152 
 
A REVIEW 
 
 OF THE 
 
 PRESENT STATE 
 
 or THE 
 
 SHAKESPEARIAN CONTROVERSY, 
 
 BY THOMAS DUFFUS HARDY, 
 
 ASSISTANT KEEPER OF THE PUBLIC RECORDS. 
 
 LONDON: 
 LONGMAN, GREEN, LONGMAN, AND ROBERTS. 
 
 1860. v 
 
 Price 2s. 6d. 
 
A REVIEW 
 
 OF THE 
 
 PRESENT STATE 
 
 SHAKESPEARIAN CONTROVERSY. 
 
 BY THOMAS DUFFUS HARDY, 
 
 ASSISTANT KEEPEE OP THE PUBLIC BECORDS. 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 LONGMAN, GREEN, LONGMAN, AND ROBERTS. 
 
 1860. 
 
LONDON : 
 
 Printed by G. E. EYRE and WILLIAM SPOTTISWOODE, 
 Printers to the Queen's most Excellent Majesty. 
 
rev 
 
 " I can have no right," says Mr. Collier in his 
 reply to Mr. Hamilton's "Inquiry," " 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 discharge 
 " 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 character and dignity of their own position. 
 " A dispassionate 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 temper and 
 " moderation." 
 
 If Mr. Collier had followed the precepts he has 
 thus laid down, an important question, which to a 
 certain extent may be said to concern the whole 
 literature of England, would have been dispassipn- 
 ately discussed, and his opponents, if opponents 
 they must be called, would have no reason to object 
 
 674 A 
 
to the ungenerous insinuations with which his 
 statements abound. Should Mr. Collier complain 
 of the tone which has been adopted by those who 
 differ from him in this matter, he has no one to 
 blame but himself. It was the injudicious answer 
 he sent to the " Times " newspaper, in reply to 
 Mr. Hamilton's letter, that has caused him the 
 annoyance, by making it a personal, rather than a 
 literary, question. 
 
 Public Record Office, 
 July I860. 
 
A REVIEW 
 
 OP THE 
 
 PRESENT STATE OF THE SHAKESPEARIAN 
 CONTROVERSY. 
 
 A MOST important literary question has engaged public 
 attention since last July. Not that it is new to those 
 who take an interest in dramatic, and more especially 
 Shakespearian, literature ; for it has been before the world 
 since January 1852, when Mr. Collier first announced, in the 
 Athenaum that he had discovered in a copy of the second 
 folio edition of Shakespeare's Plays, published in 1632, a 
 large body of Notes and Emendations, amounting to nearly 
 20,000, in a hand not much later than the time when this 
 edition emanated from the press, and that in his belief 
 the Annotator had made these emendations from better 
 authority than that of the Editors of the first folio. 
 
 This announcement naturally created a great desire on the 
 part of Shakespearian critics, and other literary men, for a 
 detailed account of these Notes and Emendations; and in 
 order that any person interested in the subject might have 
 an opportunity of inspecting them, Mr. Collier, as he states, 
 exhibited the book before the Shakespearian Society, and, 
 on three occasions, before the Society of Antiquaries. 
 Further to gratify the curiosity that had then been raised, 
 in the year 1852 Mr. Collier published a volume professing 
 to contain the greater part, but not all, of these manuscript 
 alterations, with a fac-simile of a portion of one page. No 
 sooner had Mr. Collier made public some of the emendations 
 of this annotated folio, than the most lively interest was 
 excited, not only in England, but on the Continent as well. 
 The new readings were, however, violently assailed by critics 
 of every denomination ; one alone (Professor Mommsen) 
 accepting them as genuine. In England, Mr. Singer, Mr. 
 Dyce, Mr. Staunton, Mr. Hunter, and Mr. C. Knight repu- 
 diated them in no very measured terms. According to 
 
 A 2 
 
4 A REVIEW OF THE PRESENT STATE 
 
 these gentlemen, they were not what they professed to be ; 
 the " Old Corrector " (as Mr. Collier termed their author) 
 had no authority for his corrections ; on the contrary, the 
 greater part of them were adopted from recent annotators ; 
 those of which the original could not be traced were violent 
 and inconsiderate changes for the worse ; the larger number 
 were frivolous and unnecessary. Such was the gist of the 
 allegations made in reference to these readings. 
 
 The scholars who thus impugned the genuineness of these 
 emendations, arrived at their conclusions wholly from their 
 knowledge of Shakespeare's text, and of what had been done 
 for it by Commentators during the present century and the 
 last. They had never examined Mr. Collier's folio, though 
 more than one had endeavoured to obtain an opportunity 
 of doing so. As early as 1853 Mr. Charles Knight pointed 
 out, in a temperate but forcible manner, the propriety of 
 having the folio deposited in the custody of some public 
 body, who would allow access to it, under proper regulations, 
 and a full and satisfactory examination of its contents. Dis- 
 regarding, however, the adverse opinions thus expressed, 
 Mr. Collier, in 1853, issued a Second Edition of the Notes 
 and Emendations ; and, shortly after, the folio became the 
 property of the Duke of Devonshire. All further chance of 
 a critical examination of the volume had now become ap 
 parently hopeless ; and it was after a considerable lapse of 
 time, that Mr. Howard Staunton determined, if possible, to 
 have the handwriting in which these emendations were made 
 examined. " Having myself/' he remarks,* 6( from the first 
 publication of the Notes and Emendations, felt assured, by 
 the internal evidence, that they were for the most part 
 plagiarized from the chief Shakespearian editors and critics, 
 arid the rest of quite modern fabrication, I earnestly 
 longed to have the writing tested. That which was a 
 desire before, when the present work was undertaken, 
 became a necessity ; and during the year 1858 I more than 
 once communicated to Sir Frederick Madden, as the most 
 eminent paleographer of the age. my motives for wishing 
 that the volume should undergo inspection by persons skilled 
 in ancient handwriting." Sir F. Madden's official engage- 
 ments at that time prevented his giving the subject the 
 attention it deserved ; but in consequence of Mr. Staunton's 
 
 * Preface to his Edition of Shakespeare. 
 
OF THE SHAKESPEARIAN CONTROVERSY. :> 
 
 solicitations, Sir Frederick applied to Mr. Collier for his 
 good services in obtaining access to the volume. To this 
 application Mr. Collier made no reply ; whereupon, Sir F. 
 Madden requested of the Duke of Devonshire himself the 
 loan of the volume for a short time, in order to afford Pro- 
 fessor Bodenstedt, Mr. Staunton, and others an opportunity 
 of inspecting it. These gentlemen, and others, who seem to 
 have been perfectly familiar with the handwritings of the period 
 in question, after careful examination were unanimously of 
 opinion that the manuscript notes and emendations were 
 modern fabrications, although written in imitation of hands 
 of the seventeenth century. This opinion was communicated 
 by Mr. N. E. S. A. Hamilton to the Times newspaper in 
 a letter of the 22d June 1859 ; when he also pointed out 
 the remarkable fact, that an infinite number of faint pencil- 
 marks and corrections, written in a hand of the present 
 century, could be seen on the margins of the book, and that 
 some of these pencil-marks could be distinctly, traced under- 
 neath the ink of many of the emendations. 
 
 Mr. Collier, in his reply, also published in the Times, 
 denied these assertions ; and courted " the most minute, the 
 most searching, and the most hostile examination of Mr. 
 Hamilton's allegations." 
 
 We purpose, therefore, taking Mr. Collier at his word, 
 to enter upon such an -examination as he courts. Not, how- 
 ever, in any hostile spirit, but with a sincere desire to 
 ascertain the truth. The subject is too important and too 
 grave to require or admit of personal recriminations. 
 
 As Mr. Collier rests the authority of his folio upon the 
 antiquity of the handwriting in which those emendations are 
 made, we purpose examining this claim to authority under 
 the following heads: 
 
 I. Is the writing, in which the Notes and Emendations 
 
 occur, of the period of which Mr. Collier alleges it 
 to be? 
 
 II. Are there any pencillings in the margin, as Mr. 
 
 Hamilton professes to have discovered ? 
 II F. Do the Notes and Emendations carry upon their 
 
 face proofs of their genuineness ? 
 IV. What is the history of the folio in which these 
 
 Notes and Emendations are found? 
 
6 A REVIEW OF THE PRESENT STATE 
 
 and lastly, on collateral grounds : - 
 
 Y. Are certain Letters and Papers relating to Shake- 
 speare which Mr. Collier has printed^ or referred 
 to, genuine or not ? 
 
 I. Is the writing, in which the notes and emendations 
 occur, of the period of which Mr Collier alleges it to be ? 
 
 It is almost impossible to convey to the mind of the 
 uninitiated a correct notion of the shades of difference in the 
 handwritings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ; and 
 yet a practised eye distinguishes at a glance one from 
 another, as easily as a man who, finding half a dozen letters 
 from intimate friends upon his table, can tell who are the 
 writers without looking at the signatures, and yet would be 
 at a loss to describe the different characteristics which enabled 
 him to form his conclusion. 
 
 The handwriting of the notes and alterations in the 
 Devonshire folio is of a mixed character, varying, even 
 in the same page, from the stiff laboured Gothic hand of the 
 sixteenth century to the round text-hand of the nineteenth, 
 a fact most perceptible in the capital letters. It bears 
 unequivocal marks also of laborious imitation through- 
 out. 
 
 In their broader characteristics the features of the hand- 
 writing of this country, from the time of the Reformation, 
 may be arranged under four epochs, sufficiently distinct to 
 elucidate our argument : 
 
 1. The stiffupright Gothic of Henry VIII. and Edward VI. 
 
 2. The same, inclining, and less stiff, as a greater amount of 
 correspondence demanded an easier style of writing, under 
 Elizabeth. 
 
 3. The cursive, based on an Italian model (the Gothic 
 becoming more flexible and now rapidly disappearing), in the 
 reign of James I., and continuing in use for about a century. 
 
 4. The round hand of the schoolmaster, under the House 
 of Hanover, degenerating into the careless half -formed hands 
 of the present day. 
 
OF THE SHAKESPEARIAN CONTROVERSY. 7 
 
 Now, it is perfectly possible, that any two of these hands 
 in succession, may have been practised by the same person ; 
 although hand-writings, with all their modifications, are far- 
 mere stationary in their essential characteristics, than an 
 inexperienced inquirer would generally suppose. That the 
 first and third, or the second and fourth should be co-existent 
 is very improbable. That all, or that the first, second, and 
 fourth should be found together, as belonging to one and 
 the same era, we hold to be utterly impossible. 
 
 Yet this is a difficulty that Mr. Collier has to explain ; as 
 the hand-writings of the MS. corrections in the Devonshire 
 folio, including those in pencil, vary, as already said, from the 
 stiff, upright, laboured, and earlier Gothic to the round text- 
 hand of the nineteenth century. 
 
 " But," says the Edinburgh Reviewer,* with considerable 
 caution though he betrays the uncertainty of the ground on 
 which he is venturing, (f in many an instrument of the seven- 
 teenth century, engrossed in the Gothic, names of places 
 and persons, and other words to which it was wished to 
 attract special attention, were inserted in a cursive hand, 
 very like modern handwriting in general appearance. 
 Such a cursive an old Corrector may have used in his 
 freer pencil jottings, to be replaced by elaborate half- 
 printing in penmanship." 
 
 Now, the truth is, that the cursive hand of the seven- 
 teenth century is utterly unlike the cursive hand of these 
 pencillings. It is so far from being like, that no prac- 
 tised eye could be deceived by it. The cursive hand of these 
 Gothic instruments is of the most perfect and graceful kind. 
 It was derived from the Italian scholars, and based on the 
 type now named ' italic.' If the reader will refer to any 
 works printed in italics in the 17th century, e. g. to 
 Bacon's " Novum Organum," or his " De Augmentis," or, 
 still better, to his MSS. preserved in the British Museum, 
 he will be able to form a tolerably accurate conception of 
 the nature of cursive writing in the 17th century; a hand 
 as distinct from the slovenly round text-hand of these 
 pencillings as it is from the Gothic of an earlier period. 
 
 * No. 226, pp, 452-486. 
 
8 A REVIEW OF THE PRESENT STATE 
 
 The Reviewer might as well confound Norman with 
 Pointed Architecture, or Batty Langley with Cinque Cento. 
 
 But the reason assigned by the Reviewer for the prevalence 
 of the stiffer Gothic hand in the Shakespeare emendations 
 is really extraordinary. The folio in which they are made 
 appeared in 1632. We must allow some years to have 
 elapsed before the Corrector had completed his labours. 
 Mr. Collier assigns them to the Commonwealth. Assume 
 the period to be 1650. The corrections, then, ought to 
 have appeared in the prevalent writing of that era ; that 
 is, in the ordinary cursive hand of the period, or, it may 
 be, in a hand a little more antiquated, supposing they were 
 the work of a provincial ; for handwriting, like manners, was 
 in those times somewhat less in advance in the provinces than 
 in the metropolis. Fac-similes of this hand are too common 
 for anyone to be at a loss to understand its general character. 
 But, on turning to the corrections in the Devonshire folio, they 
 are ostensibly in the hand of a much earlier date, i.e. of Queen 
 Elizabeth or the earlier period of James I., while the pen- 
 cillings are in a cursive hand of the 19th century. Supposing, 
 however, for a moment that these pencillings had really been 
 (what they are not) in a cursive hand with all the undeniable 
 characteristics of the middle of the 17th century, what con- 
 ceivable motive could the "old Corrector "have had in deliber- 
 ately transforming them into a hand which had long gone out of 
 fashion? It can hardly be supposed that it could be for his 
 own convenience or pleasure that he undertook such 'an 
 amount of unprofitable labour, for what was to be gained by 
 it ? Could it, then, be for the printer's use ? Certainly not ; 
 though the corrections are made in the style of adapting 
 a book for the press. 
 
 It is possible to conceive a reason for inverting the process, 
 that is, for transforming Gothic pencil writing into ink 
 cursive ; but none whatever for the reverse. Had the pencil 
 writing been in Gothic, and had the majority of the written 
 corrections been in the prevalent hand of 1650, we could then 
 have conceived that the writer, for the sake of clearness, had 
 been transferring the less legible Gothic into the more legible 
 cursive ; but why he should undertake the task of replacing 
 the distinct and modern by the indistinct and antiquated, 
 passes our comprehension. 
 
OF THE .SHAKESPEARIAN CONTROVERSY. 9 
 
 There is another consideration which, slight as it may 
 appear, will not fail to have weight with those who have 
 heen accustomed to the study of handwriting in general. 
 Mr. Collier avows his belief that all these corrections are by 
 one and the same hand. Perhaps he is right ; but, if so, 
 how does he account for the extraordinary variations in the 
 letters ? In the commonest capitals there are to be found as 
 many as half a dozen different forms of the same letter; several 
 of which appear to have been written at first in an ordinary 
 modern character, and afterwards altered and retouched with 
 the evident design of creating a more antique appearance. 
 Let Mr. Collier, from the British Museum, or from the State 
 Paper Office, furnish a single instance of one writer at any 
 period who, in writing according to the usage of that period, 
 has thus luxuriated in varying the form of his capitals. 
 
 We shall say only a few words on the subject of the 
 material in which the corrections are made, as Mr. Maskelyne 
 has given clear evidence that it is not what is commonly 
 called the tf black ink " in use at any period. 
 
 The pigment, or whatever else it may be, is of different 
 shades, often varying on the same page from a yellow brown 
 to a light Indian ink ; a fact that seems to show that the 
 corrections were made at different times. This may have 
 given rise to the supposition that they were made by different 
 persons at long intervals of time ; but it appears to us, from 
 the peculiarities in the writing and the different shades of 
 ink, that they were made by the same hand, though 
 undoubtedly at different periods. Believing, AS we do, that 
 they have no claims to antiquity, but are in reality recent 
 fabrications, our opinion is simply this : that whenever the 
 " Old Corrector " has come across any reading suggested, or 
 error corrected, by any of the Shakespearian scholars of the 
 last century or the present that has at all taken his fancy, 
 he has seized upon them and inserted them in the folio ; 
 and that thus are the various shades of the ink to be 
 accounted for. Chemical tests, if they were allowed to be 
 tried, would at once determine what are the component parts 
 of the liquid in which the corrections are written. 
 
 II. Are there any pencillings in the margin, as Mr. 
 Hamilton professes to have discovered ? 
 
10 A REVIEW OF THE PIIESENT STATE 
 
 It has been already stated that Mr. Hamilton, on examining 
 the emendations, discovered in the margins a number of faint 
 pencil-marks and corrections, written in a hand of the present 
 century, and that some of these pencil-marks could be dis- 
 tinctly traced underneath the ink. This fact and other cir- 
 cumstances, singly of little importance, tend collectively to 
 establish the charge of fabrication. On this point, too, there 
 is other evidence than palaeography ; and Mr. Maskelyne's 
 testimony,* resting on independent grounds, cannot be 
 lightly set aside. " This simple test (the microscope) of 
 the character of these emendations, I brought to bear on 
 them, and with the following results : 
 
 " Firstly. As to any question that might be raised con- 
 cerning the presence of the pencil-marks asserted to be so 
 plentifully distributed down the margin, the answer is, they 
 are there. The microscope reveals the particles of plumbago 
 in the hollows of the paper ; and in no case that I have 
 yet examined, does it fail to bring this fact forward into 
 incontrovertible reality. 
 
 " Secondly, the ink presents a rather singular aspect under 
 the microscope. Its appearance in many cases on or rather 
 in the paper suggested the idea of its being a water-colour 
 paint rather than an ink; it has a remarkable lustre, and 
 the distribution of the particles of colouring matter in it 
 seems unlike that in inks, ancient or modern, that I have 
 yet examined. 
 
 " This view is somewhat confirmed by a taste, unlike the 
 styptic taste of ordinary inks, which it imparts to the 
 tongue, and by its substance evidently yielding to the action 
 of damp. But on this point, as on another, to which atten- 
 tion will be presently drawn, it was not possible to arrive at 
 a satisfactory conclusion in the absence of the Duke of 
 Devonshire's permission to make a few experiments on the 
 volume. 
 
 " His Grace visited the Museum yesterday, and was 
 good enough to give me his consent to this. The result has 
 been, that the suspicions previously entertained regarding 
 the ink were confirmed. 
 
 * Printed in Mr. Hamilton's Inquiry, p. 27-29. 
 
OF THE SHAKESPEARIAN CONTROVERSY. 11 
 
 " It proves to be a paint removable, with the exception 
 of a slight stain, by mere water, while, on the other hand, 
 its colouring matter resists the action of chymical agents 
 which rapidly change inks, ancient or modern, whose colour 
 is due to iron. In some places, indeed, this paint seems to 
 have become mixed, accidentally or otherwise, with ordinary 
 ink ; but its prevailing character is that of a paint formed 
 perhaps of sepia, or of sepia mixed with a little Indian ink. 
 This, however, is of secondary importance in comparison 
 with the other point which has been alluded to. This point 
 involves, indeed, the most important question that has 
 arisen^ and concerns the relative dates of the modern-looking 
 pencil marks, and the old emendations of the text which arc 
 in ink. The pencil marks are of different kinds. Some are 
 d's, indicative of the deletion of stops or letters in the text, 
 and to which alterations in ink, I believe, invariably re- 
 spond. Others, again, belong to the various modes at 
 present in use to indicate corrigenda for the press. Some 
 may, perhaps, be the ( crosses, ticks, or lines ' which 
 Mr. Collier introduced himself. But there are others, again, 
 in which whole syllables or words in pencil are not so 
 effectually rubbed out as not to be still traceable and legible, 
 and even the character of the handwriting discernible, while 
 in near neighbourhood to them the same syllable or word is 
 repeated in the paint-like ink before described. The pencil 
 is in a modern-looking hand; the ink in a quaint antique- 
 looking writing. In several cases, however, the ink word 
 and the pencil word occupy the same ground in the margin, 
 and are one over the other. The question that arises in these 
 cases, of whether these two writings are both ancient or 
 both modern, is a question for the antiquary or palrcographist. 
 The question of whether the pencil is antecedent or subse- 
 quent to the ink, is resolvable into a physical inquiry as to 
 whether the ink overlies the pencil or the pencil is super- 
 posed upon the ink. The answer to this question is as 
 follows : 
 
 " I have nowhere been able to detect the pencil-marks 
 clearly overlying the ink, though in several places the pencil 
 stops abruptly at the ink, and in some seems to be just 
 traceable through its translucent substance, while lacking 
 there the general metallic lustre of the plumbago. But the 
 question is set at rest by the removal by water of the ink in 
 instances where the ink and the pencil intersected each other. 
 The first case I chose for this was an u in Richard II., p. 36. 
 
