal 
 Commission on the British Museum (an office that, 
 of itself, raised up against me some enemies in that 
 institution), if his Lordship had not entertained a 
 sufficiently good opinion of my integrity. 
 
 Before I quit Bridgewater House, my adver- 
 
 * Mr. Hallam, as I always understood, though I never had the 
 good fortune to hear him say so, was a maintairier of the excel- 
 lence (and of their genuineness from their excellence) of the 
 notes and emendations in the Perkins folio. On this point others 
 may easily be more capable of speaking than I can profess to be. 
 
Mr. Hamilton's Inquiry. 45 
 
 saries have made it necessary for me to notice the 
 copy of the folio of Shakespeare's Works in 1623, 
 there preserved : it contains a few manuscript emenda- 
 tions, which I inserted in my first edition, and have 
 transferred to my second. It is made a question, or 
 rather I should say it is broadly asserted, that they 
 are in the same hand- writing as that of the " Bridge- 
 water House Shakespeare Forgeries," and as that of 
 the Perkins folio. I have not seen them for many 
 years ; but my memory strangely fails me if such is 
 the fact : and I think I do not ask too much when 
 I request that Mr. Hamilton's interested testimony 
 should not be implicitly received, while the present 
 Earl's evidence is entirely suppressed. The noble 
 Lord, in a letter to an acquaintance of mine, gives 
 an opinion on the point, of which, he expressly 
 says, I am at liberty to make use: it is in the 
 following words, and I thank his Lordship heartily 
 for the permission: 
 
 " There is no pretence, whatever, for saying that 
 the emendations in the Perkins Shakespeare are in 
 the same handwriting as those in my first folio : on 
 the contrary, except as they are (or profess to be) 
 of the same period, they are quite different? 
 
 If I were to see all three together, i.e. the 
 Perkins folio, Lord Ellesmere's folio, 1623, and the 
 Bridgewater House documents, on the same table, 
 and by the same light, considering the general, and 
 even particular, resemblances of hand- writing at that 
 date, I might have much difficulty in deciding 
 whether this letter or that letter were sufficiently like 
 others in form and manner, as to warrant a positive 
 conclusion. I more than doubt Mr. Hamilton's 
 opportunities for forming any decision. Nothing 
 
46 Mr. J. Payne Collier's Reply to 
 
 could well be more uncertain, even under the most 
 favourable circumstances for forming a judgment ; 
 but as it never occurred to me to compare any of 
 them, I must let the matter rest on my general and 
 distinct asseveration, that, if it be meant that I had a 
 concern in writing all, any, or either of them, no- 
 thing can be more false and unfounded. 
 
 I now come to speak of the Manuscripts at 
 Dulwich College, and how they have been most un- 
 fairly thrown into the scale, in order that they may 
 weigh against me with the rest of Mr. N. E. S. A. 
 Hamilton's accumulation of trash and trumpery. 
 
 First of all, it will be expedient for me to quote 
 a passage from Malone's Inquiry, published in 1796 ; 
 it is from p. 215. 
 
 We see from hence that Shakspeare had no motive to reside 
 in the Blackfriars before this period [March 1604-5], The 
 truth, indeed, I believe, is that he never resided in the Black- 
 friars at all. From a paper now before me, which formerly 
 belonged to Edward Alley n, the player, our poet appears to have 
 lived in Southwark, near the Bear-Garden, in 1596. Another 
 curious document in my possession, which will be produced in 
 the History of his Life, affords the strongest presumptive 
 evidence that he continued to reside in Southward to the 
 year 1608." 
 
 Let it be borne in mind that the documents, 
 which Malone here and elsewhere refers to, were, in 
 fact, the property of the Master, Warden and 
 Fellows of Dulwich College that Malone had 
 quietly taken possession of them that they re- 
 mained in his hands for several years that he did 
 exactly what he liked with them that he cut off 
 signatures of old dramatists and players to place 
 them on the title-pages of his own books and that 
 he or others mutilated Henslowe's Diary in such a 
 
Mr. Hamilton's Inquiry. 47 
 
 way, that some of the most valuable portions are now 
 entirely lost. Even the books, the title-pages of which 
 he decorated with the old autographs, had belonged to 
 Dulwich College ; for he contrived to persuade the 
 Master, Warden and Fellows, of that day, that Old 
 Plays and Old Poetry did not half so well become 
 their shelves, as the musty divinity, dull chronicles, 
 and other volumes of the same sort, which he substi- 
 tuted. Hence the bulk of his collection ; and he 
 must have chuckled amazingly at his success in 
 persuading unsuspecting people to make an ex- 
 change of works, which would sell for hundreds 
 of pounds, for others not worth as many shillings. 
 So of the Manuscripts : they seem to have allowed 
 Malone to carry away such as he pleased, to 
 keep them as long as he pleased, and to return 
 such as he pleased, in the state which he pleased. 
 Some that he did not return found their way 
 again to their old home after his death ; and it is 
 not very long since the College, most properly, 
 bought back a bundle of papers that must have 
 originally come out of its archives. 
 
 It was to all that remained, that I had, by the 
 kindness and confidence of the authorities, between 
 about the year 1825 and 1830, access in the first 
 instance, when I was completing my materials for 
 The History of English Dramatic Poetry and the 
 Stage. I cannot call to mind the precise date, but I 
 can well recollect the politeness and readiness of the 
 then Master to aid my researches. I had been intro- 
 duced to him personally by my learned and excel- 
 lent friend Mr. Aniyot. 
 
 One of the first documents I looked at was, I 
 think, a letter from Mrs. Alleyn to her husband, 
 
48 Mr. J. Payne Collier's Reply to 
 
 dated 3rd Oct., 1603, upon which has now been 
 founded the charge that I interpolated a passage not 
 met with in the original. It was in one place in 
 so decayed and crumbling a condition from the 
 effects of damp and time, that I was obliged to 
 handle it with the utmost caution. I did not read 
 it nor examine it closely until afterwards, how long 
 I do not pretend to say, but a friend, now unfortu- 
 nately dead, was with me, and we then read as 
 follows, in the latter part of the letter. 
 
