[47] Ireland's famous forgeries began when, as a young man in a lawyer's office, he sought to imitate old deeds and letters in the name of Shakspeare and his friends, urged thereto by his father's great anxiety to discover some writings connected with the great bard. Such was the enthusiasm with which they were received by men of great general knowledge, that Ireland persevered in fresh forgeries until an entire play was "discovered." It was a tragedy founded on early British history, and named Vortigern. It was produced at Kemble's Theatre, and was damned. Ireland's downward course commenced from that night. He ultimately published confessions of his frauds, and died very poor in 1835.
[48] Fielding, the novelist, in The Author's Farce, one of those slight plays which he wrote so cleverly, has used this incident, probably from his acquaintance with Hill's trick. He introduces his author trying to sell a translation of the Æneid, which the bookseller will not purchase; but after some conversation offers him "employ" in the house as a translator; he then is compelled to own himself "not qualified," because he "understands no language but his own." "What! and translate Virgil!" exclaims the astonished bookseller. The detected author answers despondingly, "Alas! sir, I translated him out of Dryden!" The bookseller joyfully exclaims, "Not qualified! If I was an Emperor, thou should'st be my Prime Minister! Thou art as well vers'd in thy trade as if thou had'st laboured in my garret these ten years!"
[49] The story is told in The Defence of Coneycatching, 1592, where he is said to have "sold Orlando Furioso to the Queen's players for twenty nobles, and when they were in the country sold the same play to the Lord Admirall's men for as much more."
[50] Edmund Gayton was born in 1609, was educated at Oxford, then led the life of a literary drudge in London, where the best book he produced was Pleasant Notes upon Don Quixote, in which are many curious and diverting stories, and among the rest the original of Prior's Ladle. He ultimately retired to Oxford, and died there very poor, in a subordinate place in his college.
[51] Since the appearance of the eleventh edition of this work, the detection of a singular literary deception has occurred. The evidence respecting The English Mercurie rests on the alleged discovery of the literary antiquary, George Chalmers. I witnessed, fifty years ago, that laborious researcher busied among the long dusty shelves of our periodical papers, which then reposed in the ante-chamber to the former reading-room of the British Museum. To the industry which I had witnessed, I confided, and such positive and precise evidence could not fail to be accepted by all. In the British Museum, indeed, George Chalmers found the printed English Mercurie; but there also, it now appears, he might have seen the original, with all its corrections, before it was sent to the press, written on paper of modern fabric. The detection of this literary imposture has been ingeniously and unquestionably demonstrated by Mr. Thomas Watts, in a letter to Mr. Panizzi, the keeper of the printed books in the British Museum. The fact is, the whole is a modern forgery, for which Birch, preserving it among his papers, has not assigned either the occasion or the motive. Mr. Watts says—"The general impression left on the mind by the perusal of the Mercurie is, that it must have been written after the Spectator"; that the manuscript was composed in modern spelling, afterwards antiquated in the printed copy; while the type is similar to that used by Caslon in 1766. By this accidental reference to the originals, "the unaccountably successful imposition of fifty years was shattered to fragments in five minutes." I am inclined to suspect that it was a jeu d'esprit of historical antiquarianism, concocted by Birch and his friends the Yorkes, with whom, as it is well known, he was concerned in a more elegant literary recreation, the composition of the Athenian Letters. The blunder of George Chalmers has been repeated in numerous publications throughout Europe and in America. I think it better to correct the text by this notice than by a silent suppression, that it may remain a memorable instance of the danger incurred by the historian from forged documents; and a proof that multiplied authorities add no strength to evidence, when nil are to be traced to a single source.
[52] These curious passages, so strikingly indicative of the state of thought in the days of their authors, are worth clearly noting. Pilate's challenge to the Saviour is completely in the taste of the writer's day. He was Adam Davie, a poet of the fourteenth century, of whom an account is preserved in Warton's History of English Poetry; and the passage occurs in his poem of the Battle of Jerusalem, the incidents of which are treated as Froissart would treat the siege of a town happening in his own day.
The second passage above quoted occurs in the Vision of Piers Plowman, a poem of the same era, where the Roman soldier—whose name, according to legendary history, was Longinus, and who pierced the Saviour's side—is described as if he had given the wound in a passage of arms, or joust; and elsewhere in the same poem it is said that Christ,
"For mankyndes sake,
Justed in Jerusalem,
A joye to us all."
And in another part of the poem, speaking of the victory of Christ, it is said—
"Jhesus justede well."