12 A REVIEW OF THE PRESENT STATE 
 
 A pencil tick crossed the u, intersecting each limb of the 
 letter. The pencil was barely visible through the first 
 stroke, and not at all visible under the second stroke of 
 the u. On damping off the ink in the first stroke, how- 
 ever, the pencil-mark became much plainer than before, 
 and even when as much of the ink stain as possible was 
 removed, and the pencil still runs through the ink in 
 unbroken continuity. Had the pencil been superposed on 
 the ink, it must have lain superficially upon its lustrous 
 surface, and have been removed in the washing. We must, 
 I think, be led by this inference that the pencil underlies 
 the ink, that is to say, was antecedent to it in its date ; 
 while also, it is evident that the ( old commentator ' had 
 done his best to rub out the pencil writing before he 
 introduced its ink substitute." 
 
 To this evidence other considerations must be added : 
 the appearance of white spots in the paper, as if acids had 
 been used to delete the ink ; and the frequency of erasures by 
 penknife or wet cloth. All these cannot but be startling 
 facts to persons acquainted with ancient MSS., and would at 
 once raise a doubt of the genuineness of any document 
 where they occurred, more especially one alleged to belong 
 to the 17th century. If this statement be questioned, let 
 the believers in the genuineness of these emendations pro- 
 duce instances of such usages prevailing in the middle of the 
 17th century; MSS. of that period are numerous enough. 
 No one can undertake to prove an universal negative ; but 
 until some positive proof has been given of the prevalence of 
 such practices as these, unusual and suspicious as they un- 
 doubtedly are, we cannot do otherwise than refuse our assent 
 to the arguments adduced in favour of the antiquity of the 
 emendations in the Devonshire folio. 
 
 Attempts have been made, and indeed very unjustly, 
 from the inadequacy of the fac- simile in Mr. Hamilton's 
 volume to imply the non-existence in reality of these pencil- 
 marks. Mr. Netherclift, senior, has taken upon himself the 
 superfluous task of informing the public that he did not 
 execute them. What inference he would have us to deduce 
 from this, it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to say ; but it 
 would have been more to the point if he could have shown 
 that these pencil-marks did not exist. On this point, how- 
 ever, we have the evidence of the " Old Corrector's " own 
 advocate, the Edinburgh Reviewer : 
 
OF THE SHAKESPEARIAN CONTROVERSY. 13 
 
 " There they are (the pencil marks) most undoubtedly, 
 and in very great number too. The natural surprise that 
 they were not earlier detected, is somewhat diminished on 
 inspection. Some say they have ' come out ' more in the 
 course of years ; whether this is possible we know not. But 
 even now they are hard to discover, until the eye has become 
 used to the search. But when it has especially with the 
 aid of a glass at first they become perceptible enough ; 
 words, ticks, points, and all. In many places even the most 
 sceptical observer can hardly doubt that the mode of correc- 
 tion was, as alleged for the prosecution, by pencil first, and 
 ink afterwards. And in others, where no pencilling can be 
 read, there is an appearance as if it had been rubbed out. 
 Are these pencillings in a modern hand ? That, after all, is 
 the real issue of this complicated case. And it is one which 
 me must leave to better eyes and more experienced judges, 
 whenever this unfortunate volume shall be honestly examined. 
 For the vehement assertions of partisans we care nothing. 
 All we can say is, that to our eyes the faint and feeble 
 ghosts of words and letters which are here and there to be 
 made out, do wear the appearance of a hand more like that 
 now in use, than the stiff gothic ink writing. But then we 
 must observe on the other hand, that even in Elizabeth's 
 reign the mixture of cursive with Gothic was very common. 
 In many an instrument of the seventeenth century engrossed 
 in the Gothic, names of places and persons, and other words 
 to which it was wished to attract special attention, were 
 inserted in a cursive hand very like modern hand-writing in 
 general appearance. Such a cursive an old corrector may 
 have used in his freer pencil jottings, to be replaced by 
 elaborate half-printing in penmanship. This, however, we 
 can but give as conjecture. We must, at all events, utterly 
 disclaim and repudiate Mr. Netherclift's fac-similcs in 
 Mr. Hamilton's volume, if they are intended to be verified 
 by the naked eye or by an ordinary glass. They are to our 
 view infinitely too distinct, and we have carefully compared 
 each of them with the original. In particular we must 
 caution our readers against the very modern-looking ' r ' in 
 armed (cited as from Hamlet, p. 277, col. 1.) Our sight, at 
 least, failed altogether to discover its counterpart in the 
 Perkins volume." 
 
 The tortuous ingenuity displayed in this extract is worth 
 observing. The Reviewer having inveighed, in the earlier 
 
14 A REVIEW OF THE PRESENT STATE 
 
 portion of his remarks, against the current maxim* Cuilibet 
 in arte sua credendum, now requires his readers to yield 
 their judgment at discretion to his own notions upon 
 palaeography and his unsupported surmise. True, he has 
 the modesty to say that he offers the explanation as his own 
 conjecture ; not the less, however, intending to have it 
 accepted as all-sufficient in reference to these pencil-marks ; 
 an issue which he has the very moment before " left to 
 better eyes and more experienced judges/' 
 
 Again, a recent writer in the Athenaeum (N 1686) dismisses 
 the question of the pencil-marks, because Mr. Netherclift's fac- 
 simile represents them as more legible than they really are : 
 a fault, in fact, which could hardly have been avoided. Had 
 he exaggerated the forms of the letters, or drawn them more 
 nearly resembling modern handwriting than they really do, 
 the objection might have been to some purpose. But, in 
 reality, the only question is the fact of their being there, not 
 of their being more or less legible. Indeed the more distinct 
 and legible they were, the more would they tell in favour 
 of the volume ; the less studied intention would they betray 
 of having been obliterated to serve the purposes of conceal- 
 ment.* The Athenceum states that no pencil-marks existed ; 
 and Mr. Collier has improved this apparent advantage by 
 asserting that there were no such pencil-marks in the book 
 while it was in his possession ; apparently intending to imply 
 that if there now are, they must have been inserted by the 
 British Museum authorities, who are well acquainted with 
 his handwriting. We will not insult the common sense or 
 candour of the reader by comment on such a defence as this ; 
 but we must again call attention to the contradictory argu- 
 ments employed by Mr. Collier's supporters in upholding 
 his views and statements as to this volume. What Mr. Col- 
 lier and the Athenceum deny to exist at allf, what the 
 Editor of Notes and Queries ll cannot see," is perceptible 
 enough to the Edinburgh Reviewer. 
 
 * Whatever may have been the origin or purpose of these pencil-marks, it is 
 clear that some one has deemed it advisable that their traces and evidence 
 should be destroyed as far as possible, and that great efforts had been made to 
 obliterate them by rubbing out. 
 
 f Mr. Collier states that neither he nor the Duke of Devonshire ever dis- 
 covered a single pencil-mark, and that another friend of his had the folio under 
 his eyes for one week and examined every page of it, and never saw a single 
 pencil-mark. 
 
OF THE SHAKESPEARIAN CONTROVERSY. 15 
 
 " There they are," he states, " most undoubtedly, and in 
 very great number too/' " In many places (he subjoins), the 
 most sceptical observer can hardly doubt that the mode of 
 correction was by pencil first and ink afterwards. And in 
 others, where no pencilling can be read, there is an appear- 
 ance as if it had been rubbed out.'' 
 
 Whatever the public may think of this admission 
 Mr. Collier can hardly thank the writer for making it. The 
 Reviewer continues : " All we can say is, that to our eyes, 
 the faint and feeble ghosts of words and letters which are 
 here and there to be made out, do wear the appearance of 
 a hand more like that now in use than the stiff Gothic ink 
 writing/' The method by which he escapes the fatal con- 
 clusion is, at all events, novel. These pencillings do occur ; 
 " but then we must observe, on the other hand, that even 
 in Elizabeth's reign the mixture of cursive with Gothic was 
 very common/' 
 
 What " experts" were at the elbow of the Reviewer when 
 he put forth this novel discovery in palaeography ? It ex- 
 hibits all the pomp and pretentiousness of sciolism, and, like 
 most novelties, is equally false and flimsy. What have instru- 
 ments engrossed, or legal documents, of the seventeenth century 
 to do with annotations scribbled in the margin of a book, first 
 in pencil, in a modern hand, and afterwards in ink, in a hand 
 of a much earlier period ? Because Gothic engrossing is to 
 be found in legal documents of 1650, therefore he concludes 
 that such hand was the ordinary hand of the Commonwealth. 
 15ut what, it may be further asked, has the mixture of 
 cursive and Gothic in the time of Elizabeth to do with the 
 handwriting of 1650? and even if it had, what has it to do 
 with pencillings which wear all the appearance of a hand of 
 the present century ? The juxtaposition of the Reviewer's 
 sentences looks very much like a studied attempt to mislead 
 the unwary. Without any logical connexion, they carry the 
 appearance of such connexion to the mind of the inex- 
 perienced reader. The Reviewer wishes to show that en- 
 grossing and cursive hands were commonly intermixed to a 
 very late period. Gothic and cursive, he tells us, are found 
 together in the common hands of the age of Elizabeth ; 
 what then ? To have gained any real support to his cause 
 he ought to have shown that the same admixture of hands 
 prevailed in the middle of the seventeenth century. 
 
1C A REVIEW OF THE PRESENT STATE 
 
 III. Do the Notes and Emendations carry upon their face 
 proofs of their genuineness ? 
 
 The corrections and conjectural emendations which occur 
 in the Devonshire folio are, so far as we have been made 
 acquainted with them, of four descriptions : 
 
 1. Typographical errors that are self-evident, and 
 
 which could be corrected by the merest tyro in 
 Shakespearian reading. 
 
 2. Typographical errors that require some critical 
 
 acumen, or perhaps fancy, to amend. 
 
 3. Errors, the corrections of which have been made by 
 
 other Commentators. 
 
 4. Errors that are corrected for the first time in the 
 
 Devonshire folio. 
 
 Upon each of these divisions a few words are necessary. 
 Unfortunately, however, this part of the case hardly admits 
 of that complete examination which it demands, as Mr. Collier 
 has failed to furnish us with all the necessary means for 
 dealing with it. He has given to the world only those 
 emendations which might seem to carry with them some 
 air of probability; while three-fourths, at least, of their 
 less fortunate brethren lie still unrevealed in the margins 
 of this folio, there to remain until some future Editor 
 shall deem them worth ushering into the light of day. But 
 to proceed : 
 
 1. The typographical errors that are self-evident, and 
 which the merest tyro might correct, are such as /ight for 
 fight, yiiith for faith, ./ail, for fail, &c., and reversing topsy- 
 turvy letters, such as Mr. Collier describes. 
 
 2. Typographical errors that require some critical acumen 
 or fancy to amend ; such as " When it was out let me not 
 " live quoth he ;" which is amended by Mr. Staunton thus, 
 "When ivit was out let me not live quoth he." 
 
 It may be remarked, that corrections of this kind may be 
 arrived at by three different processes : (1.) By writing the 
 suspected word in the hand of the 16th century, or by 
 
OF THE SHAKESPEARIAN CONTROVERSY. 17 
 
 imitating the writing of Shakespeare, as far as possible, from 
 the little that is known of it, and seeing how it would look 
 in that writing; thus ^> wn i n might be read either 
 ' haste ' or ' halter,' especially if it were carelessly written, or 
 where the long s has been used by mistake for /, and vice 
 versa. (2.) By writing down the consonants or principal 
 letters* of the doubted word, and guessing what the word 
 ought to be, for at that period words were abbreviated by 
 the omission of many of the vowels, as in prnz, which, being 
 extended, might be read ' prinzie ' or ' princely/ (3). By pro- 
 nouncing the line or phrase rapidly, and catching the sense 
 by the sound, as " I should not have thought it," which, 
 when rapidly and not clearly pronounced, would sound like 
 " I should not of thought it." " 'Tis not alone my inky cloak, 
 good mother," which was misprinted in the edition of 1611, 
 evidently from faulty pronunciation, "'Tis not alone my 
 incky cloake could smother." Again, there are several 
 instances where one word is mistaken for another by being 
 pronounced more broadly, or slenderly, than usual, as in 
 wonder and wander botcher and bwtcher better and bitter 
 pm and pen. 
 
 There is no doubt that a person resorting to any of these 
 methods would frequently be able to correct corrupt read- 
 ings, or at any rate produce clever suggestions. This seems 
 to have been the mode adopted by the " Old Corrector ;" 
 and if he had confined himself to the exposure of sucli 
 errors as he had by such means discovered, he would have 
 been entitled to much praise for his ingenuity. But where 
 he has allowed his unrestrained fancy or his ignorance to 
 prevail, he has committed the most egregious blunders and 
 absurdities. 
 
 * Shorthand may possibly have been employed in writing down from the 
 mouths of the players those plays which were surreptitiously printed Mr. Col- 
 lier cites a passage from Hey wood ("Life of Shakespeare," p. 142) in reference 
 to the errors in plays thus procured and hastily printed, which proves that it 
 was employed on some occasions : 
 
 " that some by stenography drew 
 The plot, put it in prin t scarce one word true." 
 
 But it is not at all probable that the manuscript which was supplied by the 
 author or editor to the printer was ever in shorthand. It was doubtless occa- 
 sionally written with the contractions in common use; as <g for pro, p former, 
 par, por, ^ for ter or tre, p for pre, tf for tis or tes, w* for what, w th for with, 
 y l for that, y e for the, etc, and the compositors in extending such words fre- 
 quently made mistakes. 
 
 B 
 
18 A REVIEW OF THE PRESENT STATE 
 
 On a rough calculation from the data furnished by 
 Mr. Collier, the number of alterations in the Devonshire 
 folio amounts to about 12,000, though he himself says near 
 20,000, which of course must include palpable mis-spellings 
 and instances of incorrect punctuation. Taking the German 
 Professor, Mommsem, for our authority, through the medium 
 of the Edinburgh Review, there are 52 instances in which 
 the initial letter of a word is altered, 7 in which it is added, 
 11 in which it is erased, 34 of initial double consonants 
 altered, 95 of initials altered, together with other letters, 
 266 (if we count rightly) of final letters variously altered, and 
 a proportional number of changes in letters between the first 
 and the last. Mr. Collier has published about 2,700 of these 
 alterations, leaving all others that occur in the folio un- 
 noticed. Of the 2,700 so noticed, about 270 have been 
 made by Malone, Theobald, Johnson, and others ; the 
 remainder being, almost entirely, worthless as blunders, or 
 mere corrections of typographical errors. Judging from 
 those which Mr. Collier has thus published, we are able to 
 form some opinion of the value of those which he has 
 declined to publish. 
 
 3. Errors, the corrections of which have been made by 
 other Commentators. 
 
 A few of these, which have been taken at random from the 
 various plays, will show to what extent his pilferings have 
 been carried on by the " Old Corrector :" 
 
 MEASURE FOR MEASURE. 
 
 Old or received text. " Old Corrector's " text.* 
 
 ACT I. Sc. 5. 
 Sir, make me not your story. Sir, make me not your scorn Davenant. 
 
 ACT II. Sc. 4. 
 Proclaim an en-shield beauty. Proclaim an insheU'd beauty Tyrwhitt. 
 
 ACT V. Sc. 1. 
 Make rash remonstrance. Make rash de monstrance. Malone. 
 
 * The alterations by the "Old Corrector" are printed in Italics: at the end 
 of each line is given the name of the Commentator from -whom the " Old 
 Corrector " is supposed to have borrowed the alteration. 
 
OF THE SHAKESPEARIAN CONTROVERSY. 19 
 
 COMEDY OF ERRORS. 
 
 Old or received tc.vt. " Old Corrector's" te.vt. 
 
 ACT V. Sc. 1. 
 
 The place of depth, and some execution. The place of death () and solemn execu- 
 tion. () Bowe. 
 
 MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. 
 ACT V. Sc. 1. 
 
 A lion fell,'nor else no lion's dam. A lion's fell, nor else no lion's dam. "Baron 
 
 Field. 
 
 AS YOU LIKE IT. 
 
 ACT I. Sc. 1. 
 Bequeathed me by will. He bequeathed me by will. Blackst one. 
 
 ACT I. Sc. 3. 
 
 Some of it for my child's father. Some of it for my father's child. Rowe. 
 
 LOVE'S LABOUR LOST. 
 ACT I. So. 1. 
 
 A dangerous law against gentility. A dangerous law against garrulity. War- 
 
 burton and Theobald. 
 
 ACT III. Sc. 1. 
 
 By my penne of observation, By my paine of observation. Theobald . 
 
 TAMING OF THE SHREW. 
 ACT I. Sc. 1. 
 
 Or so devote to Aristotle's checks. Or so devote to Aristotle's Ethics. Black- 
 
 stone* 
 
 ACT I. Sc. 2. 
 
 My mind presumes, for his own good and My mind presumes, for his own good and 
 yours. ours.* Theobald. 
 
 ACT V. Sc. 2. 
 
 Hath cost me five hundred crowns since Cost me one hundred crowns since supper- 
 supper-time, time. Pope. 
 
 MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR. 
 ACT I, Sc. 3. 
 
 She carves, she gives the leer of invitation , She craves, she gives the leer of invitation . 
 
 Zach. Jackson. 
 
 * This is omitted in the edition of the Notes, Emendations, etc. of 1856. 
 
 B 2 
 
20 A REVIEW OF THE PRESENT STATE 
 
 ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL. 
 
 Old or received text. " Old Corrector's" text. 
 
 ACT II. Sc. 1. 
 
 Where hope is coldest and despair most Where hope is coldest and despair most 
 shifts. fits Theobald. 
 
 ACT II. Sc. 3. 
 
 My honour's at the stake, which to defeat. My honour's at the stake, which to defend. 
 
 Theobald. 
 
 ACT II. Sc. 3. 
 
 To the dark house and the detected wife. To the dark house and the detested wife. 
 
 Rowe. 
 
 ACT III. Sc. 2. 
 
 Fly with false aim ; move the still-peering Fly with false aim ; wound the still- 
 air, piecing ( l ) air. ( l ) Malone. 
 
 ACT IV. Sc. 2. 
 
 I see that men make ropes in such a I see that men make hopes in such a 
 scarre. suit. Howe. 
 
 ACT IV. Sc. 4. 
 
 And time revives us. And time reviles us.Stevens. 
 
 ACT IV. Sc. 5. 
 Faith, Sir, a' has an English maine. Faith, Sir, a' has an English name. Rowe, 
 
 ACT IV. Sc. 5. 
 And, indeed, he has no pace. And, indeed, he has no place. Tyrwhitt. 
 
 ACT V. Sc. 3. 
 Done i' the blade of youth. Done i' the blaze of youth. Theobald. 
 