 " Aboute a weeke a goe came a youthe, who said 
 he was Mr. Frauncis Chaloner, who would have 
 borrowed x 11 to have bought things for * * *, and 
 said he was known unto you, and Mr. Shakespeare 
 of the globe, who came * * * said he knewe hym 
 not, onely he herde of hym that he was a roge, * * * 
 so he was glade we did not lend him the monney 
 * * *. Richard Johnes [went] to seeke and inquire 
 after the fellow, and said he had lent hym a horse. 
 I feare me he gulled hym, thoughe he gulled not us." 
 Memoirs of Edward Alleyn, 8vo. 1841, p. 63. 
 
 Now the question is, and the only question of the 
 slightest importance (though that is in truth of little 
 moment) whether the name of a Mr. Shakespeare of 
 the globe " occurred in the most rotten and frag- 
 mentary part of the letter at the time when I copied 
 it. Whether it did or did not is not of the smallest 
 interest, as regards the biography of our poet, 
 especially as there were two, if not three, other 
 Shakespeares " of the Globe " Theatre, then resident 
 in South wark.* However, the charge is that from the 
 
 * One of these was an Edward Shakespeare, of whom nobody 
 had ever heard till I published his name in 1846 (Lives of Shake- 
 speare's Actors, Introd. p. xv.) from the Registers of Cripplegate 
 
Mr. Hamilton's Inquiry. 49 
 
 mere love of deception (for I could have no other 
 motive) I imagined the part of the letter in which 
 the name of Shakespeare occurs, and corrupted the 
 immediately adjoining portions for the purpose of 
 giving my invention support. 
 
 It is indisputable that since I first saw and copied 
 the letter at Dulwich, portions of it have crumbled 
 away and entirely disappeared ; so that Mr. Hamil- 
 ton's account of the contents differs from mine : he 
 accuses me not only of inaccuracy, but of fraud and 
 wilful misrepresentation. I do not deny that it is 
 possible I misread some utterly unimportant letters 
 or words : the paper was in such a state of demolition 
 that it was extremely difficult to make any sense out 
 of the latter part of it ; but I did my best to give a 
 faithful transcript, and I am absolutely certain that 
 "Mr. Shakespeare of the globe" was spoken of in it, 
 and in the way I stated. Mr. Hamilton asserts that 
 " there is not the smallest trace of authority for any 
 allusion to Shakespeare:" this may be very true; 
 he is speaking of Mrs. Alley n's letter in its present 
 condition, but that is not the question : the question 
 is, whether, when I saw the letter, some thirty, or 
 even more years ago, the name of "Mr. Shakespeare 
 of the globe >J was not to be traced. I maintain that 
 it was ; and had an intimate and excellent friend 
 been still alive, I could have substantiated it by 
 his evidence as well as by my own. Mr. Hamilton 
 insists that the name of Shakespeare never was to 
 be seen on any part of the paper which is now 
 
 Parish. I may here express my wonder that the MS. Department of 
 the British Museum has not contended that I invented and forged 
 most of the particulars I derived especially from the Southwark, 
 Cripplegate, and Shoreditch parochial records. 
 
 E 
 
50 Mr. J. Payne Collier's Reply to 
 
 rotted away ; but how can lie tell whether it did or 
 did not exist there, when he cannot deny that much 
 of what was originally written on that part of the 
 paper has been utterly annihilated ? Excepting as 
 it impeaches me, the whole is really a lana caprina 
 matter, valuable, perhaps, to Mr. Hamilton and to 
 his coadjutors in the distress of their case, but utterly 
 worthless to anybody else. 
 
 Here allow me to ask this question : If I had 
 purposely misstated the import and contents of the 
 letter, adding that it was in a state of ruinous decay, 
 what would have been the natural course for me to 
 have pursued ? would it not have been to have left 
 the letter as it was, in the hope that when it was next 
 seen and consulted, as much of it might have disap- 
 peared as possible? Instead of doing so instead 
 of leaving it still exposed to the action of air and 
 accident, I carefully inclosed it in paper, and either 
 I or my friend wrote on the outside, that within was 
 a document of value, which should not be roughly 
 handled. I have also a faint recollection that I 
 especially directed the attention of the Master of 
 the College, or of the Librarian, to it : at all events, 
 I diligently wrapped it up, as if to make sure that 
 the next person who opened the paper should see 
 that I had been guilty of fraud. If, indeed, I had so 
 misrepresented the contents of the crumbling relic, 
 what was to prevent my rubbing away a little more 
 of the old paper, and who then would have been able 
 to detect the trick I had played ? I have never, I think, 
 seen the letter from the day I copied it until this 
 moment ; but I understand that the envelope, on 
 which my caution was written, is still in existence, 
 though it did not suit the purpose of my adversaries 
 
Mr. Hamilton s Inquiry. 51 
 
 to mention the care I had taken, if I were guilty, to 
 preserve the evidence of my guilt.* 
 
 Such is the way in which these accusations have 
 been prepared ; I will not say manufactured. The 
 passage I have quoted from Malone's Inquiry, shows 
 that he knew from the documents before him, that is 
 to say, from documents derived from Dulwich College, 
 that Shakespeare was in all human probability living 
 in South wark during twelve successive years. 
 
 Mrs. Alleyn's letter proves that u Mr. Shakespeare 
 of the globe" was seen in South wark in October, 1603, 
 and this was doubtless one of Malone's reasons for 
 concluding that our great dramatist had a residence 
 in Southwark from 1596 to 1608. 
 
 Malone, nevertheless, was unquestionably in error 
 as to the latter year ; for it is certain that it should 
 be 1609 ; because the assessment to the poor for the 
 liberty of the Clink, in which the names of Shake- 
 speare, Henslowe and Alleyn appear, as giving a 
 weekly contribution of 6e?., is dated 8th April, 1609: 
 1608 ended on 25th March, so that the year 1609 
 
 * See the Athenceum of 25th Feb. last, p. 269. The Editor 
 seems to have been incredulous upon the point whether I did 
 actually leave Mrs. Alleyn's letter so carefully inclosed, but he 
 found it in an envelope inscribed thus : " Important document 
 not to be handled until bound, and repaired, the lower part 
 being rotten." " Would any man in his senses (asks the Editor) 
 sedulously guard from harm a document which he had consciously 
 misread ? Would any rogue guilty of foisting in a paragraph 
 into a public paper, take pains to call instant and incessant atten- 
 tion to the very document which would witness to his crime ? No 
 one out of Bedlam." How happens it, I may be allowed to ask, 
 that Mr. N. E. S. A. Hamilton says not one syllable of the pains 
 I had volunteered to take that the letter should not receive 
 farther injury ? Does not this trifling fact tend to prove the 
 animus with which I am pursued ? 
 
52 Mr. J. Payne Collier's Reply to 
 
 had then commenced exactly a fortnight, for which 
 Malone did not allow. In my letter in the Athenaeum, 
 of 18th Feb., 1859, I hastily supposed (writing in a 
 hurry for immediate publication) that Mr. Hamilton 
 referred to this assessment: I was mistaken.* There 
 is no doubt that it was in existence when Malone 
 published his Inquiry in 1796, and that he had seen 
 it. I was then only seven years old, and of course 
 merely a probationer in " pothooks and hangers," so 
 that Mr. Hamilton will hardly contend that at that 
 early age I could be a proficient in forgery. 
 
 The " list of players," which Mr. Hamilton 
 charges as a modern addition to a genuine document, 
 I saw and quoted with the other papers ; and if the 
 names were forged, I can only say that they must 
 have been upon the instrument when it was seen by 
 Malone before 1796, although he did not extract it, 
 reserving it, perhaps, (as I said in my Memoirs of 
 Edward Alley n) for his Life of Shakespeare. My 
 materials for those Memoirs were in great part col- 
 lected while I was engaged on my History of English 
 Dramatic Poetry and the Stage; and I can most 
 distinctly aver that the " list of players " was then 
 extant, and that it was seen by Mr. Amyot, who 
 accompanied me in one of my earlier expeditions to 
 Dulwich. I myself state (Mem. of Alley n, p. 67) 
 that the " list " itself is " in a different hand and in 
 different ink," which I need not have mentioned, 
 if I had not wished to produce all the circumstances 
 
 * The reader will be so good as to observe that I emphatically 
 acknowledge my error. I call attention to it, lest Mr. Hamilton 
 should be disposed to argue that I purposely drew attention to one 
 document, that I might lead people's minds away from another. 
 My case as to that other is still stronger. 
 
Mr. Hamilton's Inquiry. 53 
 
 regarding it, that would enable a correct judgment 
 to be formed of its authenticity. Moreover, to set 
 this matter completely at rest, I have now before 
 me Malone's copy of his Inquiry (8vo, 1796), as 
 annotated by him for a second edition : it is full 
 of scribbled scraps and notes with information, not 
 contained in the first edition, and on the back of 
 a letter addressed to " Mr. Malone, Queen Anne 
 Street, East," is the very list of players in question. 
 Therefore, whether it were or were not an addition 
 subsequent to the date of the original document to 
 which it is appended, it is certain that it was seen by 
 Malone very many years before I was at Dulwich.* 
 
 If any of the documents returned to Dulwich 
 College after Malone's death appear to have been 
 tampered with, I most distinctly acquit him of any 
 such misconduct. Whatever I may be, in the 
 opinion of my adversaries, I feel sure that he was a 
 man of honour and principle ; and supposing, only for 
 a moment, that we were on a par in that respect, it 
 must be admitted that Malone, with all the docu- 
 ments in his private room for years, had infinitely 
 
 * This book I bought some years after I had printed my 
 Memoirs of Alleyn in 1841. As a bibliographical note, and as 
 it may serve hereafter as a means of identifying the book (though 
 Malone's writing, print-like or current, is to be found in hundreds 
 of places in it), I quote the following particulars from the fly- 
 leaf: Mr. Hamilton is fond of fly-leaves and their water-marks, 
 and he may like to know that " 1795 " is distinctly to be seen in 
 the substance of the paper. Malone's note is this: " For a 
 second edition. Begun to be written about the 10th of January. 
 Begun to be printed about the 20th of January; finished at the 
 press, Monday, March 28: published March 31st, 1796. 500 copies 
 sold on that day and the next." So that it took Malone less than 
 three months to write and print an 8vo. vol. of 424 pages. 
 
54 Mr. J. Payne Collier's Reply to 
 
 the advantage over me, as far as the commission of 
 fraud and forgery is concerned. At Dulwich I was 
 never, at that period, anywhere but in a public 
 library-room, always open, not only to the fellows 
 and the servants of the College, but to individuals 
 in the neighbourhood, who were well known. 
 What opportunity I had for committing any of 
 these elaborate offences, my antagonists have not 
 attempted to show : I do not mean to say that I 
 was not often alone, and for some time, but never 
 without the constant danger of being interrupted 
 and detected in my imputed practices. 
 
 With reference to the Player's Challenge, be- 
 ginning, " Sweete Nedde, nowe wynne an other 
 wager," which Mr. Hamilton declares a "forgery 
 from beginning to end, although executed with sin- 
 gular dexterity,' 5 I may remark that Mr. Halliwell 
 quotes it in his Life of Shakespeare, 8vo. 1848, p. 
 329, after having " collated it with the original ;" and 
 he does not drop the remotest hint that he thought 
 it a forgery. I have no particular recollection of the 
 manner in which it is written, but, contrary to what 
 Mr. Hamilton says, that it is " executed with singular 
 dexterity," it now seems to me that the reduplication 
 of consonants, and other points of orthography in it, 
 might possibly raise suspicion. 
 
 What surprises me, in reference to the Dulwich 
 Manuscripts, is that Mr. Hamilton should have con- 
 fined his objections to such paltry points, when in 
 the course of the Memoirs of Alley n, I have for the 
 first time printed so many papers of importance 
 that are passed by without a word of notice. What 
 does he say, for instance, to Ben Jonson's translation 
 from Martial, to Sir W. Alexander's copy of verses, 
 
Mr. Hamilton's Inquiry. 55 
 
 to Dekker's and Field's Letters, and to nearly the 
 whole of Alleyn's part in R. Greene's Orlando Fu- 
 rioso, 1594, with various other curious original do- 
 cuments? All these receive no comment and with 
 very good reason, I can well believe. 
 