 ACT V. Sc. 3. 
 
 Her insuit coming, with her modern grace. Her infinit cunning, with her modern 
 
 grace. Sidney Walker. 
 
 TWELFTH NIGHT. 
 
 |~ ACT I. Sc. 1. 
 
 ! it came o'er my ear like the sweet O ! it came o'er my ear like the sweet south. 
 sound. 
 
OF THE SHAKESPEARIAN CONTROVERSY. 2J 
 
 Old or received text. " Old Corrector's" text. 
 
 ACT II. Sc. 5. 
 
 And with what wing the stallion checks And with what wing the falvon* checks at 
 at it. it. 
 
 ACT IV. Sc. 1. 
 
 Adieu, goodinan divel. Adieu, goodman drivel. Farmer and Ste- 
 
 vens. 
 
 KING JOHN. 
 
 ACT II. Sc. 1. 
 
 His own determin'd aid. His own determiu'd aim. Mason. 
 
 ACT III. Sc. 2. 
 
 Some airy devil hovers in the sky. Somojlery devil hovers in the sky. War- 
 
 burton. 
 
 ACT V. Sc. 4. 
 
 Unthread the rude eye of rebellion. Untread the road-way of rebellion. T/wo- 
 
 bald. 
 
 FIRST PART OF HENRY IV. 
 ACT I. Sc. 1. 
 
 A conquest for a prince to boast of. Faith 'tis a conquest for a prince to boast 
 
 of. Pope. 
 
 ACT I. Sc. 3. 
 
 Shall wo buy treason, and indent with Shall we buy treason, and indent with foes? 
 fears? ~-Hanmcr. 
 
 ACT I. Sc. 3. 
 
 I'll steal to Glendowor, and loe Mortimer. I'll steal to Glendower, and lord Mortimer. 
 
 All Editions for upwards of a century, 
 
 Act V. Sc. 2. 
 
 Supposition all our lives. Suspicion all our lives. Pope. 
 
 SECOND PART OF HENRY IV. 
 
 ACT I. Sc. 1. 
 
 The raggcd'st hour. The ruyged'st hour. Theobald. 
 
 ACT IV. Sc. 1. 
 
 Turning your books to graves. Tumingyour books to nlaives.Warburton. 
 
 (Stevens suggested greaves.) 
 
 * This alteration is one of the emendations pointed out by the Edinburgh 
 Reviewer as a proof of the authenticity of the " Old Corrector." Now the 
 word stannyel for stallion -was happily suggested by Hanmer; and the Old Cor- 
 rector for stannyel substitutes falcon, " which means nearly the same thing." 
 
A REVIEW OF THE PRESENT STATE 
 
 Old or received text. " Old Corrector's" text. 
 
 HENRY V. 
 
 ACT II. Sc. 1. 
 
 There shall be smiles. There shall be smites. Farmer. 
 
 ACT II. Sc. 4. 
 
 Whiles that his mountain sire on moun- Whiles that his mighty sire on mountain 
 tain standing. standing. Toilet. 
 
 ACT III. Sc. 3. 
 
 Desire the locks. Defile the locks. Pope. 
 
 FIRST PART OF HENRY VI. 
 
 ACT II. Sc. 4. 
 I scorn thee and thy fashion. I scorn thee and thy faction. Theobald. 
 
 ACT III. Sc. 3. 
 On her lowly babe. On her lovely babe. Warburton. 
 
 ACT V. Sc. 4. 
 
 The hollow passage of my poison'd voice. The hollow passage of my prison* d voice. 
 
 Pope. 
 
 SECOND PART OF HENRY VI. 
 ACT I. Sc. 3. 
 
 She'll gallop far enough. She'll gallop fast enough. Pope. 
 
 ACT in. Sc. 2. 
 
 And to drain upon his face. And to rain upon his face. Stevens. 
 
 ACT IV. Sc. 1. 
 
 The lives of those which we have lost in Can lives of those which we have lost in 
 fight. fight. Stevens. 
 
 ACT V. Sc. 3. 
 
 And all brush of time. And all bruise of time. Warburton. 
 
 THIRD PART OF HENRY VI. 
 ACT I. Sc. 1. 
 
 Hear but one word. Hear me but one word. 3d Folio, Mason ; 
 
 Singer, 1826. 
 
 ACT II. Sc. 2. 
 
 And this soft courage. And this soft carriage. Mason. 
 
 ACT V. Sc. 6. 
 To wit, an indigested deformed lump. To wit, an indigest deformed lump. Malone 
 
OF THE SHAKESPEARIAN CONTROVERSY. 23 
 
 RICHARD III. 
 
 f)ld i,r received text. " Old Corrector's" /.r/. 
 
 ACL V. Sc. 3. 
 To desperate adventures. To desperate ventures. Stevens. 
 
 ACT V. Sc. 3. 
 
 They would restrain the one, distain the They would distrain the one, distain the 
 !'t!xr. other. Wai-burton. 
 
 HENRY VIII. 
 
 ACT I. Sc. 2. 
 
 There is no primer baseness. There is no primer business. U'/ir/jurfmi. 
 
 ACT I. Sc. 2. 
 
 Whom after, under the commission's seal. Whom after, under the confession's seal. 
 
 Tlieobald. 
 
 ACT I. Sc. 2. 
 Things that are known alike. Things that are known, belike. Theobald. 
 
 ACT II. Sc. 3. 
 
 I shall not fail t'approve the fair conceit. I shall not fail ('improve the fair conceit. 
 
 Knight. 
 
 ACT V. Sc. 1. 
 
 The good I stand on is my truth and The ground 1 stand on is my truth and 
 honesty. honesty. Johnson. 
 
 ACT. V. Sc. 2. 
 
 In our own natures frail and capable. In our own natures frail and culpable. 
 
 Theobald; Mason. 
 
 TROILUS AND CRESSIDA. 
 
 ACT I. Sc. 1. 
 So traitor, then she comes ! So traitor, when she comes ! Howe. 
 
 ACT I. Sc. 1. 
 As when the sun doth light a scorn. As when the sun doth light a storm. Rowc. 
 
 ACT I. Sc. 2. 
 
 Achievement is command. Achiev'd men( l ) still(' 2 ) command. (^Har- 
 
 ness ; ( 2 ) Collier's own emendation in a 
 previous edition of Shakespeare. 
 
 ACT. I. Sc. 3. 
 
 Retires to chiding fortune. Replies to chiding fortune. Ifanmer. 
 
 ACT II. Sc.3. 
 
 His pettish lines, his ebbs, his flows. His pettish Junes, his ebbs, his flows. 
 
 Hanmer. 
 
 ACT III. Sc. 3. 
 
 Keeps place with thought. Keeps pace with thought. llaumer. 
 
24 A REVIEW OF THE PRESENT STATE 
 
 CORIOLANUS. 
 
 Old or received text. " Old Corrector's" text. 
 
 ACT II. Sc. 1. 
 
 His soaring insolence shall teach the His soaring insolence shaMtoucJi the people . 
 people. Knight. 
 
 ACT II. Sc. 3. 
 
 See Singer's remark in " The text of Shakespeare Vindicated," p. 216, about the " Old 
 Corrector" and Pope's line respecting Censorinus. 
 
 ACT IV. Sc. 3. 
 
 But your favour is well appear'd by your But your favour is well approved by your 
 tongue. tongue. Stevens. 
 
 ACT IV. Sc. 4. 
 
 My birth place have I. My birth place hate I. Stevens. 
 
 ROMEO AND JULIET. 
 
 ACT II. Sc. 2. 
 
 Lady, by yonder moon I vow. Lady, by yonder blessed 0) moon I swear () . 
 
 ( J ) wanting only in the 1st Folio. ( 2 ) in 
 the 4to. of 1597. 
 
 ACT HI. Sc. 5. 
 
 Tis but the pale reflex of Cynthia's brow. 'Tis but the pale reflex of Cynthia's bow. 
 
 Singer. 
 
 TIMON OF ATHENS. 
 ACT I. Sc. I. 
 
 Our poesy is a gown which uses. Our poesy is a gum which issues. Pope. 
 
 ACT IV. Sc. 3. 
 
 It is the pastor lords the brother's sides. It is the pasture lards the rotter's sides. 
 
 Singer. 
 
 ACT V. Sc. 2. 
 
 To stop afflction, let him take his haste. To stop affliction, let him take his halter* 
 
 
 
 * This example does not properly come under this head, but we have drawn 
 attention to it because the Edinburgh Reviewer selects this alteration as proof 
 of the genuineness of the emendations of the " Old Corrector," and remarks 
 that " let him take his haste " is sheer nonsense, and yet it is so near sense that 
 every Editor has passed it by without remark, as not worth touching. The 
 Corrector reads it "take his halter," and the Reviewer asks, "Why should a 
 forger have gone out of his way to meddle with a text which no man had 
 disturbed before ? " It is not necessary to point out the illogical inference 
 drawn by the Reviewer, but the error, it should be remarked, does not lie in 
 haste but in take. " Let him make his haste " is very good sense ; but the " Old 
 Corrector," not understanding the passage, thought the error was in haste, and 
 
 brought back the word to the writing of the sixteenth century ; thus, jg> , which 
 he thought would read either " halter" or " haste" and then " boldly" (we use 
 the Reviewer's own word) amends the text, and substitutes halter for haste. 
 
OF THE SHAKESPEARIAN CONTROVERSY. 25 
 
 Old or received text. " Old Corrector's" text. 
 
 ACT V. Sc. 4. 
 
 Some beast read this ; there docs not live Some beast rear'd this ; there does not live 
 a man. a man. Warburton. Seo Staunton's 
 
 restoration of this passage. 
 
 MACBETH. 
 ACT I. Sc. 4. 
 
 The swiftest f ?/ hr^ I ( of recompense The swiftest wind of recorn pence is slow, 
 is slow. * Pope. 
 
 Here are upwards of 70 emendations taken from 23 plays 
 at hazard, in which the " Old Corrector " has anticipated the 
 conjectures of Tyrwhitt, Rowe, Baron Field, Blackstone, 
 Davenant, Knight, Singer, Theobald, Malone, Stevens, Sid- 
 ney Walker, Pope, Hanmer, Jackson, Capell, Farmer, Mason, 
 Warburton, Toilet, Johnson, and even Mr. Collier himself! 
 
 Upon the value of these emendations there is no necessity 
 for comment * (beyond observing that many of the rejected 
 readings of Malone and Hanmer have been adopted by the 
 annotator of the Devonshire folio), because a question of far 
 more importance to the present inquiry will occur to the 
 reader. How came the " Old Corrector " to anticipate the 
 conjectures of minds so various as these ? Asmodeus, in 
 Le Sage's story, sees, though certainly through brick walls, 
 the deeds of existing men ; but the te Old Corrector " per- 
 forms a feat far more astonishing he sees at a glance, and 
 in embryo, all these, both probable and improbable, conjec- 
 tures, which shall enter the fertile brains of Shakespearian 
 critics and correctors, a century or more before those brains 
 are yet in existence. 
 
 It might be said, and it cannot be denied, that, amid the 
 thousands of suggestions made by Shakespearian critics of 
 the last century and a half for amendment of the text, the 
 probabilities are, in many instances, owing to a happy sur- 
 mise, the correct reading would be restored, such readings, 
 in fact, as might have been within the personal know- 
 ledge of a scholar living in 1652; but if there are many 
 instances in which the Old Corrector agrees with the sug- 
 gesters of these happy emendations, the instances unfor- 
 tunately are tenfold more numerous where he agrees with 
 
 * Perhaps the best test of the value of these emendations is the number of 
 them which have been adopted by the last two Editors of JShakespeare, Messrs. 
 Dyce and Staunton. 
 
26 A REVIEW OF THE PRESENT STATE 
 
 none of them, and where his alterations are not tenable for 
 a moment. The only conclusion, then, that we can arrive 
 at is, that for nearly all his emendations of the slightest 
 value, this " Old Corrector " has been indebted, not to his 
 personal acquaintance with the early actors of Shakespeare's 
 plays, but to the whole body of Shakespearian critics since 
 the time of Queen Anne ; and that for the rest of his cor- 
 rections, which from their utter worthlessness are self- 
 condemned, he has been indebted, not to the early actors 
 of Shakespeare's plays, but, as already suggested, to his own 
 misdirected fancy. Mr. Collier (" Notes and Emendations? 
 p. xxi.,) asks " was he (the " Old Corrector ") indebted to 
 his own sagacity and ingenuity, and did he merely guess at 
 arbitrary emendations ? I am inclined to think that the last 
 must have been the fact as regards some of the changes." 
 With this opinion we readily concur ; only instead of some 
 changes, we should suggest^ most of the changes. 
 
 4. Errors that are corrected for the first time in the 
 Devonshire Folio. 
 
 The number of these emendations, as printed by Mr. Col- 
 lier in his last Edition of them, amounts as already 
 mentioned to about 2,400, which the Edinburgh Reviewer 
 states is not one-fourth of all these readings. In " Hamlet " 
 there are 463 MS. alterations in the Devonshire folio ; 
 though Mr. Collier has noticed only 126 of them. The whole 
 of them may be seen, however, in Mr. Hamilton's "Inquiry, 
 &c." pp. 34-54. Now of some 2,000 guesses, it would be 
 strange indeed if some few were not to the purpose. The 
 dullest commentator that ever lived must have had a surpris- 
 ing faculty for perverseness if he could not sometimes blunder 
 into the right reading, after so many years' practice as this 
 unknown commentator must have enjoyed, and such con- 
 tinuous toil. 
 
 Dr. Delius, the well-known German Shakespearian critic, 
 says Mr. R. Grant White,* after a careful consideration and 
 examination of the Notes and Emendations printed by 
 Mr. Collier, admits only 17 new readings as corrections 
 worthy of adoption. Mr. Grant White likewise informs 
 us, from the data supplied to him by Mr. Collier's "Notes 
 and Emendations" that the "Old Corrector" has made 
 
 * Shakespeare's Scholar (1854), p. 75. 
 
OF THE SHAKESPEARIAN CONTROVERSY. 27 
 
 thirteen hundred and three modifications of the text of the 
 second folio. Of these thirteen hundred and three, at least 
 two hundred and forty-nine are old ; that is, either restora- 
 tions of the text of the original folio, adoptions of readings 
 from the old quartos, or identical with the conjectural emen- 
 dations of editors and commentators during the last hundred 
 and fifty years. Of these 249 old readings, 29 have long 
 ago been rejected by common consent, as unworthy of the 
 least attention ; 47 have been rejected from the text, but 
 are allowed to have a certain plausibility ; and 173 are found 
 in the received text.* Mr. White further states that 
 Mr. Collier's emendations from the Devonshire folio contain 
 1,013 inadmissible alterations ; a total which would have 
 been wonderfully increased had he counted the numbers 
 in the folio itself. This, however, is no fault on the part 
 of Mr. White ; he could only take his data from Mr. Collier's 
 publications. 
 
 But what would twenty, or thirty, or even fifty, ingenious 
 guesses be worth in determining the question of the authen- 
 ticity of the " Old Corrector's " copy, if the remainder 
 exhibited absurdities and misapprehensions of Shakespeare's 
 meaning, as well as tawdry sentiments unworthy of the 
 pen of Shakespeare's humbler contemporaries even ? 
 
 To make this plain, it will be necessary to place before 
 the reader some of the emendations which Mr. Collier has 
 printed, in which it is clear that the " Old Corrector " has 
 exhibited his utter incapacity to appreciate the poetic genius 
 of the man whose works he undertook to amend, and that 
 he must have gone into the highways and byeways to 
 collect his materials, taking them indiscriminately as he found 
 them. He cared not for quality; quantity was evidently 
 his great object. 
 
 In addition to the many other liberties which the " Old 
 Corrector" has taken with Shakespeare's works, he has 
 presumed to add entire lines, and to alter the ends of others 
 over and over again for the mere purpose of supplying a tag 
 or rhyme, in the worst possible taste, and wholly destroying 
 the sense of the passage which he professes to improve. These 
 
 Shakespeare's Schclar (1854), p. 67. 
 
28 A REVIEW OF THE PRESENT STATE 
 
 are neither amendments nor corrections of existing errors ; 
 they supply no deficiency, but are mere useless additions, 
 In fact, he has done that which was never intended to be 
 done ; he has washed pure gold with a lackering of brass. 
 
 It 'can hardly be denied, we should think, that a man's ear 
 must have been greatly corrupted by dabbling in doggrel 
 imitations of the ballad literature of the sixteenth and seven- 
 teenth centuries before he could venture to insert such lines* 
 as these, for no apparent purpose beyond the gratification of 
 a morbid taste for jingling rhymes : 
 
 " Inspire me that I it ay this treason finde, 
 My lord, looke heere, looke heere Lavinia." 
 
 Altered to 
 
 " Inspire me that this treason finde I may, 
 My lord, looke heere, looke heere Lavinia." 
 
 " And madam, if my uncle Marcus goe, 
 
 I will most willingly attend your ladyship." 
 
 Altered to 
 
 " And madam, if my uncle Marcus goe, 
 1 will most willingly attend you so." 
 
 " May run into that sinke, and soaking in, 
 Drowne the lamenting foole in sea-salt-teares." 
 
 Altered to 
 
 " May run into that sinke, and soaking in, 
 Drowne the lamenting foole in sea-salt-brine" 
 
 " No funerall Rite, nor man in mournfull weeds; 
 No mournfull Bell shall ring her Buriall." 
 
 Altered to 
 
 " No funerall Rite, nor man in mournfull pall ; 
 No mournfull Bell shall ring her Buriall." 
 
 " For two and twenty sonnes I never wept, 
 Because they died in honours lofty bed." 
 Altered to 
 
 " For two and twenty sonnes I never wept, 
 Because in honours lofty bed they slept" 
 
 " And keep eternall spring-time on thy face, 
 
 So thou refuse to drinke my deare sonnes blood." 
 
 Altered to 
 
 " And keep eternal! spring-time in the flood, 
 
 So thou refuse to drinke my deare sonnes blood." 
 
 * The Devonshire folio abounds in alterations of this description. With 
 the exception of two (the last quoted in the next page), the instances here 
 given have not been inserted by Mr. Collier in any of his editions. Nothing 
 would so well show the utter worthlessness of these alterations as by printing 
 all those which Mr. Collier has omitted. 
 
OF THE SHAKESPEARIAN CONTROVERSY. 29 
 
 " Oh, be to me, though thy hard heart say no, 
 Nothing so kind, but something pittiful." 
 
 Altered to' 
 
 " Oh, be to me, though thy hard heart say no, 
 Nothing so kind, but still some pity show"* 
 
 " That hath expres't himselfe in all his deeds, 
 A Father and a friend to thee and Rome." 
 
 Altered to 
 
 " That hath expres't himselfe abroad at Iwmc, 
 A Father and a friend to thee and Rome." 
 
 Queen." I see no reason, why a king of yeares 
 Should be to be protected like a child ; 
 God and King Henry .governe England's Rcalme : 
 Give up your statte, Sir, and the King his Real me. 
 Gloat. My static ? Here, noble Henry, is my stafTe, 
 As willingly doe I the same resigne." 
 
 Altered to 
 
 Queen. " I see no reason, why a king of yeeres 
 
 Should be to be protected like a child ; by peeres. 
 God and King Henry governe England's helm, 
 Give up your staffe, Sir, and the King his Realme. 
 Glost.My staife? Here, noble Henry, is my staffe, 
 
 To think I fain would keep it makes me laugh, 
 As willingly doe I the same resigne." 
 
 " "While I remaine behind to tell a tale, 
 That shall hereafter turne the hearers pale."t 
 
 " Fight for your King, your Country, and your Lives ; 
 And so farewell, for 1 must hence again." 
 