 I do not perceive in his Inquiry that Mr. Hamilton 
 speaks, as he did in his letters in The Times of July 
 last, of paint, pigment, and manufactured inks ; * but 
 I know, and he knows, that any ink, however old, 
 may be removed if proper methods be applied ; and 
 the scientific department of the British Museum 
 cannot be wanting in skill in this particular. The 
 late Thomas Rodd, the bookseller, undertook for me, 
 and accomplished it, to abolish the slightest appear- 
 ance of ink-stain from scribbled title-pages ; and I 
 myself have taken envelopes sent from different hemi- 
 spheres, east and west, and have obliterated the ad- 
 dresses by the simplest application. In truth, as 
 most people are aware, no test of the genuine or 
 the spurious can be more uncertain; and if the 
 Trustees of the British Museum would give me leave, 
 I could promise, with no other means, to expunge 
 every vestige of the famous signature, " Willm Shak- 
 spere, 5 ' in the Montaigne's Essays by Florio, 1603, 
 for which alone Sir F. Madden paid out of the public 
 purse no less a sum than 130. I am sure that he 
 would not let it stand the test even of a sponge and 
 
 * In my Prefaces to Notes and Emendations I have myself 
 not omitted to state that " the ink in the Perkins folio was of 
 various shades, differing sometimes on the same page," and in 
 the body of the book I have in several places, and with reference 
 to particular emendations, pointed out the same peculiarity. I 
 did so in order to enable people to form a just estimate upon the 
 question of authenticity, as applied to the whole volume ; and if I 
 omitted any information of the kind, it was quite unintentionally. 
 
56 Mr. J. Payne Colliers Reply to 
 
 water ; and yet Mr. Maskelyne and Mr. Hamilton 
 licked over the Perkins folio ad libitum, and were 
 delighted to find that they could manage to get off 
 some of the supposed colouring matter. They do 
 not tell us how much of the soft surface of the old 
 paper they destroyed in this process. 
 
 I am now glad to arrive at the last count in the 
 indictment against me ; it amounts to the very grave 
 charge, that I was guilty of manufacturing and forging 
 a State paper a document deposited in the National 
 Archives, and still existing there. 
 
 Many years were employed by me in collecting 
 materials for my History of English Dramatic 
 Poetry and the Stage: it was published twenty -nine 
 years ago, and I think it took more than a year to 
 print it, for it was a work requiring more accuracy 
 than despatch : it was certainly not ready for press 
 until 1829 or 1830, and it bears date in 1831. I 
 cannot speak positively upon the point, but I think 
 it must be about thirty -three or thirty-four years ago, 
 that I first obtained admission into the State Paper 
 Office that I might copy documents that bore upon 
 my subject. 
 
 That always willing and zealous friend, Mr. 
 Amyot, then Treasurer of the Society of Antiquaries, 
 gave me a personal introduction to Mr. Lemon, the 
 father of the gentleman who is now so deservedly 
 high in the Department. Mr. Lemon, senior, was at 
 that date in a post of great trust and confidence, and 
 at my earnest request he promised to look out for 
 me certain muniments relating to plays and theatres. 
 I believe that, as he took a lively interest in my 
 pursuits, he bestowed a good deal of pains on 
 searching out relics that would contribute to my 
 
Mr. Hamilton's Inquiry. 57 
 
 purpose and calling in Great George Street, where 
 the State Papers were then kept before their removal 
 to their present abode, I found, much to my satisfac- 
 tion, that he had instituted so active an inquiry, 
 that he had discovered for me five or six papers of 
 great novelty and curiosity. 
 
 My belief is that the office hours did not extend 
 beyond three in the day ; and as it was late before I 
 arrived, I expressed my fears that I should not be 
 able to copy all the documents that morning. One 
 of them, I well remember, was a Memorial from 
 some of the principal inhabitants of the precinct of 
 Blackfriars against the continuance of a theatre there, 
 on the ground that it was a nuisance, that it at- 
 tracted disorderly crowds, and that, as it was about 
 to be repaired and enlarged by the players, the an- 
 noyance would be increased. Another document 
 was in the form of a Petition from the players against 
 that Memorial ; and this last Mr. Lemon very kindly 
 undertook either to copy, or to get copied for me: 
 he took it away for the purpose, and by the time I 
 had made some extracts from the Memorial, he re- 
 turned into the room where I was sitting, with the 
 Petition and the transcript of it in his hand. He 
 was good enough to aid me in the collation of the 
 two, and when we had finished, he took away the 
 Petition itself (which I never saw again, but the 
 authenticity of which I never for a moment doubted) 
 and left me the copy, which I used for my book, 
 sending the very same sheet to the printer of my 
 History. 
 
 My notion was that Mr. Lemon's son, the present 
 head of the family, had copied the paper for me; but 
 I have since understood that such was not the case. 
 
58 Mr. J. Payne Collier's Reply to 
 
 Even now, after the lapse of so many years, if it had 
 been of any consequence, I might have been able to 
 decide the point, had I not, when I quitted London 
 in the spring of 1850, for the sake of putting every- 
 thing into as small a compass as I could, sent away 
 or destroyed all my proof-sheets, and the manuscript 
 belonging to them. Until then it had been my con- 
 stant habit to tie in bundles the proofs and " copy" 
 of every separate work in which I had been con- 
 cerned from 1820 to 1850. A large parcel of old, 
 useless letters, shared the same fate, as I could not 
 carry them with me into the country, and as the 
 Pantechnicon would have charged heavily for the 
 space they would have occupied. 
 
 That this Petition existed in the State Paper 
 Office before I knew where that office was, is quite 
 clear. It was found for, and pointed out to me, by 
 Mr. Lemon, senior. Mr. Lemon, junior, still in that 
 department, bears witness that it was known, both 
 to himself and to his father, before I had been ad- 
 mitted into the State Paper Office : of this fact there 
 exists the best possible evidence ; for the Editor of 
 the Athenceum, having learned that such was the 
 case, very recently wrote the subsequent note to 
 Mr. Lemon, making the inquiry whether what he 
 had heard were true : 
 
 "Athenaeum Office, Feb. 13, 1860. 
 