 Altered to 
 
 " Fight for your King, your Country, and your Lives ' 
 And so farewell : rebellion never thrives."^. 
 
 Instances in which the " Old Corrector " has entirely 
 misunderstood the sense : 
 
 In As You Like It/' Act IV. Sc. 1. : 
 
 Orland. " "Who could be out, being before his beloved mistress ? 
 RosaL Marry, that should you, if I were your mistress, or I should think 
 my honesty ranker than my wit." 
 
 Rosalind's speech has been altered by the " Old Corrector " 
 thus 
 
 " Marry, that should you, if I were your mistress, or I should 
 thank my honesty rather than my wit." 
 
 What Shakespeare meant is clearly expressed. The " Old 
 Corrector " by his amendment makes it sheer nonsense. 
 For what should Rosalind thank her honesty ? 
 
 * So altered, but afterwards struck out. 
 
 f These two lines are additions; but they are not published by Mr. Collier. 
 $The reader will remember the verse from which this " tag" was evidently 
 derived : 
 
 " Treason can never prosper for this reason : 
 
 That if it prospers, none dare call it treason." 
 
30 A REVIEW OF THE PRESENT STATE 
 
 In "Henry the "Fifth," Act IT. Sc. 3., the Hostess, de- 
 scribing the death of Falstaff, says 
 
 " 'A parted eve'n just between twelve and one, e'en at the turning o' the tido ; for after 
 I saw him fumble with the sheets, and play with flowers, and smile Upon his finger's 
 ends, I knew there was but one way ; for his nose was as sharp as a pen,* and 'a babbled t 
 ofgreenfields" 
 
 But the u Old Corrector " gives the passage in italics, thus 
 
 " For his nose was as sharp as a pen on a table of green frieze" 
 
 There is something exquisitely touching, as well as truth- 
 ful, in Shakespeare's description of the dying old man, whose 
 thoughts reverted to the innocence of his childhood, and to 
 its "green fields;" and it is almost lamentable to think how 
 the passage has thus been misunderstood and vulgarized 
 by the " Old Corrector," who must have sadly taxed his 
 ingenuity for the purpose of distorting the poet's meaning. 
 
 In "Henry the Fifth," Act IV. Sc. 1., Henry speaks of 
 
 _ the wretched slave, 
 
 Who, with a body fill'd, and vacant mind, 
 
 Gets him to rest, cramm'd with distressful bread." 
 
 The " Old Corrector " amends the third line thus 
 
 " Gets him to rest, cramm'd with distasteful bread." 
 
 Thus robbing the figure of its poetical drapery, and 
 dressing it in a patchwork robe. Shakespeare's image is 
 touching and beautiful. We can picture the poor slave 
 eating the bread of sorrow distressful to his spirit not as 
 the " Old Corrector " suggests, distasteful to his stomach. 
 
 In " Cymbeline," Act III. Sc. 2., Imogen, eager to meet 
 Posthumus, calls for horses, and when Pisanio submits that they 
 can go no farther than twenty miles a day, she exclaims 
 
 " * ' ' ' I have heard of riding-wagers, 
 Where horses have been nimbler than the sands 
 That run 'i the clock's behalf." 
 
 This simile is perfect meaning that the horses are 
 nimbler than the sands that run in the hour-glass sub- 
 stituted for a clock. The " Old Corrector " makes Imogen 
 speak thus ' 
 
 " . . . . Nimbler than the sands, 
 That run 'i the clocks, by half." 
 
 * This is probably a misprint for pin. 
 
 fin the folio editions of Shakespeare, the above final words are incorrectly 
 printed, " and a table of green fields," which Theobald most happily restored 
 as given above. 
 
OF THE SHAKESPEARIAN CONTROVERSY. 31 
 
 An emendation that is ridiculous. In addition to misappre- 
 hending Shakespeare, the " Old Corrector " has made an 
 egregious blunder, by making the sands a portion of the 
 works of a clock ; the horses are nimbler by half than the 
 sands that run in a clock ! I 
 
 In " The Tempest/' Act I. So. 2., Prospero says 
 
 "One, 
 
 Who having, unto truth, by tolling of it, 
 Made such a sinner of his memory. 
 To credit his o\vn lit'." 
 
 The text of this passage is certainly obscure ; but the " Old 
 Corrector" has made it no less so. lie gives it thus :- 
 
 "One, 
 
 Who having to untruth, by telling of it, 
 Made such a sinner of his mcmoi'v, 
 To credit his own lie." 
 
 There is something eminently absurd in the following 
 alteration. In the Induction of " The Taming of the Shrew," 
 Sc. 2. Christopher Sly says, " If she say I am not fourteen 
 pence on the score for sheer ale, score me up for the lyingest 
 knave in Christendom." 
 
 The meaning is clear enough, and yet the " Old Corrector/' 
 out of sheer wantonness, one might almost think, alters the 
 passage thus : " If she say I am not fourteen pence on the 
 score for Warwickshire ale, score me up, etc." And Mr. Col- 
 lier gives someequally baseless justification of the alteration ; 
 whereas " sheer " here signifies nothing more or less than 
 pure or unmixed (equivalent to the Latin merus), an expres- 
 sion still in common use. Johnson even selects his example 
 of the use of this word from the drunken Tinker's speech ; 
 but the " Old Corrector/' perhaps, wished to improve on 
 what M alone had suggested on the subject, who thought that 
 it meant shearing or reaping ale. 
 
 * We would, however, suggest the following reading 
 
 " One, 
 
 Who adding unto truth by telling of it, 
 Made such a sinner of his memory, 
 To credit his own lie." 
 
 That is, he had exaggerated truth so often, that at last he believed his own 
 exaggeration. 
 
32 A REVIEW OF THE PRESENT STATE 
 
 A few words are called for in reference to the numerous 
 passages which are struck out in the Devonshire folio. The 
 principal purpose of these mutilations seems to have been to 
 shorten the Scenes, for they occur in the plays that were 
 most frequently performed. Some few passages, however, 
 may have been struck out because the audience did not 
 understand them, and some, though not many, as Mr. Collier 
 suggests, on account of their indecency. It has been asked, 
 if these corrections are really forged, what motive could any" 
 modern forger have in eliminating a number of magnificent 
 passages from the folio ? Would he have ventured to incur 
 the odium of such imprudence ? So far, however, from there 
 being any intrinsic value in this suggestion, the friends of 
 the folio have far from mended their case by inviting atten- 
 tion to the fact ; one in itself most strange and most unac- 
 countable, on the supposition of the genuineness of the 
 corrections in the folio. 
 
 There are throughout the book a number of the finest 
 passages scored out, as is common in prompters' copies. (A 
 copy of the same edition in fact is now lying open before 
 us, in which some of the most poetical passages are similarly 
 struck out.) It is assumed that these elisions in the Devon- 
 shire folio must have been made by the " Old Corrector," in 
 conformity with some original from which he derived his 
 emendations. Now the overwhelming probability seems to 
 be, that the passages in question were not struck out by the 
 person who wrote the Notes and Emendations, but were 
 expunged at a much earlier period, and that solely for thea- 
 trical, and not critical, purposes ; the ink in which the cor- 
 rections are 'made being evidently different from that in 
 which these deletions or elisions occur. This fact too seems 
 the more clear, as these scored passages are accompanied by 
 exactly the same sort of amended readings in the margin as 
 the rest of the book. If they were scored out by the " Old 
 Corrector " with the view of being omitted, how came they, 
 equally with the unscored passages, to exhibit these various 
 readings ? 
 
 A word or two also on the punctuation and stage direc- 
 tions which have been added throughout the Devonshire 
 volume ; a point of some importance, although little at- 
 tention seems to have been directed to it throughout this 
 controversy. On this subject Mr. Collier writes : " The 
 
OF THE SHAKESPEARIAN CONTROVERSY. S3 
 
 changes in punctuation alone,, always made with nicety and 
 patience, must have required a long period, considering their 
 number ; the other alterations, sometimes most minute, ex- 
 tending even to turned letters and typographical trifles of 
 that kind, from their very nature could not have been intro- 
 duced with rapidity/' 
 
 Now it is 1 greatly to be doubted whether Mr. Collier, 
 with all his experience in such matters, can show any 
 other instance, in dramas of the first half of the seven- 
 teenth century, either manuscript or printed, where such 
 minutiae are to be found. Every one must know, who has 
 given the slightest attention to the subject, that the punc- 
 tuation introduced into this folio is not the punctuation of 
 the seventeenth century, nor even of the eighteenth. It 
 is too elaborate to be genuine. Indeed, it may be doubted 
 whether an editor, in preparing an edition for press in 
 the present century, could have been more exact. The 
 volume has all the appearance in fact of having been 
 actually punctuated for press ;* and, singular to say, 
 minute as this punctuation is, and savouring so strongly 
 of the present century, it unquestionably was inserted 
 in pencil before it was written in ink, as in many instances 
 it underlies the ink. 
 
 In reference also to the stage directions, they are 
 much too abundant to be genuine. In fact, Mr. Collier 
 has remarked that the written additions of this kind seem 
 even more frequent and more explicit than might be 
 thought necessary. It may be observed, that many of 
 the stage directions prove that the corrections were not 
 made at the time to which they professedly belong; for 
 painted or moveable scenery (especially of such a character 
 as trees into which a person might climb) was not in use 
 
 * No one, we feel persuaded, who has carefully examined the volume, can 
 come to any other conclusion than that this folio was corrected with the full 
 intention of printing it ; why that intention was abandoned, it is not for us to 
 surmise. In this respect, we perfectly agree with the writer in the JMiii- 
 burgh Review, who states, that " not only are words and sentences altered, 
 lines added, omitted, or transposed, but the orthography and punctuation are 
 set right with the minutest and mpst fastidious care." 
 
 C 
 
34 A REVIEW OF THE PRESENT STATE 
 
 at that period,* When, therefore, we find in " Love's 
 Labours Lost/' Act IV. Sc. 3., where the original direction 
 " He stands aside " is obliterated, and " He gets him in a 
 tree " is written in its place in manuscript ; when, too, Biron 
 interposes some remark to himself, and it is added, l( He 
 is in the tree" and when upon his descending to detect 
 his companions " Come down' is inscribed in the margin, 
 these alterations are more than suspicious; indeed, they 
 are fatal to the antiquity of the directions. A similar re- 
 mark applies also to the alteration in " Much Ado About 
 Nothing," Act II. Sc. 3., where Benedick says " I will hide 
 me in the arbour," the " Old Corrector " having added, 
 e ( Retires behind the trees." In some instances the printed stage 
 directions have been obliterated ; in others, again, the stage 
 instructions of undoubtedly a succeeding century have been 
 anticipated. No one knows better than Mr. Collier that 
 there is a dearth of them in all early printed dramas, and he 
 admits that in the old printed copies there is but one note 
 of aside in the whole of Shakespeare's thirty-six plays. 
 Surely, then, these facts must afford some ground at least 
 for the suspicion that these additions were not inserted until 
 long after the time at which the emendations are alleged to 
 have been made. 
 
 So far, too, from it being probable that any person at all 
 conversant with the usages of the stage would commit to 
 paper minutiae of this description, it is the fact that many 
 of the stage directions are traditional, and handed down 
 
 * Painted scenery was not in use at public theatres until after the Restora- 
 tion, though it was undoubtedly introduced into Masques at Court and a few 
 private exhibitions at an earlier period. The advocates for the genuineness of 
 the Notes and Emendations in the Devonshire folio may possibly contend 
 that these stage-directions were inserted after the Restoration. This position, 
 however, is not tenable, as the writing in which they occur is a hand profes- 
 sedly of earlier date. Indeed, Mr. Collier himself evidently admits that they 
 are of earlier date, for he says that " these stage -directions are of the highest 
 importance in illustrating the wonderful judgment and skill of Shakespeare 
 in conducting the business of the scenes ;" implying that they must have 
 come immediately from Shakespeare himself. Also, in his affidavit of the 
 8th January 1856, he says that he has not inserted a single word, stop, sign, 
 note, correction, alteration, or emendation, which is not a faithful copy of the 
 original manuscript, and which he believes to have been written not long after 
 lite publication of the folio copy of the year 1632. The reader who is interested 
 in this portion of the history of our Drama may consult "An Historical 
 Account of the English Stage," vol. iii., pp. 79-109 in the Variorum edition 
 of Shakespeare, 1813 ; as also the Historia Histrionica by Wright, published 
 in 1699; and Collier's Annals of the Stage, vol. iii., p. 3G5, ct seq. 
 
OF THE SHAKESPEARIAN CONTROVERSY. 35 
 
 from actor to actor"; consequently, there would be no need 
 either to print or to write them for the information of 
 persons who would as a matter of course learn their 
 bye-play from the oral communications of their stage- 
 managers, who, in their turn, learned them in a similar 
 manner from their predecessors belonging to the theatre. 
 
 Another suspicious circumstance in connexion with these 
 emendations is the liberty taken by the " Old Corrector " in 
 modernizing words. He has not stopped, as the Edinburgh 
 Reviewer remarks, at his own supposed day, but has abso- 
 lutely brought his modernizings down to the present century. 
 
 At the close of this branch of the inquiry, it may be not 
 irrelevant to remark that whatever else may have been ac- 
 complished by the researches of the non-believers in the 
 Notes and Emendations of the Devonshire folio, this at least 
 has been done : they have been the means of bringing for- 
 ward evidence utterly destructive of the authority of the 
 " Old Corrector." Even the most ardent supporters of the 
 " Old Corrector " must now hesitate before they accept his 
 emendations as valid authority per se of any reading ; and 
 that, after all, is the more important branch of the question. 
 Who the interpolator may have been is a matter of com- 
 parative indifference. 
 
 IV. What is the history of the folio in which these notes 
 and emendations are found? 
 
 At the risk of seeming tedious, it will be necessary to 
 recapitulate under this head many details with which most 
 readers of these pages will in all probability be familial-. 
 Viewed as a matter of feeling, the Edinburgh Reviewer is 
 fully justified, no doubt, in his remark that the subject is a 
 painful one to approach ; but justice alike to the impugners 
 of the Devonshire folio and to Mr. Collier himself demands 
 that it should not be passed over in silence. 
 
 As already stated, from the very moment that Mr. Collier 
 gave to the world a sample of the Notes and Emendations 
 in his folio, grave doubts were entertained of their genuine- 
 ness ; and no long period elapsed before he was assailed on 
 all sides by Shakespearian critics,who asserted that an attempt 
 had been made upon their credulity, notwithstanding the 
 
 c 2 
 
36 A REVIEW OF THE PRESENT STATE 
 
 statement given in his Preface relative to the volume. Hav- 
 ing, however, been more directly attacked in an anonymous 
 pamphlet, entitled " Literary Cookery/' Mr. Collier thought 
 it necessary to make an affidavit on the subject in the 
 Court of Queen's Bench, in which he swore to the truth 
 of the facts stated in his Preface, and made some further 
 disclosures respecting the history of his obtaining possession 
 of the volume in question. 
 
 As some new materials have been recently imported into 
 this part of the case, which are at variance with Mr. Collier's 
 statement, it will be necessary to give his own version of 
 the story ;* which is as follows : 
 
 " In the history of the volume to which I have been thus 
 indebted, I can offer little that may serve to give it 
 authenticity. It is very certain that the manuscript notes 
 in its margins were made before it was subjected to all the 
 ill-usage it experienced. When it first came into my hands, 
 and indeed for some time afterwards, I imagined that the 
 binding was the original rough calf in which many books of 
 about the same date were clothed ; but more recent ex- 
 amination has convinced me, that this was at least the 
 second coat it had worn. It is, nevertheless, in a very 
 shabby condition, quite consistent with the state of the 
 interior, where, besides the loss of some leaves, as already 
 mentioned, and the loosening of others, many stains of wine, 
 beer, and other liquids are observable ; here and there holes 
 have been burned in the paper, either by the falling of the 
 lighted snuff of a candle, or by the ashes of tobacco. In 
 several places it is torn and disfigured by blots and dirt, and 
 every margin bears evidence to frequent and careless 
 perusal. In short, to a choice collector, no book could 
 well present a more forbidding appearance. 
 
 11 1 was tempted only by its cheapness to buy it, under the 
 following circumstances : In the spring of 1849 I hap- 
 pened to be in the shop of the late Mr. Eodd, of Great 
 Newport Street, at the time when a package of books 
 arrived from the country ; my impression is that they 
 came from Bedfordshire ; but I am not at all certain upon 
 
 * Notes and Ejnendutions (1852) Introduction, p, v. 
 
OF THE SHAKESPEARIAN CONTROVERSY. 37 
 
 a point which I looked upon as a matter of no importance. 
 He opened the parcel in my presence, as he had often 
 done before in the course of my thirty or forty years' 
 acquaintance with him ; and, looking at the backs and 
 title pages of several volumes, I saw that they were 
 chiefly works of little interest to me. Two folios, however, 
 attracted my attention ; one of them gilt on the sides, 
 and the other in rough calf. The first was an excellent 
 copy of Florio's "New World of Words," 1611, with 
 the name of Henry Osborn (whom I mistook at the moment 
 for his celebrated namesake, Francis,) upon the first leaf; 
 and the other a copy of the second folio of Shakespeare's 
 Plays, much cropped, the covers old and greasy, and as I 
 saw at a glance on opening them, imperfect at the beginning 
 and end. Concluding hastily that the latter would complete 
 another poor copy of the second folio, which I had bought 
 of the same bookseller, and which I had for some years in 
 my possession, and wanting the former for my use, I bought 
 them both, the Florio for twelve, and the Shakespeare for 
 thirty shillings/' 
 
 Mr. Collier goes on to state, (t As it turned out, I at 
 first repented of my bargain as regarded the Shakespeare, 
 because, when I took it home it appeared that two leaves 
 which I wanted were unfit for my purpose, not merely by 
 being too short, but damaged and defaced ; thus disappointed 
 I threw it by, and did not see it again until I made a selec- 
 tion of books I would take with me on quitting London. 
 In the mean time, finding that I could not readily remedy 
 the deficiencies in my other copy of the folio 1632, 1 had 
 parted with it ; and when I removed into the country with 
 my family in the spring of 1850, in order that I might not 
 be without some copy of the second folio, for the purpose 
 of reference, I took with me that which is the foundation 
 of the present work. 
 
 " It was while putting my books together for removal, 
 that I first observed some marks in the margin of this folio ; 
 but it was subsequently placed upon an upper shelf, and I 
 did not take it down until I had occasion to consult it." 
 
 fi It then struck me that Thomas Perkins, wlio.se name, 
 with the addition " his book," was upon the cover, might 
 be the old actor, who had performed in Marlowe's " Jew of 
 
38 A REVIEW OF THE PRESENT STATE 
 
 Malta," on its revival shortly before 1633. At this time 
 I fancied that the binding was of about that date, and that the 
 volume might have been his ; but in the first place I found 
 that his name was Richard Perkins, and in the next I 
 became satisfied that the rough calf was not the original 
 binding. Still, Thomas Perkins might have been a descen- 
 dant of Richard ; and this circumstance, and others, induced 
 me to examine the volume more particularly. I then 
 discovered, to my surprise, that there was hardly a page 
 which did not present, in a handwriting of the time, some 
 emendation in the pointing or in the text, while on most of 
 them they were frequent and on many numerous." 
 
 Further examination led to more important discoveries. 
 " Of course I now submitted the folio to a most careful 
 scrutiny; and as it occupied a considerable time to com- 
 plete the inspection, how much more must it have consumed 
 to make the alterations? The ink was of various shades, 
 differing sometimes on the same page, and I was once 
 disposed to think that two distinct hands had been employed 
 upon them. This notion I have since abandoned; and I 
 am now decidedly of opinion that the same writing prevails 
 from beginning to end, but that the amendments must 
 have been introduced from time to time, during perhaps 
 the course of several years. The changes in punctuation 
 alone, always made with nicety and patience, must have 
 required a long period, considering their number; the 
 other alterations, sometimes most minute, extending even to 
 turned letters, and typographical trifles of that kind, from 
 their very nature could not have been introduced with 
 rapidity, while many of the errata must have severely tasked 
 the industry of the Old Corrector." 
 
 Such is Mr. Collier's statement in the year 1852, when 
 he first printed some of these emendations in an 8vo. 
 volume, before any suspicions had been raised as to their 
 genuineness. 
 
 The statement thus put forth at leisure eight years ago, 
 Avhen the circumstances were more recent in his memory, 
 was repeated by him in the following year, when he brought 
 out a second edition ; but, with an extraordinary reticence 
 and inconceivable self-restraint, for which there is no 
 satisfactory or assignable motive, instead of publishing these 
 
OF THE SHAKESPEARIAN CONTROVERSY. 39 
 
 corrections at once, he dribbled them out piecemeal ; first 
 in the volume of 1852, "containing some, but not all 
 the said MS. Emendations, &c. ;'* then in a second edition 
 of the volume, which was published in 1853; and next in 
 a one-volume Shakespeare,* published also in 1853, where 
 such of them were given as " did not seem to require 
 distinct and separate mention among the Notes and Emenda- 
 tions recently published." A professedly Complete List 
 appeared only in 1856, at the end of Mr. Collier's edition 
 of Coleridge's Seven Lectures on Sliakespeare and Milton ; and 
 now it is in evidence that this professedly Complete List 
 does not comprise one half of the manuscript emendations 
 that exist in this folio ; while, on the other hand, many that 
 had appeared in the above-mentioned publications of 1852 
 and 1853, are not to be found in the List of 1856.t 
 
 Now such a mode of proceeding as this, really seems 
 irreconcileable with the ordinary motives which actuate 
 mankind ; indeed, the writer in the Edinburgh Review him- 
 self, favourable as he is to Mr. Collier and the claims of the 
 folio, cannot disguise his annoyance, when speaking of it. 
 
 " In possession of the mysterious volume," says the 
 Reviewer, " Mr. Collier proceeded, however, to deal with it 
 in so strangely inconsistent and inadequate a manner as to 
 rouse, not unnaturally, the suspicions of his many ill-wishers. 
 True to the instinct of his former literary career, always 
 fumbling with the text of Shakespeare, advancing new conjec- 
 tures and new discoveries by piecemeal, and never taking 
 counsel of time and silence to ripen his own convictions, 
 he first brought out, in 1853, his volume called ' Notes 
 and Emendations from early MS. Corrections,' but which 
 comprised a great deal of conjectural matter besides these 
 corrections, and gave only fragments of the corrections them- 
 selves. Then followed his one volume edition of Shakespeare, 
 professing to incorporate the corrections, but really incor- 
 porating only some of them, and without the slightest 
 attempt to enable the reader to find out where the correc- 
 tions are ; respecting which, we are half inclined to echo the 
 sentiments of the infuriated Mr. Grant White : ' With all 
 
 * The Platjs of Shakespeare-, the text regulated by the Old Copies, 
 the recently discovered Folio of 1632, containing early MS. emendations 
 
 and by 
 
 Folio of 1632, containing early MS. eraendatioi 
 f See Note, page 40. 
 
40 A REVIEW OF THE PRESENT STATE 
 
 respect clue from me to a gentleman, who was a man when 
 my father was a boy, I must say that the publication of that 
 volume was a crime against the republic of letters.' And, 
 lastly , to omit other intermediate fidgettings with the subject, 
 he published in 1856 his ( Seven Lectures on Shakespeare 
 and Milton ' (a compilation from alleged original Notes, in 
 Avhich some hostile eyes have seen another forgery), and for 
 some inscrutable reason, added, in an Appendix to this volume, 
 what he terms f A List of every Note and Emendation in 
 Mr. Collier's copy of Shakespeare's works,' but which really 
 contains, says Mr. Hamilton, not above half the emendations, 
 we should have fancied, hardly a third or a fourth." 
 
 How, it may here be parenthetically inquired, can the 
 writer of this article reconcile these statements of his own 
 with his avowed belief in the alleged history of this unhappy 
 folio since the year 1849 ? 
 
 Mr. Collier says, in his affidavit sworn in the Court of 
 Queen's Bench, in 1856 : 
 
 " And I say, that all the statements in the said preface 
 and introduction, relative to the discovery, contents, and 
 authenticity of the said folio copy, and the manuscript notes, 
 corrections, alterations, and emendations thereof, are true ; 
 and that every note, correction, alteration, and emendation 
 in each of the said two editions, and every word, figure, and 
 sign therein purporting or professing to be a note, correc- 
 tion, alteration, or emendation of the text, is, to the best 
 of my knowledge and belief, a true and accurate copy 
 of the original manuscript in the said folio copy of 1632 ; and 
 that I have not, in either of the said editions, to the best of my 
 knowledge and belief, inserted a single word, stop, sign, 
 note, correction, alteration, or emendation of the said original 
 text of Shakespeare, which is not a faithful copy of the said 
 original manuscript, and which I do not believe to have been 
 written, as aforesaid, not long after the publication of the 
 said folio copy of the year 1632." 
 
 According to Mr. Collier's reiterated statements,* all 
 the emendations contained in the (f Old Corrector " are 
 
 Preface to Cokridyes Lectures, pp. 60, 73, and 79, 
 
OF THE SHAKESPEARIAN CONTROVERSY. 41 
 
 printed in his List of 1856, whereas it is now admitted 
 that scarcely one-fourth is to be found therein ; while again 
 it is not a little singular that many of the emendations con- 
 tained in the before-mentioned publications of 1853 are left 
 out in the List of 1856.* 
 
 Agnin, in his Reply to Mr. Hamilton's letter, Mr. Collier 
 refers to his affidavit sworn and filed in the Queen's Bench, 
 January 8th, 1856; and he further states, " I have shown 
 and sworn that this very book was in the possession of a 
 gentleman named Parry about half a century ago, given to 
 him by a relation named George Gray." 
 
 On no point has Mr. Collier laboured more than to prove 
 that the Devonshire folio belonged to Mr. Parry ; yet he 
 
 * The reader is not required to accept this fact upon assertion only. He is 
 referred to Mr. Collier's three versions ; they are the evidence in the matter. 
 
 Two or three instances, however, may be subjoined of the omission of emen- 
 dations in the " Complete List" of 1856, which had appeared in the earlier 
 editions. At page 222 of the edition of 1853, Mr. Collier states, "The folio of 
 1632 misprints the following line : 
 
 " Give sorrow leave a while to tutor mo," 
 
 by absurdly putting return for 'tutor.' This blunder is set right by the Old Cor- 
 rector ; but it seems as if he had previously substituted some other word, and 
 had erased it. Such may have been the case in several other places where he 
 himself blundered." These are Mr. Collier's words, italics and all, upon which 
 Mr. Singer remarks : 
 
 " This is hardly candid on the part of Mr. Collier, for who would not think 
 that 'this blunder was set right' by the sagacity of the corrector ; whereas 
 it is only the reading of the first folio, where the word is future, and the mis- 
 print had been corrected in all editions ! Do not the frequent erasures in this 
 corrected volume excite any suspicion in Mr. Collier's mind that it has been 
 extensively tampered with." 
 
 After Mr. Singer's allegation, in these terms, of Mr. Collier's want of can- 
 dour, Mr. Collier has thought proper to leave out the emendation in his 
 " Complete List" of 1856. 
 
 In 1853 Mr. Collier writes, " The Corrector has ' as surely as I live,' of the 
 quarto of 1597, instead of as sure as I live,' which is the reading of some of 
 the folios and some of the quartos." Mr. Singer points out this emendation as 
 a remarkable coincidence with Mr. Collier's adoption of it from the quarto 
 of 1597. After Mr. Singer's remark, Mr. Collier forbears to insert this emen- 
 dation in his List of 1856. 
 
 Again, in reference to the line which appeared for the first time in the 
 Devonshire folio : 
 
 " To brook control without the use of anger," (Coriolanw, Act iii. Sc. 2.) 
 Mr. Collier has adopted the line in his edition of Shakespeare of 1858, but has 
 changed the word control to reproof, with this remark, " This line is from the 
 corrected folio of 1632, and is clearly wanted, since the sense is incomplete 
 without it." Mr. Collier, however, makes no allusion to the fact that he had 
 three times previously (in 1852, 1853, and 1856,) printed the line in the form 
 given above. 
 
42 A EEVIEW OF THE PRESENT STATE 
 
 appears (undoubtedly, in the first instance, and, according to 
 Mr. Parry's statement, throughout the whole transaction,) to 
 have neglected the means which above all others would 
 have enabled him to obtain his desired end ; viz., the ex- 
 hibiting of the volume to Mr. Parry. Mr. Collier admits 
 that he did not exhibit it to him until after his Preface to 
 his edition of 1853 was finished, though he had talked to 
 him about the volume more than once ; while Mr. Parry, 
 on the other hand, has publicly denied every particular that 
 Mr. Collier has asserted ; and his truthfulness and memory, 
 it may be presumed, although Mr. Collier's senior by some 
 years, are as much to be relied upon as Mr. Collier's. 
 Mr. Parry can gain nothing by denying that the Devonshire 
 folio ever was his property, while Mr. Collier would be no 
 loser if he could prove it was. 
 
 In addition to this denial on the part of Mr. Parry, it 
 now appears that, while searching among his books and 
 papers, he has discovered the fly-leaf of his folio copy (which 
 had come loose while it was in his possession), and it has 
 been compared with the Devonshire folio. The result is, that 
 it does not fit this copy at all, being a quarter of an inch too 
 short, and a quarter of an inch too broad ; a fact which goes 
 far towards substantiating Mr. Parry's declaration, when 
 he first saw the Devonshire folio at the British Museum, 
 and from which he has never deviated, that the margins of 
 his copy were wider than those of the (Devonshire) folio. 
 
 Mr. Collier, failing in his endeavour to prove that his folio 
 had belonged to Mr. Parry, and feeling it necessary to adduce 
 evidence that he bought the volume of Rodd in 1849, made 
 application to Dr. Wellesley by letter, a copy of which surely 
 ought to have been given, in addition to the Doctor's answer. 
 That answer, which Mr. Collier kept to himself for six months 
 before he thought proper to publish it, is as follows : 
 
 " Woodmancote Rectory, Hurstpierpoint, 
 " Sir, August 13th, 1859. 
 
 " 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 
 Shakespeare, with an abundance of manuscript notes in the 
 
F THE SHAKESPEARIAN CONTROVERSY. 43 
 
 margins. He observed to me that it was of little value to 
 collectors 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 after- 
 wards 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, 
 To J. P. Collier, Esq." " H. WELLESLEY." 
 
 What was generally spoken of? that Mr. Collier had 
 purchased an imperfect folio of the second edition of Shake- 
 speare, which (as he himself says) Mr. Rodd considered of 
 no value ? Was there anything remarkable in a man buying 
 such a book ? Even at this time that edition is by no means 
 unattainable, and even less so was it then. But if the affair 
 was generally spoken of, how is it that Mr. Collier was wholly 
 ignorant of the reputation which he had thus gained ? How, 
 in fact, is this statement of Dr. Wellesley reconcil cable with 
 Mr. Collier's assertion of his indifference for, and neglect of, 
 his new acquisition for a considerable period of time, a whole 
 year, at the very least ? * It seems altogether impossible to 
 bring these conflicting statements into anything like con- 
 sistency. 
 
 We do not at all impeach Dr. Wellesley's veracity, and 
 readily admit that he has stated his impression of the facts ; 
 a statement quite reconcileable with the hypothesis that 
 Mr. Collier did purchase a folio Shakespeare of Mr. Rodd 
 in a very imperfect condition, scribbled over with marginal 
 annotations of no value, as such copies often are ; but it 
 is our belief that the copy which Dr. Wellesley saw, and 
 which Rodd described to him as of little value to collectors, 
 
 * " It remained long in )ny possession before I became acquainted with its 
 great literary curiosity and value." (Collier's Reply, p. 10.) See the particulars 
 as to the intervening lapse of time, in pages 36, 37, ante. 
 
A REVIEW OF THE PRESENT STATE 
 
 was not the copy which Mr. Collier calls the " Perkins 
 Folio."* 
 
 Mr. Rodd, we are told, asserted that the copy he sold for 
 30^. was of little value to collectors. Would he have asserted 
 this of a folio of 1632, enriched with marginal notes and 
 emendations, and those apparently in the hand-writing of 
 that period? Certainly not, or he would have acted in a 
 manner that no other dealer in old books in this kingdom 
 would. 
 
 Mr. Rodd was in the habit of buying and disposing of 
 MSS., and books with MS. emendations, to the British 
 Museum ; which would have given him, probably, many 
 times as many pounds, and would have been eager to 
 possess the volume. He, too, was at that time the London 
 Agent for the Shakespearian Society's publications. If 
 there was one subject which he thoroughly understood, 
 and one in which he took a commendable pride, it was in 
 the matter of Shakespearian literature and Shakespearian 
 emendations ; and his great sagacity in such matters, 
 equally with his interest, would prompt him to examine, 
 with more than usual attention, all the MS. notes and 
 names in works of this description. 
 
 Mr. Collier states, that neither Mr. Rodd nor himself was 
 aware of the existence of any manuscript notes in the volume 
 which he bought for thirty shillings; if so, Mr. Rodd must 
 have known nothing about the inside of the volume. On 
 what grounds, then, did Mr. Rodd fix the price ? He knew 
 that the true value depended entirely on the condition of 
 the volume. Is it at all likely then that he would have fixed 
 the price and sold the book without having first examined it, 
 to ascertain its precise condition ? Mr. Rodd was not the 
 man to have been guilty of such an unbusiness-like proceed- 
 ing. Moreover, it has been already shown, from Dr. Wel- 
 lesley's letter, that Mr. Rodd had examined the volume, and 
 
 * " It may not be necessary to say more on the present occasion than that 
 the Perkins folio came out of a parcel of books from the country ; that I \ras 
 iu Rodd's shop when the parcel arrived ; that I bought it for thirty shillings 
 (neither Rodd nor myself being aware of any manuscript notes in it)." licply, 
 
 pp. 7, 8. 
 
OF THE SHAKESPEARIAN CONTROVERSY. 45 
 
 pronounced it " of little value ;" a thing that he certainly 
 could never liave said of the Devonshire folio, unless he 
 had previously examined it, and had come to the con- 
 clusion that the emendations were worthless. In fact, the 
 only inference that can fairly be drawn from Dr. Welles- 
 ley's letter is this, that if the volume he saw had been the 
 Devonshire folio, Mr. Rodd's attention (supposing for a 
 moment that it had not been previously given to it) would 
 at that time, and from the very nature of Dr. Wellesley's 
 inquiry, have infallibly been drawn to it ; he would at once 
 have seen that it was no ordinary volume, and would have 
 lost no time in apprizing Mr. Collier of the lucky purchase 
 which (to his own lossj he had made. Instead of which, 
 Mr. Rodd, we are left to presume, let Mr. Collier take away 
 his precious acquisition without one word more on the sub- 
 ject, to repose for at least twelve months on the shelves of 
 one of the most indefatigable Shakespearian inquirers of the 
 day, without being examined ! 
 
 But Mr. Collier, we are told, purchased the volume in 
 order to supply some missing leaves in a poor copy of that 
 edition which he had already bought of the same book- 
 soller. He would, therefore, naturally look into it to 
 see whether or not it contained the leaves he wanted. 
 On looking into it, could he possibly have failed to see 
 that it was positively studded with marginal emendations 
 thoughout ? 
 
 How was it that he did not discover them at once ? Did 
 he by instinct open the volume at the very places where the 
 pages he wanted ought to have been ? And did he studiously 
 avoid opening it anywhere else? 
 
 Let the reader take any copy of Shakespeare, the one 
 even that he has in common use, and let him see whether he 
 can hit, at two successive openings, on two given pages, 
 in two plays, without making a search for them. Mr. Col- 
 lier must either have done this, or he must have gone over 
 the leaves to see if the volume contained those which he 
 required ; in doing the latter of which, it would seem to be 
 wholly impossible that he could escape seeing the emenda- 
 tions which he himself tells us " were on most of the pages 
 frequent, and on many numerous," 
 
46 A REVIEW OF THE PRESENT STATE 
 
 Taking all these points into consideration, it is impossible 
 to avoid coming to the conclusion that Mr. Collier's account 
 of the whole of this branch of the question is anything but 
 satisfactory. 
 
 Y. We proceed to the fifth division of this inquiry, viz., 
 whether certain Letters and Papers relating to matters of 
 Shakespearian interest, which Mr. Collier has printed or 
 referred to, are genuine or not. 
 
 To begin with " The Players' Petition," a document at 
 present in the State Paper Branch of the Public Record 
 Office. It is without date, but purports to be a Petition 
 to the Lords of Queen Elizabeth's Council, from certain 
 Players (eight of whom are therein named, one of them 
 being " William Shakespeare,") praying their Lordships' 
 permission that they may finish the reparations and altera- 
 tions in their Theatre in the precinct of the Blackfriars, and 
 that their performances there may not be interrupted. 
 Mr. Collier calls it " a Counter Petition by the Lord 
 Chamberlain's Players/' and he was the first to direct public 
 attention to it, by printing it in his " Annals of the Stage " 
 (1831). He there announces his belief that it is not the 
 original Petition, but merely a copy without the signatures. 
 
 Now, if the paper thus printed by Mr. Collier be only a 
 copy of the Petition, it is at least a very unaccountable 
 circumstance that the copy should have been preserved in the 
 public archives, and the original not be found there as well. 
 
 We can quite understand why a fabricator (not aware 
 that it was unusual for petitioners, during the reigns of 
 Elizabeth and James I., to subscribe their names to Petitions) 
 should prefer that a document fabricated by him should be 
 considered as a copy, rather than as an original, seeing that 
 the former could be much more easily manufactured than 
 the other, He may have thought that in a document of this 
 nature, if professing to be an original, it would be necessary 
 to forge the signatures of eight persons, a puzzling and 
 awkward process ; for though he might know how to 
 imitate the signatures of some, yet he might not be 
 acquainted with the signatures of all, and the failure of one 
 would be the condemnation .of the whole. 
 
OF THE SHAKESPEARIAN CONTROVERSY. 47 
 
 Mr. Collier, however, in one instance, says, " This re- 
 markable paper has, perhaps, never seen the light, from the 
 moment it was first presented, until it was recently dis- 
 covered." Here he would seem to treat the document as 
 an original, though in another place he has distinctly called 
 it a copy. If it is not a contemporary copy,* the original 
 would surely have been among the State Papers when the 
 copy was made ; and if it is a contemporary copy, why was 
 it made ? Surely not for the purpose of being preserved 
 as a State Paper in lieu of the original. 
 
 Mr. Lemon, of the State Paper Branch Record Office, 
 rnight possibly be able to throw some light on the subject ; 
 at any rate, as he is pretty confident of the fact of his father 
 bringing the document in question under the notice of 
 Mr. Collier, he ought to be able to say, with something like 
 an equal degree of confidence, whether it was the original or 
 the copy that his father placed before Mr. Collier, or both. 
 And here, even at the risk of giving pain to Mr. Lemon, we 
 must say, that in penning his hasty letter to the Athenaum 
 (No. 1686), he has cast at least a shadow of a reproach upon 
 his father's memory, by implying that he produced this 
 "Petition" to Mr. Collier as a genuine document. If 
 Mr. Lemon, Senior, really did produce this Petition, and 
 pronounce it genuine, his judgment was marvellously at 
 fault : but of the two alternatives, we should be inclined 
 rather to doubt the accuracy of the son's memory than 
 the father's skill as a palajographer ; for we say, and say 
 advisedly, that any one who could pronounce the " Players' 
 Petition" to be genuine, would be totally unfit to hold the 
 office that Mr. Lemon, Senior, held. 
 