 " The Editor of the Aihenceum presents his compliments 
 to Mr. Lemon, and referring to the Petition of the Players 
 contained in the bundle of papers in the State Paper Office 
 marked ( Bundle No. 222, Elizabeth, 1596,' a copy of which 
 has been printed in text by Mr. Collier, and in fac-simile by 
 Mr. Halliwell, takes the liberty of inquiring whether, within 
 Mr. Lemon's knowledge, that Petition of the Players was in 
 
Mr. Hamilton's Inquiry. 59 
 
 the State Paper Office before Mr. Collier began his researches 
 in that office? An early answer will oblige." 
 
 The inquiry was, of course, very material; not 
 merely with reference to the authenticity of the Peti- 
 tion, but with reference to the impossibility of my 
 being concerned in "the surreptitious introduction 
 of it," to use Mr. Hamilton's words. The answer, 
 forwarded by return of post, was entirely satisfactory, 
 and in these terms : 
 
 " State Paper Office, Feb. 14, 1860. 
 " DEAR SIR, 
 
 " In reply to your question, I beg to state that the 
 Petition of the Players of the Blackfriars Theatre, alluded 
 to in your note, was well known to my father and myself, 
 before Mr. Payne Collier began his researches in this office. 
 I am pretty confident that my father himself brought it under 
 the notice of Mr. Collier, in whose researches he took great 
 interest. 
 
 " I am very faithfully yours, 
 
 " R. LEMON. 
 " The Editor of the Athenamm." 
 
 I am not aware, therefore, that it is necessary for 
 me to say more upon this part of the subject. Mr. 
 Lemon, senior, undoubtedly did bring the Players' 
 Petition under my notice, and very much obliged to 
 him I was, that he took so much trouble to assist me 
 in my literary investigations. The genuineness of 
 the Memorial, to which the Petition is obviously an 
 answer, has, I believe, not been questioned; and as 
 it is dated 1596, it may be said to ascertain that the 
 Petition, which has no date, was of the same period. 
 The following quotation from the Loseley Manu- 
 scripts (edited by the late A. J. Kempe, Esq.), 8vo., 
 1835, p. 496, proves in what way the Players at the 
 
60 Mr. J. Payne Collier's Reply to 
 
 Blackfriars, at about this period, intended to enlarge 
 their theatre, viz. by taking in part of the house of 
 Sir William More. 
 
 " Lord Hunsdon to Sir William More. Wishes 
 to take a house of him in the Blackfriars. Hears 
 he has already parted with a portion of his own house 
 to some that mean to make a playhouse of it. So- 
 merset House, Jan. 9, 1595." 
 
 At that time, " Jan. 9, 1595," was in fact Jan. 9, 
 1596, which tallies with the date of the Memorial 
 and consequent Petition. We know besides, that, in 
 May, 1596, it was directed that the Players should 
 not be disturbed. These, however, are only points of 
 history, rendering it probable that the Players did 
 present such a Petition ; for it cannot now be disputed 
 that I was not the discoverer of the document, but that 
 having been found by the late Mr. Lemon, he brought 
 it to my knowledge, and kindly procured it to be 
 copied for me, in order to expedite me in my under- 
 taking. 
 
 I consider myself much more than fortunate to be 
 able to procure this important and indisputable piece 
 of evidence; for, had the present Mr. Lemon died 
 between about 1828 and 1860, how might not my 
 enemies have triumphed in their imputation, that I 
 had first forged the Petition, and then smuggled it 
 into the State Paper Office ! 
 
 Of the investigation instituted by the Master of 
 the Rolls, from which Mr. Lemon was apparently 
 excluded, and in which Mr. Hamilton was cer- 
 tainly included (though absolutely an interested 
 party), all I shall say is, that there might be very 
 sufficient reasons for not inviting Mr. Lemon to 
 assist, seeing that he knew perfectly well that the 
 
Mr. Hamilton's Inquiry. 61 
 
 document in question was in the State Paper Office 
 before I commenced my researches in that department. 
 Unless I "surreptitiously introduced it" before I knew 
 where the State Paper Office was, even Mr. Hamilton 
 and the Manuscript Department of the British Mu- 
 seum must acquit me of any concern in the supposed 
 fabrication of it. 
 
 Have we not here, let me ask, another proof of 
 the sort of spirit by which my adversaries seem to 
 be influenced? While they most indelicately select 
 Mr. N. E. S. A. Hamilton as a coadjutor in the in- 
 quiry respecting this Players' Petition, they, as it 
 seems, carefully shut out from that inquiry the very 
 man who could have given them conclusive inform- 
 ation. That information, however, would have been 
 fatal to their accusation. 
 
 As to Mr. Hamilton's sort of challenge " to pro- 
 duce a remarkable document," so u minutely stated 
 by me " in the Athenceum, 6th Dec., 1856, and 
 printed for the first time in my last edition of Shake- 
 speare, iii., p. 214, I merely have to remark that it 
 would become Mr. Hamilton, as an officer of the 
 Manuscript Department of the British Museum, to 
 be better informed about our public muniments 
 before he scatters imputations in his usual fashion of 
 inuendo. Why does he not say honestly, and at 
 once, that he does not believe in the existence 
 of any " Examination " of Augustine Phillipps, the 
 fellow-actor with Shakespeare?* Perhaps he may be 
 
 * Let me take this opportunity of correcting a misprint in my 
 copy of that very curious document : for *' Sir Charles Pryce" and 
 " Jostlyne Pryce " we must of course read Sir Charles Percys 
 and Jostlyne Percye. The body of the paper is in Chief Justice 
 Popham's infamously illegible scrawl. 
 
62 Mr. J. Payne Collier's Reply to 
 
 equally incredulous respecting the " Examination " 
 of Sir Gilly Meyricke, which I published in my new 
 Life of Shakespeare, 1858, p. 154. These are 
 documents that I found and printed ; but if we were 
 to stay until such interesting papers are discovered by 
 the Manuscript Department of the British Museum, 
 we might wait, I fear, as many years as we have 
 waited months for the recent pamphlet.* 
 
 It may even be doubted whether those officers 
 do not owe me some ill-will for finding them work. 
 Only a year or two ago I procured, for a comparative 
 trifle, three large cases of Bentinck manuscripts from 
 Germany, belonging to the period treated by Lord 
 Macaulay in his recent History. How far they illus- 
 trate our annals of that time I know not, as I never 
 looked at them ; but being asked by a friend in 
 Oldenburg whither they ought to be sent, I at once 
 recommended the British Museum. These manu- 
 scripts may, for aught I know, be yet uncatalogued ; 
 I presume not ; and such industrious workmen as 
 Mr. N. E. S. A. Hamilton may have suffered in 
 point of labour, from the occupation I was thus the 
 innocent means of procuring for them. 
 