 But supposing for a moment that the " Players' Petition ' 
 was a genuine document, and that the fact of its existence 
 
 * Although slightly anticipating -what will be more fully discussed hereafter, 
 this most curious coincidence here calls for some notice, that several of the 
 
 Blackfriars Theatre to the Privy Council in 1859 ; The Letter signed II. S,, 
 and other papers in which Shakespeare's name occurs. Is it not " strange, 
 passing strange," that copies of all these papers should have been religiously 
 preserved, the originals being nowhere to be found ? 
 
48 A REVIEW OF THE PRESENT STATE 
 
 had been discovered by Mr. Lemon, his first duty, on such 
 discovery, would be to communicate the fact to Mr. Hob- 
 house, the head of his office, and to make an entry of the 
 purport of the document in the official Repertory. There 
 is no evidence that he did either ; on the contrary, the 
 Petition was never heard of by the public until Mr. Collier 
 printed it in 1831. Viewing the matter, too, as one of 
 feeling, and laying aside all considerations of duty, if 
 Mr. Lemon, Senior, had indeed discovered this precious 
 document, and been convinced of its genuineness, no reason- 
 able doubt can be entertained that he would have been too 
 eager to announce the fact to the public, and that the whole 
 of literary England would have rung with the intelligence of 
 his good fortune. He, of all men, was not the person to 
 conceal it from the chief of his office, from his colleagues, 
 from his personal friends, and from the whole body of 
 Shakespearian scholars. He was much too alive to the 
 pleasure of congratulation to have kept such a discovery 
 secret for a period of four years (1825 to 1829), and then to 
 have communicated it to Mr. Collier, at that time an un- 
 known individual, and recently introduced to him by a mere 
 acquaintance. Such, however, is Mr. Collier's statement. 
 But how comes it that he never thought of this before ? 
 One would certainly suppose that Mr. Collier would have 
 rmde some mention (as he has done in instances where 
 Mr. Lemon* had introduced a document to his notice) of 
 Mr. Lemon's kindness in placing a document of such sur- 
 passing interest as this before him : but, on the contrary, 
 not the slightest allusion is there made to him in connexion 
 with the " Players' Petition," although Mr. Collier states that 
 it had been very recently discovered in the State Paper Office. 
 Why should he then have concealed the fact that he now 
 vouchsafes to tell us ? Nay, more than this, Mr. Halliwell, 
 in giving a printed fac-simile of the document in question, 
 announced to the public that it was discovered by Mr. Collier ; 
 a statement which Mr. Collier has never contradicted until 
 the moment when public attention is critically drawn to the 
 subject. 
 
 * " The Minute in the Registers of the Privy Council (pointed out to us by 
 Mr. Lemon) is this," &c. Again, " This new and valuable piece of information 
 was pointed out to us by Mr. Lemon." 
 
OF THE SHAKESPEARIAN CONTROVERSY. 49 
 
 There is another point, too, in Mr. Lemon's Letter that calls 
 for notice, as tending somewhat to impugn the accuracy of 
 his memory in reference to these transactions. He is only 
 " pretty confident," he says, that his father first brought this 
 document under the notice of Mr. Collier ; but he speaks 
 positively, or at all events seems to do so, as to the fact that 
 this document " was well known to his father and himself 
 before Mr. Collier began his researches in the office." Now 
 it seems no more than reasonable to suppose that if he is 
 only " pretty confident " in the one case, he can hardly be 
 more than " pretty confident " in the other, which is more 
 distant in point of time, and dating from a period prior to 
 the alleged commencement of Mr. Collier's researches at the 
 State Paper Office in 1829 ; a period at which, if we are 
 not much mistaken, Mr. Lemon had nothing whatever 
 to do with the State Paper Office in an official capacity, 
 he having resigned his situation there in 1825, at the direc- 
 tion of the Under Secretary of State, " in order that he 
 might devote his time exclusively to the Commission for 
 printing and publishing State Papers,'' to which he had been 
 appointed Assistant Secretary. This office he held until 
 1835, in which year he was appointed Second Clerk in the 
 State Paper Office. 
 
 Under these circumstances, without meaning the slightest 
 offence to Mr. Lemon, we cannot but be of opinion that he 
 has spoken somewhat too hastily upon subjects which could 
 hardly have come within his knowledge ; viz., the existence 
 of one document in particular, out of very many thousands, 
 at a certain period of time, upwards of thirty years ago, 
 the period of Mr. Collier's first admission into the State 
 Paper Office ; if indeed his letter can be construed to speak 
 positively as to the latter point, which, after all, seems 
 somewhat uncertain. Mr. Lemon, doubtless, is speaking 
 the truth to the best of his belief; but not one iota beyond 
 this can we admit. 
 
 To revert once more to the Edinburgh Reviewer, and his 
 opinions on the " Players' Petition." Somewhat to our 
 surprise, he boldly asserts (p. 484) that " the authenticity of 
 the paper (the Players' Petition) is still maintained by the 
 best authorities in the State Paper Office to be equal to that 
 of any other document in the collection ; and this opinion is 
 curiously confirmed by the fact, that there are spots of 
 
 D 
 
50 A REVIEW OF THE PRESENT STATE 
 
 corrosion by rust in the paper, which have eaten away not 
 only the paper, but the ink, showing that the writing, as well 
 as the paper, is old. The handwriting is not only not the 
 handwriting of the Corrector, but it is of an essentially 
 different character and period." 
 
 In the space of ninety words it is hardly possible to 
 string together so many inaccuracies. In the first place, 
 there is abundant reason for denying that " the authenticity 
 of the paper is still maintained by the best authorities in the 
 State Paper Office/' Of the three Assistant Keepers of 
 Public Records at the State Paper Branch Office, Mr. Lech- 
 mere, the chief, has hitherto declined to offer any opinion at 
 all upon the subject ; Mr. Lemon himself can at most be said 
 to have expressed only by implication his belief in its genuine- 
 ness ; while the remaining Assistant Keeper, Mr. Hans Claude 
 Hamilton, has stated his conviction that the so-called (l Players' 
 Petition '' is an indubitable forgery. 
 
 Again, it is not the fact that " there are spots of cor- 
 rosion by rust in the paper, which have eaten away not 
 only the paper but the ink " ; though, if there were such, it 
 would point to an exactly opposite conclusion, as we could 
 convince the Reviewer in two minutes, by affording him 
 ocular demonstration. Further than this, our belief is, 
 that the liquid with which the document was written was 
 not what is commonly called ( ink/ or, at all events, the ink 
 in use at that period. We admit that the paper is old, a 
 century, perhaps, older than the writing ; and as to the 
 
 writing, if it is not that of the " Old Corrector/' it is a 
 very happy imitation of it, and bears a strong resemblance 
 to that of some of the papers at Bridgewater House. 
 
 In the last place, the Reviewer commits an egregious 
 error in reference to this subject (one that he might have 
 avoided if he had only consulted so common a book as 
 the "Royal Calendar " for 1859), in alleging, when making 
 mention of the State Paper Office at Westminster, and the 
 Record Office at the Rolls House, that, although under 
 one head, (f each department has its own staff* of superior 
 and subordinate officers, and its own distinct class of 
 archives." This is not the fact ; they are not distinct. The 
 State Paper Office is only a branch of the Public Record 
 Office, and the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records is the 
 
OF THE SHAKESPEARIAN CONTROVERSY. 51 
 
 chief officer of the State Paper Branch, the whole being 
 under his direction and management. He is, in fact, the 
 responsible Custos of all the documents in the State Paper 
 Branch, as well as in the Public Record Office itself 
 The Assistant Keepers located at the Public Record Office, 
 are equally Assistant Keepers of the Branch at the State 
 Paper Office, and vice versa. Even more than this, the two 
 offices have not their distinct archives. Both contain State 
 Papers ; though the Public Record Office contains, probably, 
 the larger number of the two. 
 
 It is therefore a fallacy for the Reviewer to assert as he 
 does that the officers of the State Paper Office were excluded 
 from the official inquiry as to the Players' Petition ; in addi- 
 tion to which, as already stated, Mr. Lechmere has, from the 
 very first, declined to give an opinion as to the genuineness of 
 this document. Mr. Lemon, too, had the opportunity, when 
 he wrote his letter to the Athenaum, of distinctly stating his 
 opinion as to the genuineness of the paper, but he forbore 
 to do so. 
 
 As Mr. Collier and his supporters, however (notwith- 
 standing the contradiction previously noticed), seem to 
 hesitate at maintaining that the Players' Petition is 
 genuine, it would be little better than a work of super- 
 erogation to prove that it is spurious. We therefore con- 
 tent ourselves with asserting that, be it original or copy, 
 it was not written in the reign of Elizabeth or of James the 
 First, reigns which, of course, we particularly mention, 
 because the handwriting is ostensibly an imitation of the 
 handwriting of that period, and the context is intended to 
 bear reference to the first of them. The orthography of the 
 petition, the ink or pigment in which it is written, are not of 
 those reigns, and the writing itself is tainted with clerical 
 anachronisms ; while the paper is, to all appearance, the fly- 
 leaf cut out of a book, and certainly would never have been 
 used either for an original Petition to the Council, or for an 
 official copy of one. These assertions the officers of the 
 State Paper Office, it is believed, will not be disposed to 
 contradict. As yet they have shown no inclination to do so 
 (for even supposing Mr. Lemon's memory to be accurate 
 in every respect, his evidence goes no way whatever towards 
 
 D 2 
 
52 A REVIEW OF THE PRESENT STATE 
 
 establishing the genuineness* of the document), though, on 
 the other hand, the reserve shown by them on this point 
 (with the exception of Mr. H. C. Hamilton), is not unlikely 
 to be misconstrued as seeming to give countenance to the 
 statements circulated in reference to the great literary value 
 of this spurious production. That they entertain such an 
 opinion in reference to it, it would really be an ill compli- 
 ment to suppose ; but if so, why did they not, immediately 
 upon reading the certificate impugning the genuineness of 
 the document, send to the Master of the Rolls a counter- 
 certificate, declaring their own belief in its genuineness, 
 and protesting against such a certificate being appended 
 until further consideration had been given to the subject? 
 Why, in such case, have they allowed Mr. Collier's assertions 
 to be called in question, and himself defrauded of that 
 testimony, whatever its -value, to which he has a right at 
 their hands, if they believe in its genuineness ? This, if 
 ever there was one, is a matter in which the semblance 
 e^en of a mistake should not be allowed to exist. 
 
 This subject leads us incidentally to the consideration of 
 another matter that has grown out of the question of the 
 genuineness of this document; the graceless and improper 
 insinuations that have been recently put forth by one or 
 two Reviewers, to the effect that the Master of the Rolls 
 has made himself a party, in appearance or by implication, 
 in a personal attack upon a private individual. 
 
 What are the simple facts of the case ? A complaint was 
 made to the Master of the Rolls that one of the Public 
 Records in his charge was of a suspicious character. He 
 directed an inquiry to be made into the matter. He did 
 no more than this ; and he certainly could do no less ; 
 indeed the country had a right to demand that, in virtue 
 of his office, he should institute such an inquiry. Had he 
 acted otherwise than he did. we do not hesitate to say that 
 he would singularly have failed in the performance of his 
 duty as Keeper of the Public Records. 
 
 * The Edinburgh Review (p. 455) thinks proper to say of this docu- 
 ment, in reference, we presume, to Mr. Lemon's Letter, " Its authenticity has 
 since been confirmed by evidence which appears to us to be irresistible." 
 Either the Reviewer must be a man very easily satisfied in point of evidence, 
 or he must be totally ignorant what the word " authenticity " means. 
 
OF THE SHAKESPEARIAN CONTROVERSY. DO 
 
 Of course, it did not lie within his own province to act 
 as judge in a matter of this description. He therefore 
 appointed a committee for the purpose, consisting of gentle- 
 men whose daily study, for more than half their lives, lias 
 bee a the handwriting of the last six or eight centuries. 
 These gentlemen came to the conclusion that the document 
 was spurious, and gave their certificate accordingly ; this 
 the Master of the Rolls directed to be appended thereto, 
 in order that the present inquiry might not be lost to 
 memory, should the same question ever arise in future. 
 This certificate did not charge, nor was it intended that it 
 should charge, Mr. Collier, or any other person, either with 
 fabricating the document or with inserting it among the 
 Public Records. It merely stated that, in the opinion of 
 the persons there named, the writing was spurious, a 
 dictum that neither Mr. Collier nor Mr. Lemon has since 
 attempted to repudiate. 
 
 On this point, however, it is quite unnecessary to enlarge ; 
 and we should be loth to bear the semblance even of 
 obtruding ourselves upon the reader as defending one whose 
 high and unassailable character needs no defence. Even 
 the little that has been said is based solely upon a deter- 
 mination that the truth shall be spoken, and that the public 
 shall not be hoodwinked by insinuation or misled by a 
 distortion of facts. 
 
 There yet remains to be noticed another fact connected 
 with the Players' Petition, we mean the loss of the Memorial 
 which, Mr. Collier states, was appended to it when he last 
 saw it. We do not require Mr. Collier to explain this loss ; 
 but we certainly do think that the officers of the State Paper 
 Branch Office should do so. Mr. Collier says that the 
 authenticity of this Memorial has never been questioned ; 
 perhaps not; but until it is produced and subjected to 
 examination, it will be as well perhaps to withhold implicit 
 confidence in its genuineness. 
 
 While on the subject of documents belonging to, or 
 said to belong, to the State Paper Office, we would direct 
 public attention to the disappearance of two other documents 
 to which Mr. Collier has referred. (1.) The Petition to 
 the Privy Council from James Burbage and others in 
 1576, printed by Mr. Collier in his " Annals of the Staye" 
 
54 A REVIEW OF THE PRESENT STATE 
 
 i. 227. (2.) Lord Pembroke's Letter, dated 27th August 
 1624. In reference to this last document, we have a 
 Calendar made by Mr. Kempe, some twenty years since, 
 of the papers of that period then in the State Paper Office. 
 This Calendar has been lately printed by Mrs. Everett Green, 
 and it makes no mention of this document; so that the 
 paper must have been lost or removed more than twenty 
 years ago, and apparently we have no memorial of its existence 
 since it was used by Mr. Collier. 
 
 So much, then, for four documents made use of by 
 Mr. Collier which he asserts were in the State Paper Office 
 when he published his volume. One is positively declared, 
 on no slight authority, to be spurious, and three others are 
 now not forthcoming, a curious coincidence, to say the 
 least of it, and one that demands inquiry. 
 
 We now proceed to some examination of the papers 
 alleged to have been discovered by Mr. Collier among the 
 MSS. of the Earl of Ellesmere, in the Library at Bridgewater- 
 house. They consist of the seven following documents, 
 bearing reference to the life and times of Shakespeare : 
 
 1. A paper " For the avoiding of the Play-house in the 
 
 Blacke Friers." 
 
 2. A Letter of the poet Daniell. 
 
 3. A Certificate of the Players of the Blackfriars Theatre 
 
 in reply to certain complaints. 
 
 4. The opinions of the two Chief Justices of either Bench 
 
 concerning the jurisdiction, authoritie, and liberties 
 claymed by the cittizens of London, within the precincte 
 of the late dissolved howses of the White and Black 
 Fryers of London, delivered the xxvii th of Januarie 
 1579. 
 
 o. An Order to Robert Daborne and others to provide 
 children for Her Majesty's Revels (dated 4th Janu- 
 ary 1609). 
 
 6. A copy of a letter from H. S. in favour " of the poore 
 
 Players of the Black fryers." 
 
 7. Mainwaring's Account. 
 
 " The moment I discovered them," says Mr. Collier, speak- 
 ing of these papers, " I carried them to the Earl of Ellesmere 
 (then Lord Francis Leveson Gower), and read them to him. 
 
OF THE SHAKESPEARIAN CONTROVERSY. 55 
 
 At his lordship's instance I copied them, and left both 
 originals and copies with his lordship." 
 
 The particulars of his discovery Mr. Collier afterwards 
 communicated to his friend, Mr. Thomas Amyot, in the 
 following words: "When first I obtained permission to 
 look through the Bridgewater MSS. in detail, I conjec- 
 tured that it would be nearly impossible to turn over 
 so many State Papers and such a bulk of correspondence, 
 private and official, without meeting with something illus- 
 trative of the subject to which I have devoted so many 
 years ; but I certainly never anticipated being so fortunate 
 as to obtain particulars so new, curious, and important, 
 regarding a poet who, above all others, ancient or modern, 
 native or foreign, has been the object of admiration. When 
 I took up the copy of Lord Southampton's Letter, and 
 glanced over it hastily, I could scarcely believe my eyes to 
 see such names as Shakespeare and Burbage in connection 
 in a manuscript of the time. There was a remarkable 
 coincidence also in the discovery, for it happened on the 
 anniversary of Shakespeare's birth and death. I will not 
 attempt to describe my joy and surprise ; and I can only 
 liken it to the unexpected gratification I experienced two or 
 three years ago, when I turned out, from some ancient 
 depositories of the Duke of Devonshire, the original designs 
 of Inigo Jones, not only for the scenery, but for the dresses 
 and characters of the different masques by Ben Jonson, 
 Campion, Townsend, &c. presented at court in the reigns of 
 our First James and Charles. The sketches were sometimes 
 accompanied by explanations in the handwriting of the great 
 artist, a few of which incidentally illustrate Shakespeare, 
 who, however, was never employed for any of these royal 
 entertainments. Annexed to one of the drawings was the 
 following written description, from whence we learn how 
 the actor of the part of Falstaff was usually habited in the 
 time of Shakespeare : ' Like a Sir Jon Falstaff : in a roabc 
 of russet, quite low, with a great belley, like a swolen man, 
 long moustacheos, the sheows [shoes] shorte, and out of 
 them great toes like naked feete : buskins to sheaw a great 
 swolen leg. A cupp coming fourth like a beake a great 
 head and balde, and a little cap alia Venetiane greay a 
 rodd and a scroule of parchment.*' 
 
 * " New Facts regarding the Life of Shakspeare," in a Letter to Thomas 
 Ainyot, from J. Payne Collier, 1835. 
 
56 A REVIEW OF THE PRESENT STATE 
 
 " It is somewhat remarkable/' says Mr. Hamilton, " that 
 neither tins drawing, nor the description of Falstaff, is to be 
 found in the Shakespeare Society's volume, edited by J. K. 
 Planche, Esq., from the Duke of Devonshire's Library.* The 
 language of this ' description ' is, to say the least, suspicious." 
 The orthography, Mr. Hamilton might have added, is con- 
 clusive against its authenticity. 
 
 Mr. Collier in this letter, it will be observed, dwells 
 emphatically on the value of these documents ; but makes no 
 observation on the handwriting that could raise a suspicion as 
 to their genuineness, while he enters into all the particulars 
 of their being found in bundles of MSS. which had probably 
 never been examined since the days of Chancellor Ellesmere ; 
 a circumstance, lie considers, which tells strongly in their 
 favour. 
 
 To proceed, however, to an examination of the above-men- 
 tioned documents individually. 
 
 1. "For the avoiding of the Play-house in the Blacke 
 
 Friers."f 
 
 * Mr. Hamilton, in his " Inquiry" p. 103, has called marked attention to the 
 spurious character of a MS. volume of Ballads stated by Mr. Collier to be in 
 his possession, and in a handwriting of the time of the Commonwealth, but 
 which, from the internal evidence of the ballads published, as well as from a 
 fac-simile of the handwriting of a portion of one of them, he pronounces to be 
 unmistakeable modern forgeries. Mr. Col ier has silently passed over Mr. Ha- 
 milton's challenge to him to produce the book, even though his supporter, the 
 Edinburgh Reviewer, declares that in this particular instance Mr. Collier must 
 be either deceiver or deceived. 
 
 " Mr. Collier," says the Reviewer, " published in 1839, as an extract from 
 an alleged manuscript volume in his possession, a trashy ballad called The 
 Inchanted Island, the plot of which is similar to that of The Tempest. Mr. 
 Douce, he says, shook his venerable head, and called it one of the most beau- 
 tiful ballads he had ever read ; which must have been in some strange fit of 
 after-dinner enthusiasm. Mr. Collier conjectures that it was written between 
 1642 and 1660. It has been fac-similed for Mr. Halliwell. Mr. Hamilton 
 says that the writing is suspicious; of which we say nothing. But we fully 
 agree with him that the intrinsic character of the verses themselves by no 
 means serves to allay these suspicions. It would take a good deal to persuade 
 us that lines in which it is said of a magician that 
 
 ' Sooth to say, in dangerous hour 
 He had some more than human power ;' 
 
 in which a lady's hair is described as 'like to sunlit gold;' and in which it is 
 said of a father that ' his little Ida's morning smile made him forget his 
 woe ' were by any very ancient ballad-monger. But we know not whether 
 Mr. Collier in this particular instance is either deceived or deceiver." 
 Review, No. 226, p. 483.) 
 
 f Printed in Mr. Hamilton's "Inquiry" p. 110. 
 
OF TUB SHAKESPEARIAN CONTROVERSY. 57 
 
 This paper is cleverly executed, and might at first sight 
 puss for a copy of a genuine document; but certainly 
 neither for an original nor for a contemporaneous copy. The 
 more, however, it is examined, the more suspicious it appears. 
 The ink is not what the ink of that period was, and the 
 paper has been evidently the fly-leaf of a book. 
 
 No one, probably, will contend that this piece is the 
 original ; and if it is not the original, it becomes of interest 
 to know where the original is, and how a copy of this docu- 
 ment &hould have been found among papers having no 
 connexion whatever with those belonging to the Egerton 
 family. 
 
 This circumstance not improbably influenced the late 
 Lord Ellesmere, when he insisted on Mr. Collier keeping the 
 document he had found, as it was no necessary part of the 
 Egertou family documents. 
 
 2. A Letter * " To the Eight Honorable Sir Thomas 
 
 Egerton, Knight, Lord Keeper of the Great Scale of 
 England, from S. Daniel!." 
 
 The statement that this is an original letter sent by Daniell 
 to Sir Thomas Egerton is preposterous, and, to say the least, 
 must have been made in utter ignorance ; for neither in the 
 handwriting, the ink, nor in any other particular does it bear 
 any characteristic of the reign of Elizabeth. 
 
 If, on the other hand, it is asserted that it is a copy, how 
 comes it that the copy of a letter addressed to the founder of 
 this noble house should have been preserved, and neither the 
 original preserved nor the fact of its having existed in any 
 way recorded ? 
 
 3. A Certificate f of the Poore Playeres, being sharers in 
 
 the Blacke Fryers Playhouse in November 1589. 
 
 This is written on a slip of paper, evidently taken from a 
 book. Mr. Collier suggests that it passed into the hands 
 
 * Printed in Mr. Hamilton's " Inquiry" p. Ill, 
 f Printed in Mr. Hamilton's "Inquiry ," p. 113. 
 
58 A ItEVIEW OF THE P11ESENT STATE 
 
 of Lord Ellesmere, then Attorney General, and that it has 
 been preserved among his papers ever since. This, however, 
 must be an error, for Popham was Attorney General at that 
 time, and not Sir Thomas Egerton. 
 
 The document itself is of a most suspicious character ; 
 and it is impossible not to agree with Mr. Collier that te it 
 seems strange that this testimonial should have come from 
 the players themselves. We should rather have expected 
 that they would have procured a certificate from some 
 disinterested parties." 
 
 The fabricator of the document, however, must have had 
 some reason of his own for making it in this form, which, of 
 course, it is not for others to pretend to divine. Be this, 
 however, as it may, no one who has the slightest pretensions 
 to a knowledge of the handwriting of the reign of Eliza- 
 beth, would hesitate for an instant in condemning the paper 
 from the writing alone ; and we canot forbear expressing 
 our surprise that any person should venture to call this 
 document an original of the 16th century. 
 
 5. The opinions of the two Chief Justices of either Bench 
 concerning the jurisdiccon, authoritie, and liberties 
 claymed by the cittizens of London, within the 
 precincte of the late dissolved bowses of the White 
 and Black Fryers of London, delivered the xxvii th of 
 Januarie 1579. 
 
 This piece is written in the Gothic hand of the 16th 
 century, and is supposed by gentlemen of acknowledged 
 skill in such matters to be a genuine document. Still, after 
 a close examination, to us its genuineness seems questionable 
 at least. Be this the case or not, it certainly is not an 
 original, but only a copy. 
 
 5. An Order * to Robert Daborne and others, to provide 
 children for Her Majesty's Bevels (dated 4th January 
 1609). 
 
 This document is perhaps the most transparent fabrication 
 of any that has been put forth as an original. As a fac-simile 
 
 Printed in Hamilton's "Inquiry" p. 114. 
 
OF THE SHAKESPEARIAN CONTROVERSY. 59 
 
 of it has been published in Mr. Hamilton's "Inquiry" the 
 reader has the opportunity of forming his own opinion ; and, 
 if he has any knowledge of the handwriting of the reign 
 of James I. he cannot fail to condemn it at once. 
 
 6. Copia vcra of a Letter* from H. S. in favour of the 
 poore Players of the Black fryers. 
 
 This piece professes to be only a true copy (copia vera*, and 
 has excited considerable attention. It has no date, and is not 
 addressed to any one, a somewhat extraordinary circum- 
 stance, seeing that it is attested as copia vera. For how 
 can it be " copia vera " unless the name of the person 
 addressed is also given ? The fabricator of the paper 
 must have felt this difficulty, but was at a loss how to 
 remedy it. He needed some such document probably to 
 supply a link in a certain chain that he was weaving, and 
 he knew that the less definite the document should be, the 
 smaller the chance of detection. He knew, in fact, that 
 there would have been considerable risk in affixing either 
 the date, the name of the writer, or the name of the 
 person addressed. Mr. Collier, however, when publishing 
 the document, thus gets over the difficulty : " We may con- 
 clude," he says, " that the original was not addressed to Lord 
 Ellesmere, or it would have been found in the depository 
 of his papers, and not merely a transcript of it." This 
 argument, however, would seem hardly tenable, for how is 
 it that the Lord Keeper did not preserve the original of 
 the letter from the poet Daniell, which was addressed to 
 him ? Why should he have preserved the copy among his 
 family papers, and not the original ? 
 
 " But," continues Mr. Collier, " a copy of it may have 
 been furnished to the Lord Chancellor, in order to give 
 him some information respecting the characters of the 
 parties upon whose cause he was called upon to adjudicate." 
 What cause? certainly none in the Chancery ; of that we 
 have very good evidence. But why should a letter addressed 
 to some nameless person by an anonymous writer, signing 
 himself H. S., be sent to the Lord Keeper? Mr. Collier 
 supposes, though without a shadow of support, that the letter 
 was written by the Earl of Southampton, and was sent by 
 
 * Printed in Hamilton's "Inquiry" p. 116. 
 
GO A KEVIEW OF THE PllESKNT (STATE 
 
 the nameless person to the Lord Keeper merely to enlighten 
 him as to the deserts of Shakespeare and Burbage ! The 
 idea cannot be entertained, for a moment even. 
 
 7. Rewardes to the vaulters, players, and dauncers. Of 
 this x 11 to Burbadge's players: for Othello, Ixiii 11 , 
 xviii 3 , x d . Rewarde to Mr. Lillye's man, which 
 brought the lotterye box to Harefield, x 1 *. 
 
 This document professes to be an account of the expendi- 
 ture of the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal (signed by 
 Arthur Main waring, who appears to have been his auditor) 
 for the reception of Queen Elizabeth, on her visit to him at 
 Harefield, in the beginning of August 1602. It furnishes a 
 fact which, if it could be relied upon, would to a certain 
 extent settle the question as to the date of the first appear- 
 ance of the Tragedy of " Othello," a disputed point ; some 
 critics assigning it to 1604, others to 1611. 
 
 Mr. Collier produces this Account to prove that Burbadge's 
 Players received from the, Lord Keeper 637. 18s. lOd. for 
 playing Othello before the Queen, on Her Majesty's visit to 
 Harefield, in August 1602; consequently, that the play 
 must have been written and performed in London before that 
 date.* Unfortunately, however, the paper upon which 
 Mr. Collier rests his proof must be condemned as spurious. 
 The difference between it and the others in the same volume 
 of manuscripts, signed by Arthur Mainwaring, which are 
 unquestionably genuine, is striking ; and, although it is 
 written on paper similar to the others, the writing, the 
 ink, and the signature equally condemn it at once. 
 
 Speaking of these documents, Mr. Collier says,f " I admit, 
 without reserve, that the weakest part of my case relates to 
 the finding of Shakespeare documents among the late Earl 
 of Ellesmere's MSS., at Bridgewater-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 
 testimony as to the discovery of them. Nobody was with 
 
 * See Mr. Collier's " Introduction to Othello," vii. 493. 
 f " Reply to Mr. Hamilton's ' Inquiry,' " p. 34. 
 
OF THE SHAKESPEARIAN CONTROVERSY. 61 
 
 me at the precise moment, although the noble owner of the 
 papers had been in the room only a few minutes before." 
 
 We agree with Mr. Collier, that it is unfortunate that no 
 other person was present when he found these papers ; and 
 even more unfortunate is it that he never is able to cite the 
 testimony of any living person as being present at the 
 moment of any one of his discoveries. 
 
 But to follow Mr. Collier a step further. " Mr. Hamil- 
 ton," he says, " boldly be'gging the whole question, styles 
 them ( the Bridgewater Shakespeare 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 Stevens had formerly been 
 admitted into the rooms which held both the books and the 
 manuscripts. I do not believe that he had any more hand 
 in the forgeries than the Rev. H. J. Todd, with whom I 
 once conversed about the papers, and who had, as I under- 
 stood, for some years filled the office of librarian." 
 
 To say the least of it, this is a most unworthy insinuation. 
 To remove suspicion from himself, Mr. Collier, by a sort of 
 negative pregnant, would impugn the honour of two gentle- 
 men long since deceased, and unable therefore to speak for 
 themselves. 
 
 Every one who knows anything of the world, knows full 
 well that the man who forges a document produces and 
 makes it public in order that he himself may reap the benefit 
 of his forgery ; that it is fs sic vos non volis " least of all with 
 a person of such crooked tendencies as these. Had either 
 Stevens or Todd forged them, he would most assuredly have 
 drawn the attention of the public to them, and would not 
 have allowed another person to reap the benefit of his 
 labours. Mr. Collier was both the discoverer of these docu- 
 ments and the editor of them as genuine ; while, from his 
 own admission, it would seem that he would not be very 
 reluctant now to admit them to be forgeries. 
 
 But why is Mr. Collier indignant with Mr. Hamilton for 
 calling these documents forgeries? He exhibited no such 
 indignation in 1853 against Mr. Halliwell, who not only 
 denounced them as such, but gave a fac-simile of one of the 
 
62 A REVIEW OF THE PRESENT STATE 
 
 documents in question, with the view of substantiating his 
 position. 
 
 " Fortunately for the interests of truth/' says Mr. Halli- 
 well, "indications of forgery are detected in trifling circum- 
 stances, that are almost invariably neglected by the inventor, 
 however ingeniously the deception be contrived. Were it 
 not for this, the search for historical truth would yield results 
 sufficiently uncertain to deter the most enthusiastic inquirer 
 from pursuing the investigation." To which he adds : " It 
 is clearly Mr. Collier's duty, as a lover of truth, to have 
 the originals carefully scrutinized by the best judges of the 
 day." 
 
 An ordinarily sensitive man would surely, upon a challenge 
 like this, have adopted such a course, rather than that a 
 shadow of suspicion should rest upon his name. Mr. Collier 
 forbore to do so ; on the contrary, he has remained silent and 
 inactive until now, when he assumes an air of indignation, 
 and rises, armed at all points with insinuations, sneers, and 
 insults, directed against every person who ventures to come 
 forward to investigate, in the name of truth and learning, a 
 great literary question. Mr. Collier, if conscious of being 
 above all blame, ought to have been thankful to Mr. Hamilton 
 for affording him, in whatever spirit, the opportunity of 
 dispelling any suspicion that might lurk in the minds of 
 Shakespearian scholars that he had brought before the literary 
 world numberless supposititious emendations of the text of 
 Shakespeare, and some equally supposititious facts connected 
 with his life. 
 
 Having thus cursorily noticed the spurious Shakespearian 
 papers in the Ellesmere Collection, we now come to the 
 Dulwich documents of a like character, to which Mr. Collier 
 has called the attention of the literary world. They consist 
 of four papers, three of which are undoubtedly anything but 
 genuine ; and the fourth, known as " Mrs. Alleyn's Letter " 
 to her husband, has been treated by Mr. Collier in a most 
 extraordinary manner in the use which he has made of it. 
 We take Mrs. Alleyn's Letter first, 
 
 Mr. Collier professes* to give the world a correct copy of 
 this letter; but, on examination, his copy has been found 
 
 * Memoirs of Alley n, p. 62. 
 
OF THE SHAKESPEARIAN CONTROVERSY. G3 
 
 to differ, in by far its most material points, from the original. 
 In his version not only have words been left out and others 
 inserted (we do not here allude to several inaccuracies of 
 minor importance), but one entire passage a most important 
 one, containing a mention of William Shakespeare has been 
 introduced ! 
 
 Subjoined is a correct copy of that portion of the letter 
 to which we allude, accompanied by Mr. Collier's version of 
 it. In italics are given the words, and fragments of words, 
 which Mr. Collier has omitted, and in small capitals those 
 which appear in their place. It will thus be seen at a 
 glance, that there can be no mistake about the matter, but 
 that in reality the passage in question does not exist, and 
 never could have existed, 
 
 " Aboute a weeke agoe there [cam]c a youthe who said he was 
 Ir. Frauncis ChaloFnerJs man .... Id have borrow[e]d x to 
 
 bought have A things for [hjis Mr t liyrn 
 
 Coimnge witJiout . . . token d 
 
 I would have 
 
 <0 1 bene sti 
 
 and inquire after the fellow and said ho had lent hym a horse. I 
 us feare me he gulled hym, thoughe he gulled not A . The youthe 
 what was a prety youthe aud handsom in appayrell, we know not A becamc 
 
 of him Mr. Bromffeild commends hym : he was heare yesterdaye. Nicke 
 and Jeames be well, and commend them, so dothe Mr. Cooko and his \\ < !! 
 in the kyndest sorte, and so once more in the hartiest manner 
 farwclle 
 
 " Your faithfull and lovinge wetfa 
 
 " JOANE ALLEYNE." 
 
 " Aboute a weeko a goe there came a youthe who said he was 
 Mr. Frauncis Chaloner who \vould have borrowed x li to 
 have bought things for * * * AND SAID HE WAS KNOWN 
 
 UNTO YOU, AND ME. SHAKESPEAEE OF THE GLOBE, WHO CAME 
 
 * * * SAID HE KNEWE HYM NOT, ONLY HE HEAEDE OF HYil THAT HE WAS 
 
 A ROOE * * * 80 HE WAS GLADE WE DID NOT LEND HIM 
 
 THE MONNEY * ' * RICHARD JOHNES [WENT] TO SEEKE 
 
 and inquire after the fellow, and said he hau lent hym a horse. I 
 
 fcare me he gulled hym, thoughe he gulled not us. The youthe 
 
 was a prety youthe, and hansom in appayrell : we knowe not what booamo 
 
 of hym. Mr. Benfield commendes hym ; he was heare yesterdaye. Nicke 
 
 and Jeamos be well, and comcnd them : so doth Mr. Cooke and his wiefe 
 
 in the kyndest sorte, and so once more in the hartiest manner 
 
 farwell. 
 
 " Your faithfull and lovinge wiefe. 
 
 " JOANE ALLEYNE." 
 
 It is not our intention to notice all the inaccuracies of Mr. 
 Collier's version, but a few only of the most striking. The 
 reader who is desirous of seeing them in their totality may 
 consult Mr. Hamilton's ** Inquiry* pp. 91-93, where all the 
 variations between Mr. Collier's text and the original letter 
 at Dulwich College are printed in italics. 
 
 In the second line, 105. has been misread as 10/., a thing 
 that certainly betrays no little ignorance, as 1 OZ. in those 
 days would have equalled about 60/. of our present money 
 
A REVIEW OF THE PRESENT STATE 
 
 A strange youth calls on Mrs. Alley n, and asks the loan 
 of 10/. as coolly as he would have asked for as many pence ! 
 
 But the really unpardonable discrepancy in this case is the 
 introduction of the following words, words which are not, 
 and never by any possibility could have been, in the 
 original : " and said he was known unto you, and Mr. 
 Shakespeare of the Globe, who came . . . said he knewe liym 
 not, only he hearde of liym that he was a roge . ... so he was 
 glade we did not lend him the monney .... Richard Jolines 
 \ia:ent\ to seeke ;" while not one of the ten words in this 
 place, which really do exist and are plainly visible in the 
 original document, is to be found in Mr. Collier's version. 
 
 The fact is indisputable that he has put fourteen lines in 
 the space that in reality is occupied by thirteen only in the 
 original ; while the terminations of the third and fourth lines 
 in the above extract are wholly changed, and nine words, 
 which are distinctly legible at the beginning of the fourth* 
 fifth, and sixth lines, are suppressed. 
 
 In defending himself against the charges brought against 
 him in reference to this letter, Mr. Collier, it seems hardly 
 too much to say, is at once evasive and illogical. He says :* 
 " Now the question is, and the only question of the slightest 
 importance (though that is in truth of little moment), whether 
 the name of ' Mr. Shakespeare, of the Globe,' occurred in the 
 most rotten and fragmentary 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/' 
 
 Mr. Collier is correct, no doubt, in saying that the ques- 
 tion is not of the smallest interest as regards the biography 
 of our poet; but, in reference to the trustworthiness and 
 accuracy of Mr. Collier, it cannot but be of the greatest 
 importance that the words should be where he has alleged 
 that he had seen them to be. 
 
 He further states : " I do not deny that it is possible 
 I misread some utterly unimportant letters and words." 
 
 * " Reply" p. 48, 
 
OF THE SHAKESPEARIAN CONTROVERSY. ()5 
 
 Unfortunately, however, not only has Mr. Collier misread 
 what he thinks proper to call " unimportant " words, but he 
 has omitted several which are evident to even an unskilled 
 eye, and has inserted words, indeed whole sentences, where 
 they never could have occurred. But to proceed with 
 his statement. He says : " I am absolutely certain that 
 ' Mr. Shakespeare, of the Globe,' was spoken of in it 
 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 paw the letter, some thirty or even more years ago, the 
 name of ' Mr. Shakespeare, of the Globe/ was not to be 
 traced." 
 