 I humbly and earnestly hope that all but my 
 
 * It is astonishing how little the Keepers and Assistant 
 Keepers in our national depository appear to know of anything 
 that is not immediately under their own eyes. One night, at the 
 Society of Antiquaries, I produced copies of two letters from the 
 famous Richard Hakluyt ; and one of the Museum Assistant 
 Keepers, printing something about them afterwards, was obliged 
 to confess his ignorance as to where the originals were deposited. 
 I also stated that I knew of a copy (now before me while I am 
 writing) of Hakluyt's Divers Voyages touching America, 4to. 1582, 
 with both the maps. It did not gain credence from the Museum 
 authority, who spoke of the " supposed possessor." 
 
Mr. Hamilton's Inquiry. 63 
 
 impenetrable enemies will be of opinion that I have 
 cleared myself reasonably well I put it in no 
 stronger form from all fair suspicion of guilt; and 
 especially from any discreditable connexion with the 
 emendations in the Perkins folio. The Rev. Dr. 
 Wellesley knows that they were in it when I bought 
 the book in 1849. It is all very well for certain 
 people to decry them : those rival editors who do 
 decry them, have often been compelled, by the especial 
 excellence of the proposed changes, to adopt them. 
 To have only suggested them would have made 
 the fortune of any man ; and, if I were the real 
 author of them, what could have induced me to 
 foist them into an old folio and to give anybody else 
 the credit of them f The charge is so ridiculous 
 that it carries its own contradiction. Mr. Singer 
 inserted many with very grudging acknowledgment, 
 and adopted others, as if they were his own im- 
 provements : Mr. Knight behaved in a more straight- 
 forward way, but availed himself of them. The Rev. 
 Mr. Dyce has been driven to the hard necessity of 
 doing nearly the same, with this salvo, that in order 
 to discredit the Perkins folio he has asserted, un- 
 knowingly I believe, that some of the best changes 
 of text were contained in Mr. Singer's corrected folio, 
 when Mr. Singer never had a corrected folio that pre- 
 sented them, or anything like them. Important as 
 were other coincidences, it is remarkable that there 
 never was the smallest outcry for the production 
 of Mr. Singer's folio, and for the best of all reasons, 
 that the production of it would have directly con- 
 tradicted those who disparaged the Perkins folio.* 
 
 * I do not think that Mr. Singer ever pretended that the 
 
64 Mr. J. Payne Collier's Reply to 
 
 I know well what it must have cost the Rev. 
 Alexander Dyce to insert such emendations as " dis- 
 eases " for degrees, of " mirror'd " for married, of 
 " bollen " for woollen, of " bisson multitude " for 
 
 emendations in his folio 1632 had any claim to consideration on 
 the score of antiquity : on the contrary, I believe that some 
 minor points, which concurred with those in the Perkins folio, 
 were at one time not to be found in Mr. Singer's folio. I 
 however entirely acquit him of introducing them. I never saw 
 the work by Mr. Singer, called Shakespeare Vindicated, but I 
 heard that he spoke hardly of me in it, and I took no notice of 
 his attack : at last he seems to have been won over by his own 
 convictions (for late in life he admitted that he had pursued a 
 wrong system of commentation, if I may use the word) and by 
 my patience, and in 1854 he presented me with a small transla- 
 tion, containing this inscription : " To J. P. Collier, Esq. with 
 Mr. Singer's compliments a peace-offering" I at once accepted 
 the amicable gift, and wrote him a letter of thanks in the fol- 
 lowing terms : 
 
 "Maidenhead, 3d March, 1854. 
 " MY DEAR SIR, 
 
 " I am much obliged to you for your interesting little 
 volume (which reached me yesterday) but more for the inscription 
 it contains. I gladly receive it in the spirit in which, I presume, 
 it is intended. 
 
 " I know not how far you have advanced in your new edition 
 of Shakespeare, but I heartily wish you success in your endeavours 
 to free his text from corruptions, and to render his meaning intel- 
 ligible. Such has been the labour of my life, and I shall rejoice 
 if it be the triumph of yours. Allow me to subscribe myself, 
 
 " Yours very sincerely, 
 
 " J. PAYNE COLLIER. 
 " S. W. Singer, Esq." 
 
 For some reason or other I never received the slightest recog- 
 nition of my note, unless the series of imputations cast upon me 
 in the course of Mr. Singer's Shakespeare, 12mo. 1856, are to be 
 so considered. What had occurred to counteract his repentant and 
 pacific disposition of the spring of 1854, I never inquired. My 
 earnest wish was to keep on good terms with everybody. 
 
Mr. Hamilton's Inquiry. 65 
 
 bosom multiplied, and many others ;* but he did 
 insert them after he became an editor of Shake- 
 speare ; having before that, while he was yet friendly 
 with me, written under his own hand that not a 
 few of the emendations in the Perkins folio were 
 " so admirable that they can hardly be conjectural" 
 This, too, when my volume of Notes and Emenda- 
 tions had been some weeks in his hands, so that he 
 cannot say that he gave a hasty and unconsidered 
 opinion. He must pardon me for once more re- 
 minding him of his very words, for they so forcibly 
 
 * The two first of these changes of text the Rev. A. Dyce 
 vindicates on the ground that they are supported by corrections 
 in Mr. Singer's folio, as well as in the Perkins folio, when the 
 fact is that Mr. Singer's folio has neither of them : indeed, as to 
 the first, Mr. Singer in his Shakespeare, v. 179, justifies degrees 
 instead of "diseases," and blames those who, with the Perkins folio, 
 have substituted " diseases," not pretending that he has any cor- 
 rected folio that reads "diseases." As to the second, "mirror'd" 
 for married (Singer's Shakesp. vii. 242), precisely the same remark 
 will apply, excepting that Mr. Singer had the boldness to print 
 " mirror'd," as if it were his own unprompted emendation, omitting 
 to mention the Perkins folio, and not for an instant urging that 
 he had any authority but his own conjecture for the alteration. 
 Yet both these important changes the Rev. Mr. Dyce assigns to 
 Mr. Singer's corrected folio, as if he wished to deprive the 
 Perkins folio of the sole merit of such great improvements of the 
 text. This, to say the least of it, is very unfair, and I willingly 
 believe that Mr. Dyce unconsciously fell into an error in both 
 cases. As to verbal objections to the Perkins folio, on the ground 
 that modern words are found in its MS. notes, all that it is neces- 
 sary to say is, that wheedling, though used by Butler just after 
 the Restoration, was pointed out by myself; and that cheer was 
 in use as a word of encouragement and approbation early in the 
 reign of Elizabeth, and that the expression three cheers is found 
 in Teonge's Diary, from 1675 to 1679. Yet we are told by the 
 enemies of the Perkins folio that the earliest use of three cheers 
 was about 1806 ! Those who make such unfounded objections 
 come very ill provided to maintain them. 
 