 Now, in answer to this, we maintain with Mr. Hamilton, 
 and so must every other person who is possessed of eye-sight 
 and common understanding, that not only is it not there 
 now, but that it never could by any possibility have been 
 in the place where Mr. Collier asserts it was ; any more 
 than that those words could have been added to the docu- 
 ment since Mr. Collier saw it which have been omitted by him. 
 Under these circumstances, if Mr. Collier could call twenty 
 dead friends, in addition to the one he invokes,* it would 
 make no difference in his favour; facts speak for them- 
 selves, and neither dead nor living can gainsay them. 
 
 Another link one of circumstantial evidence may be 
 added to the argument already adduced. Malone, that 
 careful Shakespearian critic and indefatigable inquirer, had 
 the box of papers which contained this letter to look over 
 and examine at his leisure. Surely, if he had discovered any 
 allusion to William Shakespeare, whose very name would in 
 his estimation have hallowed the paper whereon it was 
 written, he would have made some note or mention of it ; 
 but we turn to him in vain for corroborative evidence of 
 Mr. Collier's assertion. 
 
 A few more words in reference to Mrs. Alleyn's letter. 
 Mr. Collier states f that he carefully enclosed the letter in 
 
 * " Reply? p. 49. 
 
 p. :><). 
 
 E 
 
66 A REVIEW OF THE PRESENT STATE 
 
 paper after he had copied it, and that either he or his now 
 deceased friend wrote on the outside of the paper, that within 
 was a document of value, which should not be roughly 
 handled ; and he asks whether it is likely he would have 
 done so had he purposely misstated the import and contents 
 of a letter that was in a state of ruinous decay ? Would 
 not the natural course for him to pursue 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 dis- 
 appeared as possible? He further asks, If he had mis- 
 represented the contents of the crumbling relic, what was to 
 prevent his rubbing away a little more of the old paper, 
 and who then would have been able to detect the trick he 
 had played ? * Now, the only answer to this is, that true 
 it is, there is in the tin box at Dulwich College a sheet 
 of paper enclosing this identical document, with a memoran- 
 dum written in pencil to the above effect; but, singular to 
 relate, this memorandum is not in the handwriting of Mr. Col- 
 lier, nor yet of his friend Mr. Amyot, as the writer of the 
 article in Notes and Queries has inconsiderately asserted. 
 
 A fac-simile of that portion of the letter which is the 
 subject of the present discussion was made by that careful 
 and expert artist, Mr. Fairholt ; and which agrees verbatim 
 et literatim with the fac-simile made by Mr. Nethercliffe, 
 Junior, as given in Mr. Hamilton's " Inquiry." 
 
 Too much, it may possibly be thought, has been said upon 
 this branch of our subject ; but it is one of so much im- 
 portance in the enquiry, that it could hardly have been 
 dismissed in fewer words. 
 
 To proceed, however, with the other documents at Dul- 
 wich College. 
 
 The next document that calls for notice is a paper in 
 verse, consisting of seventeen lines, called by Mr. Collier 
 
 * It is somewhat strange that, in his earlier answer to Mr. Hamilton, which 
 appeared in the Athenceum, Mr. Collier makes no allusion to the circumstances 
 of his having placed the "crumbling relic" in a sheet of paper and indorsed 
 it with the caution we have here mentioned. The Editor of the Athenoeum 
 was the first to assert in print that the indorsement is in Mr. Collier's hand- 
 writing. 
 
OF THE SHAKESPEARIAN CONTROVERSY. 67 
 
 " The Players' Challenge/' and commencing " Sweet Nedde, 
 no\v wynne an other wager." It was printed by him in 
 1841, in his " Memoirs of Alley v? p. 13. 
 
 A cursory examination of this paper must convince most 
 persons at all acquainted with handwriting of the sixteenth 
 and seventeenth centuries that it is spurious. It is, how- 
 ever, neatly written, and would not improbably deceive a 
 person inexperienced in palaeography. Mr. Collier says :* 
 " 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 re-duplication of consonants, and other points 
 of orthography in it, might possibly raise suspicion." 
 Mr. Collier is right. The facts that he mentions do raise 
 suspicion, a suspicion which we are surprised did not cross 
 his mind when he published the document, and which is not 
 confined to the orthography alone. 
 
 The Letter from Marston, the dramatist, to Hensloe, also 
 printed by Mr. Collier in his "Memoirs of Alleyn," p. 154, 
 is anot.her of these Dulwich documents. " It refers," says 
 Mr. Collier, " to a play by Marston, on the subject of Co- 
 lumbus, of which we have no other authority." In this 
 letter, pencil-marks are visible, faintly indeed, for the most 
 part, though in one or two instances they are pretty distinct ; 
 and not so very faint are they but that in them nearly every 
 word of the letter can be distinctly traced. As to the letter 
 itself, written in ink, it is evidently penned in imitation of 
 Marston's hand. To a practised eye, however, the difference 
 between the genuine handwriting of Marston and this imi- 
 tation is quite perceptible; and there cannot be the 
 slightest doubt that the document is a fabrication. 
 
 The next paper at Dulwich which calls for notice, is a 
 " List of Players," in which Shakespeare's name occurs. It 
 is printed in the "Memoirs of Alley n" p. 68, and Mr. Collier 
 himself admits that it is in a different ink from that used in 
 the document to which it is appended. The document to 
 which the List of Players is attached is genuine, no doubt, 
 and is noticed by Malone in his "Inquiry" (1796); but he 
 
 Reply,'' p. 54* 
 
 Hi 2 
 
68 A REVIEW OF THE PRESENT STATE 
 
 makes no allusion whatever to any List of Players being 
 thereto annexed. However, Mr. Collier, when in 1841 he 
 published the List in question, suggested that Malone's 
 reason for passing it over was, that he intended to use the 
 information contained in it in his Life of Shakespeare which 
 he did not live to publish. 
 
 Mr. Collier's suggestion is by no means satisfactory. It 
 seems little short of incredible that Malone should have 
 passed over such a remarkable paper without some notice 
 of it, if he really had seen it. His was no hurried inspec- 
 tion of the Dulwich papers, for they remained in his hands 
 for several years. It is more than probable, then, that he 
 saw this document many a time, and if so, he could not 
 have overlooked the List of Players attached to it. Be this, 
 however, as it may, the handwriting proclaims the " List of 
 Players " to be spurious. 
 
 We cannot dismiss the name of Malone without calling 
 attention to another subject ; one that certainly seems to 
 demand some explanation at Mr. Collier's hands, if he would 
 prevent the literary world from judging him by his own 
 apparent estimate of honour and morality. In pp. 46, 47, of 
 his if Reply" to Mr. Hamilton, we find the following passage 
 (the italics are our own) : 
 
 " 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 remained in his hands for several years ; that lie 
 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 
 f Henslowes Diary] in such a way that some of the most 
 valuable portions are entirely lost. Even the books the 
 title-pages of which he decorated with the old autographs, 
 had belonged to Dulwich College ; for lie contrived to persuade 
 the Master, Warden, and Fellowes 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 substituted ; hence the bulk of his col- 
 lection. And he must have chuckled amazingly at his success 
 in persuading unsuspecting people to make an exchange oj 
 
OF THE SHAKESPEARIAN CONTROVERSY. 69 
 
 works, ivJdch 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." 
 
 Now, if we know anything as to the force and meaning of 
 the English language, this is a circumstantial description 
 of the thoughts and actions of none other than a violator 
 of the ordinary ties of honour, friendship, and integrity ; in 
 other words, a swindler and a rogue. But be this as it may, 
 it is Mr. Collier's deliberate description of the doings and 
 dealings so far as Dulwich College was concerned of 
 Edward Malone. 
 
 We next turn to page 53 of Mr. Collier's " Reply? the 
 italics again our own. 
 
 " 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. What- 
 ever I may be in the opinion of my adversaries, I feel sure 
 that he was a man of honour and principle." 
 
 How does Mr. Collier reconcile this passage with the 
 distinct statements and the downright assertions as to 
 Edward Malone made by him in the passages that- have 
 been previously quoted ? If the conduct there imputed 
 to him is in any way reconcileable with Mr. Collier's code 
 of " honour and principle," all that we have to add is, that 
 we are far from surprised at the phase this most unhappy 
 controversy has now assumed. 
 
 It is necessary, before concluding these remarks, to bestoAv 
 some notice upon an argument, if, indeed, an argument it 
 can properly be called, which is prominently put forward by 
 Mr. Collier in his " Reply" and, indeed, repeated by him 
 again and again. 
 
70 A REVIEW OF THE PRESENT STATE 
 
 This is the gist of his charge; that his opponents, and 
 more particularly what he calls the MS. Department of the 
 British Museum, of which he styles Mr. Hamilton " the 
 mouthpiece," entertain certain feelings of personal enmity 
 against himself. As to the motive for making this charge, it 
 is obvious. All persons, particularly the English public, 
 have an instinctive love of fair play ; and if it could be 
 shown that a man, entertaining feelings of personal animosity 
 against another, had taken advantage of a plausible oppor- 
 tunity for gratifying his malignity and resentment, the 
 feelings of the community would assuredly be strongly 
 enlisted in favour of the object of the attack. Still stronger 
 would that feeling be, if the person attacked were an aged 
 man of literary acquirements and unblemished reputation; and 
 least of all would such a violation of propriety be tolerated, 
 if committed by one literary man against another. 
 
 It is not too much to say that such assailants, and under 
 such circumstances, would find disfavour from all ; their 
 arguments would be unwillingly listened to, and their con- 
 clusions reluctantly admitted; while any plausible answer in 
 excuse would be eagerly accepted, nor would the public be 
 very eager to inquire into the exact balance of merits in 
 such a contest as this. 
 
 Still, however, in reference to such a case as the present, 
 the public would, in equal justice, deem itself bound to 
 distinguish between the hostility which is the result of the 
 indignation natural to honourable men, who, after a fair and 
 impartial investigation, have had the suspicion forced upon 
 them that a series of literary deceptions had been committed, 
 and that hostility, which, springing from a previously 
 existing enmity, has seized a favourable occasion to inflict 
 an injury upon a literary colleague. 
 
 In the former case a certain amount of hostility not 
 unmixed, perhaps, with different feelings might be fairly 
 supposed to be the natural and inevitable consequence of a 
 suspicion, amounting to reasonable belief, that so grave an 
 offence had been committed. For what graver offence could 
 possibly be committed against the republic of letters than 
 the forgery of documents and annotations connected with 
 the name of a deceased writer, for every fact connected 
 with whom the last century and a half have been athirst ? 
 
OF THE SHAKESPEARIAN CONTROVERSY. 71 
 
 proving a source of error and confusion to the literary world, 
 and this, merely to gratify the fabricator's literary ambition, 
 or to conduce to his profit. 
 
 An offence of this description unsettles literary questions, 
 introduces distrust into the assertions of author?, compels the 
 reader to test for himself the truth of everything he reads, 
 and above all tends to lower the standard of English literary 
 honesty in the eyes of the enlightened men of other nations. 
 Well, then, might the literary men of England, and especially 
 those connected with a department so peculiarly interested 
 in such questions as is the MS. Department of the British 
 Museum, feel indignant, if such a case, in their belief, were 
 made out ; and as readily would the public excuse any one 
 who had advocated the cause of what he sincerely believed 
 to be the truth, with more than ordinary warmth. 
 
 Now, in reference to the language of his " Reply '," Mr. Col- 
 lier evidently had this distinction present to his mind ; for he 
 labours to persuade his readers, not so much that the articles 
 recently written in reference to his Shakespearian discoveries 
 contain marks of hostility, as that those articles are the 
 result of a previously existing enmity. He feels that it is 
 not sufficient for him to show that such a relation now exists 
 between himself and those who impugn his statements, but 
 that, in order to enlist the public in his favour, he must 
 establish the fact that he is the object of a previously existing 
 hostility, and that this is an occasion taken for its display. 
 
 And how does Mr. Collier prove this? Assuming its 
 existence, and reasoning from it as from a fact that is 
 undoubted and undeniable, he would evidently ascribe it to 
 the literary reputation which he has acquired. 
 
 e In his f ' Reply "* to Mr. Hamilton, he says : ( ' 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 excite envy ; and I foresaw, that when Lord Camp- 
 bell, as a kind compliment to that reputation rather than to 
 my merits, addressed to me his letter ' On the Legal Acquire- 
 ments of Shakespeare/ it would materially tend to exasperate 
 
 * Page 6. 
 
72 A REVIEW OF THE PRESENT STATE 
 
 my enemies. It had not long been published before 
 Sir F. Madden, c. 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 expresses it, of subjecting it, with the aid of Sir 
 F. Madden and others, to the most rigorous examination/' 
 He further ascribes the hostility of Sir F. Madden, as will be 
 seen, to other unintentional causes of offence, supposed 
 neglect (pp. 11, 70), and services rendered on two occasions 
 (pp. 28, 29). Mr. Arnold also he assumes to be his per- 
 sonal enemy, and vaguely suggests that it is to something 
 that had passed between him and the father of that most 
 estimable and enlightened magistrate,* that he is indebted 
 for this enmity. 
 
 Occasionally, however, Mr. Collier seems to profess 
 himself at a loss to account for this unmerited hostility. At 
 one time he suggests that the cause of the enmity of the 
 Museum officials may have arisen from his not having 
 especially invited them to see the folio when he publicly 
 exhibited it ; and then, in a similar spirit, he proceeds to say : 
 " 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 pre- 
 sented the Perkins folio to the kindest, most condescending, 
 and most liberal of noblemen, instead of giving it to their 
 institution. 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." In another place J he 
 evidently seems inclined to ascribe their hostility to his 
 having been recommended to the Queen to fill the office of 
 Principal Librarian of the Museum. Again, he suggests that 
 
 * " 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." Reply, 
 page 7. 
 
 f This is a fallacy, seeing that as the Duke of Devonshire's Library was not 
 open to the public, while that of the British Museum was, the former could 
 not, for literary or any other purposes, be deemed as accessible as the latter. 
 Indeed, to place it in the Duke's Library was the very way to hide it from the 
 public view ; for the Duke might with justice have refused the applications of 
 the literary public, a thing that neither Mr. Collier nor the Museum could 
 have done. 
 
 % " Kept?/" p. 30. 
 
OF THE SHAKESPEARIAN CONTROVERSY. 73 
 
 the officers of the Museum may possibly owe him * some ill- 
 will for finding them work, in procuring three large cases 
 of Bentinck MSS. from Germany ; he thus having been 
 " the innocent means of procuring for them occupation." 
 In another place, f he says : " How and why the MS. autho- 
 rities of the British Museum have been heated into such 
 animosity towards me, I cannot pretend to explain. 1 was 
 always on 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 service 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 MSS. 
 which he ought to have known had been dishonestly come 
 by. * * *." " Some men can forget an injury, who 
 
 never can forgive an obligation ;" but still, hej ' ' cannot for 
 a moment suppose that Sir F. Madden and the younger 
 officers of the Museum have taken any antipathy to him on 
 that score/' 
 
 The public, no doubt, will, equally with Mr. Collier, be 
 unable from such causes as these to account for such hos- 
 tility as he imputes to those gentlemen who have done no 
 more than exert themselves to solve the question as to the 
 genuineness of the annotations in the Devonshire folio. || and 
 to prove the existence of certain forgeries in the shape of 
 documents professing to contain the poet's name. 
 
 Should it be urged by Mr. Collier, in reference to these 
 charges of preconceived hostility, that he requires nothing 
 beyond what is contained in the publications against him to 
 prove the truth of his assertion, this will not answer his 
 purpose. It is a mere begging of the question, and in reality 
 leaves the question wholly untouched. Is all this mere 
 Animosity ? or is it the result of an enforced conviction that 
 
 * " Reply," p. 62. f " Reply" p. 28. J " Reply" p. 30. 
 
 || So great an offence is this in Mr. Collier's eyes, that his insinuations as to 
 unfair motives extend beyond the British shores. Speaking of the criticisms 
 which appeared on the publication of " Notes and Emendations" he says : 
 " In Germany both it and I have been violently assailed by critics of every 
 grade ; in some instances with a degree of personal rancour, for which I can 
 only account on the supposition that I have unwarily, unwittingly, and some- 
 times unavoidably, neglected publications which have been sent to me as pre- 
 sents from their authors." 
 
 F 
 
74 A KEVIEW OF THE PRESENT STATE 
 
 the writings and documents in question are forgeries ? If 
 the latter, which, for our own part, we are convinced really is 
 the case, Mr. Collier's charges of hostility are a mere fallacy, 
 and of course the question is left exactly where it was. 
 That question is this : Does the evidence establish, first, that 
 these documents are forged, these annotations modern ? And, 
 next : Is Mr. Collier, according to the existing evidence, so 
 connected with them as to justify something more than 
 mere doubt and hesitation on the part of careful and impar- 
 tial investigators ? 
 
 If we look abroad into the world, we shall find that the 
 charge of hostility, derived in reality from the matter in 
 question itself, but ascribed to preconceived enmity, is one 
 of common occurrence. It is a matter of almost every-day 
 experience for the losing party in a suit to say that some of 
 the jurors were his enemies. The defendant in a Chancery 
 suit is not uncommonly heard to express his surprise that 
 the judge has shown such remarkable animosity towards him, 
 and to profess himself at a loss to know what he could have 
 possibly done to deserve or occasion it. A pertinent illus- 
 tration of this will be familiar to the recollection of all who 
 are well acquainted with the writings of the late Rev. Sydney 
 Smith, who, having severely castigated certain of the States 
 of the North American Union for the repudiation of their 
 public debts, their refusal, in fact, to pay either principal or 
 interest of monies received by them, and of which the in- 
 habitants of. the State had received the advantage was met 
 by various answers ; in most of which, however, w r as pro- 
 minently put forward, by way of exordium, an expression of 
 surprise as to what could be the cause or origin of all this 
 hatred of our American brethren. Sydney Smith's reply is 
 so very germane to a controversy of this description that we 
 cannot but commend it to the notice of the reader.* 
 
 Possibly, however, too much may have been said on this 
 point. Still, as Mr. Collier repeats it so often, and makes 
 it so leading, indeed, so offensive a feature of his defence, 
 a more elaborate notice of it may be justified than in reality 
 would have been due to any real claims to notice that it 
 possesses. 
 
 * Miscellaneous Works of the Rev. Sydney Smith (1859), vol.ii., p. 330. 
 
OF THE SHAKESPEAKIAN CONTROVERSY. 75 
 
 For ourselves personally (and, indeed, for all those who 
 have arrived at conclusions in this investigation similar to 
 our own, so far as the opportunity has been afforded us of 
 penetrating into their thoughts or motives,) we can honestly 
 say that we disown any species of personal animosity against 
 Mr. Collier. Indeed, so far as we ourselves are concerned, 
 we entertain more of another feeling than of the indigna- 
 tion which, as already observed, might naturally spring from 
 a reasonable belief in the truthfulness of the charges made 
 by Mr. Collier's opponents : but still, we feel ourselves 
 bound to say that, convinced as we are that the documents 
 in question are spurious, and the annotations in the folio of 
 modern fabrication, and that Mr. Collier has by no means 
 satisfactorily explained his connexion with them, our sorrow 
 and our indignation are not umningled with a sense of 
 humiliation for the discredit that this controversy, under its 
 present aspect, must of necessity throw on the character of 
 English literary men. It has been no agreeable task for us 
 to take the course we have done ; but we cannot but deem 
 it the bounden duty of every man (and more especially of 
 one who by avocation is devoted to the promotion of litera- 
 ture and the establishing of historic truth), at whatever 
 sacrifice, to do his utmost towards setting in their true light 
 a series of demands upon the public credulity, by which, 
 connected as they are with a name of world-wide renown, 
 the unenquiring portion of the literary world might possibly 
 be most seriously misled. 
 
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