 F 
 
66 Mr. J. Payne Collier's Reply to 
 
 express my own convictions, and indeed almost go 
 beyond them, that I cannot refuse myself the satis- 
 faction of quoting them, whenever an occasion fairly 
 presents itself. 
 
 As I stated in the Preface to my Shakespeare, 
 6 vols. 8vo. 1858, 1 am unable to guess what had ope- 
 rated so hostilely on the mind of the Rev. A. Dyce, 
 beyond the fact, that in 1843 I had anticipated 
 him in his project of publishing an edition of the 
 poet's works. I have never seen even a quotation 
 from his recent attack on my latest labours ; but I 
 hear that his anger scarcely knows bounds. I had 
 occasion, in my Preface, to animadvert upon his 
 animosity to me, and upon the mode in which he 
 had treated my labours in 1844, when his adverse 
 Remarks almost instantly followed the appearance 
 of my first impression ; and in his Few Notes, which, 
 in 1853, were specially directed against my volume 
 of Notes and Emendations. I heard, incidentally 
 and accidentally, that he was offended at what I 
 had written ; and I immediately addressed a mutual 
 friend, stating that my least object was to do in- 
 justice to a gentleman and a scholar whom I had 
 known intimately for thirty years : I therefore offered 
 to retract every syllable that was injurious, if it 
 could be shown to be unjust, and to make my re- 
 tractation public in every possible way. Subse- 
 quently I found that the Rev. Mr. Dyce was serious 
 in his intention to publish an answer to my Preface ; 
 and thinking that a knowledge of my offer to our 
 mutual friend might not have reached him, I wrote 
 to him precisely to the same effect. This note he 
 passed by with entire silence ; but I never since have 
 uttered, or written one word in the disparagement 
 
Mr. Hamilton's Inquiry. 67 
 
 of my sometime friend, that was not absolutely re- 
 quired for my own justification.* I still say of 
 him, as the great Saint said of the greater Sectary, 
 " I loved thee once ; I almost love thee still." 
 
 I have thus been, most unintentionally, involved 
 in the quarrels of authors ; and strange it must seem, 
 that ever since the art of criticism was applied to 
 the works of " the gentle Shakespeare," the most 
 amiable of human beings, those works have been the 
 cause and source of relentless animosities among 
 his commentators. How grandly does the benevo- 
 lence and generosity of the great poet rise above the 
 petty bickerings of us would-be illustrators of his 
 
 * As my note was very short, perhaps I may be allowed to 
 subjoin a copy of it: it establishes how seriously anxious I was 
 to make amends, if I had done any wrong. 
 
 "Maidenhead, 5th Feb. 1859. 
 " SIR, 
 
 " I heard some time ago, and I have just seen it in 
 print, that you are preparing an answer to the Preface to my 
 Shakespeare, 6 vols. 8vo. 1858. 
 
 " If this report be true, it may be right that you should be 
 
 informed, that some months since, in consequence of what Mr. 
 
 said, I wrote to him, stating that if in that Preface you could 
 show that I had done you any injustice, however slight, I would 
 eagerly seize the occasion of acknowledging it, and would make 
 the acknowledgment public in the most effectual manner. 
 
 " With the most vivid and painful recollection of our former 
 and long-enduring friendship, 
 
 " I am, yours, 
 
 " J. PAYNE COLLIER." 
 
 I cannot blame the Rev. Mr. Dyce for not accepting my offer : 
 he might have good reasons for wishing to pursue his own course; 
 but surely no sufficient reason for not taking any notice of what I 
 wrote. He might fancy that it arose, to use Tom Nash's words, 
 with which the Rev. Mr. Dyce must be familiar, " out of a base- 
 hearted fear" of another Harvey. Not so, I can assure him. 
 
68 Mr. J. Payne Collier's Reply to 
 
 text! For myself, I never knew that I had an 
 enemy until I undertook to edit Shakespeare. 
 
 Of the gentleman who seems, in a manner, to 
 have been put forward by the British Museum, to 
 represent them in this encounter, I knew nothing 
 until I saw his accusatory letter in The Times of 
 the 2nd of July last : he, I suppose, is the literary 
 detective of the national establishment ; but I doubt 
 how far the whole body rely upon his skill and in- 
 telligence. Perhaps, from living so entirely in the 
 country, I never heard of him ; but he has been 
 allowed to stir up a little the stagnation of a depart- 
 ment, where the younger men seem eager " to seize 
 opportunities" of gaining notoriety, while the older 
 officers have necessarily been content with the fame 
 acquired by publication of an old chronicle, or of 
 a venerable household -book. When first I heard 
 that I was attacked by Mr. N. E. S. A. Hamilton, 
 I expressed my surprise that the enterprise was 
 entrusted to such obscure hands; and I, not very 
 courteously perhaps, added a couplet from a satirist, 
 which I will not repeat here, because I am anxious 
 to avoid anything like mere personality. 
 
 From Sir Frederick Madden I was unreasonable 
 enough to expect rather different treatment, than 
 from a subordinate to whom I was unknown. I 
 have been acquainted with Sir Frederick nearly 
 ever since he was introduced into the British Mu- 
 seum : we have not unfrequently corresponded, we 
 have exchanged books, and have always observed 
 at least the ordinary civilities of life. Mr. Ha- 
 milton, somewhere in his Inquiry, strangely, yet 
 strongly, reproaches me with not having lent my 
 assistance in the investigations respecting the au- 
 
Mr. Hamilton's Inquiry. 69 
 
 thenticity of the Perkins folio. I saw from the 
 newspapers that it had reached the Manuscript De- 
 partment, and I saw that consultations were held 
 over it, not only by various officers of the esta- 
 blishment, but by many literary gentlemen, and 
 especially by editors of Shakespeare, some of whose 
 labours on the poet's works I had only heard of. I 
 thought, not unnaturally, that if any information 
 from me were wished, I should also have been 
 invited to the meeting ; but not having been so in- 
 vited, I apprehended that it would be the height of 
 indelicacy, if not of presumption, in me to proffer my 
 services, or to thrust myself into a company where 
 my presence was not desired. 
 
 It seemed the more likely that I should have 
 been asked to attend, because Sir F. Madden, in the 
 preceding month of September, had written me a 
 note, in which he expressed a wish, propriis oculis, 
 to inspect the Perkins folio. The chief business of 
 his note, I remember, was to thank me for fac-similes 
 of the Hamlets of 1603 and 1604, with the distribution 
 of which the late and the present Duke of Devon- 
 shire had entrusted me ; and to inquire whether I 
 had seen a signature of Shakespeare on a map of some 
 county of England, and whether I looked upon it as 
 genuine. I answered the two last parts of Sir F. 
 Madden's note, but I postponed that incidental por- 
 tion which related to the Perkins Shakespeare, be- 
 cause the present Duke of Devonshire was then in 
 Lancashire, and because I hoped that when his Grace 
 returned to London, he would, as his noble prede- 
 cessor had done, entrust me with the book, in order 
 that I might carry it to Sir Frederick Madden at the 
 Museum. 
 
70 Mr. J. Payne Collier's Reply to 
 
 In the meantime, his Grace had confided to my 
 care the very responsible task of preparing a fac- 
 simile of the Hamlet of 1604; and the wish, only ex- 
 pressed obiter by the head of the Manuscript Depart- 
 ment, I am sorry to say, escaped my memory. Sir 
 F. Madden might surely without derogation have 
 reminded me of his former request regarding the 
 Perkins folio ; and I never dreamed that he would 
 take, nor do I believe now that he has taken, offence 
 at so trifling a piece of neglect on my part, counter- 
 balanced as it is by the fact, that of the forty copies 
 of the fac-similes of 1603 and 1604 (for no more 
 were struck off for each distribution) I sent two, in 
 the Duke of Devonshire's name, to Sir F. Madden 
 himself, and two others to the Department of Printed 
 Books in the British Museum. His Grace had given 
 me only general instructions upon the subject, and 
 it was of my own free will that I addressed these 
 rare books to Sir F. Madden, whom I had known 
 for so many years ; and who, it should seem, at that 
 date was aiding the case against me founded upon 
 the Perkins folio. 
 
 If, therefore, as an act of courtesy, I was not to 
 be asked to be present, it would appear only an act of 
 justice that I should have been required, in the very 
 first instance, almost before the Perkins folio had been 
 opened in the Manuscript Department, to inspect it, 
 in order that I might be sure that it was precisely in 
 the same condition as when I had presented it to the 
 late Duke of Devonshire. Instead of that, it seems 
 as if it had been at once handed over to the tender 
 mercies of Mr. Hamilton, as a literary detective ; and 
 he certainly claims to have been the person who first 
 made the discovery of the pencil-marks. He tells us 
 
Mr. Hamilton s Inquiry. 71 
 
 that " the correspondence between certain pencil- 
 marks in the margins, with corrections in ink [was] 
 first noticed by myself." He does not add when he 
 " first noticed" them, whether anybody else was by 
 at the time, nor how long the book had been in his 
 possession before he communicated his discovery 
 of the pencil-marks. All may have been meant to 
 be conducted with perfect fairness : I will presume 
 so ; but would it not have occurred to any impartial 
 person, on the discovery of the mysterious pencil- 
 marks, to have requested me at once to look at them, 
 and to say whether I had ever observed them while 
 the volume was mine, or while the book had been in 
 the library of the late Duke of Devonshire? Such 
 a course would certainly have saved an infinite deal 
 of trouble. 
 
 However, I will not fritter away the substantial 
 features of the case by these comparatively in- 
 significant topics : those substantial features beyond 
 all cavil or dispute, are, 1. That the manuscript 
 notes were in the Perkins folio when I bought it in 
 1849, if not fifty years before that date; 2. That 
 I discovered the Bridgewater House manuscripts 
 precisely under the circumstances stated, and that 
 the authenticity of some of them was maintained 
 by the best judges of our day, both literary and 
 artistic ; 3. That the Dulwich manuscripts were in 
 the condition I have described them at least as far 
 back as the year 1796, as is evidenced, among other 
 proofs, by Malone's Inquiry of that date; and 4. 
 That with regard to the Players' Petition of 1596, if 
 it be a forgery at all, it was a forgery before I 
 set foot inside the State Paper Office, before I com- 
 
72 Mr. J. Payne Collier's Reply. 
 
 menced my researches there, and before I even knew 
 where the Office was situated. 
 
 I ought to apologise to the reader for occupying 
 so much of his time, but I was anxious, once for all, 
 to go into the case as fully as my materials, after 
 the lapse of so many years, would enable me. Hie 
 arma repono. 
 
 J. PAYNE COLLIER. 
 
 Maidenhead, 12 March, 1860. 
 
 ADDITIONAL NOTES. 
 
 Page 1. I did not see Mr. Hamilton's Letter of the 7th inst. 
 in the Athenceum until some days after my earlier sheets were at 
 press, or I would have made some alterations in them. I am glad 
 to observe that he now denies the participation of his colleagues 
 in office. I only used the word " mouthpiece " as it is defined by 
 Johnson, "one who delivers the sentiments of others associated 
 in the same design." 
 
 Page 50. Having written to the Rev. J. Lindsay on the 
 subject of Mrs. Alleyn's Letter, he has promptly replied that he 
 does not remember the circumstance. He, like me, regrets the 
 death of John Allen, Esq., then Master of Dulwich College, who 
 may have been the person to whom I mentioned the decayed state 
 of the document. 
 
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