To the statement that no one who was not a fool or a knave believed in the Shakespearean manuscripts, Mr. Samuel Erin, scorning to make any particular rejoinder, replied by simply publishing a list of those who had appended their names to his certificate. To this he added a footnote stating the opinion which Dr. Parr had expressed concerning the Profession—namely, that there were many beautiful things in the liturgy of the Church of England, but all inferior to it, which produced a vehement disavowal from that hot-tempered cleric; he mentioned that he had never stated anything so foolish, and that the words in question had been used by Dr. Warton, an observation which caused some coolness between the two learned divines.
To say that William Henry, the football between these two opposing parties, enjoyed it, would be an exaggeration; he liked being in the air—and indeed he was lauded by many persons to the very skies—but did not so much relish the being knocked and trodden under foot below.
As a popular poet once remarked of the reviewers, ‘I like their eulogies well enough, but d—n their criticisms,’ so the young man would have preferred his notoriety to have been without this alloy; but on the whole it pleased him vastly.
Margaret was almost angry with him for taking men’s hard words so coolly, but comforted herself by reflecting that her Willie must have a heavenly temper.
‘As for me,’ she would say, ‘I could scratch their eyes out. It drives me wild to listen to what uncle sometimes reads aloud out of their horrid pamphlets.’
To which the young fellow would gallantly reply, ‘To have such a partisan, who would not compound for fifty such detractors? And, after all, these good people have a right to their own opinions, though it must be confessed they express them with some intemperance. I have given them the “Lear“ manuscript, but I cannot give them the taste and poetic feeling necessary to appreciate it.’
What of course had wounded Margaret was not their antagonistic criticism, nor even their supercilious contempt, but the accusations they had not scrupled to make against William Henry’s good faith. One does not talk of the ‘poetic feeling’ of a hostile jury. But love has as many causes of admiration as Burton in his ‘Anatomy’ finds for melancholy; and the young fellow’s very carelessness about these charges was, in Margaret’s eyes, a feather in his cap, and proved, for one thing, their absolute want of foundation. If she did not understand all the niceties of the points of difference between the ‘Lear’ manuscript and the ‘Lear’ as it was printed in her uncle’s quarto edition of the play, it was not for want of instruction. There was little else talked of in Norfolk Street, which was perhaps one of the reasons which made the visits of Frank Dennis still more rare. It was clear that the whole subject of the Shakespearean discoveries was distasteful to him; and it must be confessed that he did not even affect that interest in them which good breeding, and indeed good nature, would have seemed to suggest. As to the comparative merits of the old and new readings, or rather, as Mr. Erin maintained, of the accepted and the original text, he had no opinion to offer one way or the other. ‘I am no critic,’ he would say; ‘so that while my differing from you might give you some annoyance, my agreement with you could afford you no satisfaction’—a remark that did not by any means content the antiquary.
When one’s friends have no opinions of their own it cannot surely hurt them to adopt our opinions, and it is only reasonable that they should do so. It was quite a comfort (because not wholly looked for) to find that when pushed home on a subject within his own judgment Mr. Dennis’s heart in these matters was at least in the right place. Thus, when referring one day to the onslaughts of his opponents, Mr. Erin instanced as an example of their microscopic depravity a certain objection that had been made to the Hemynge’s note of hand. ‘You know, of course, my good fellow, how it has been proved beyond all dispute that there were two John Hemynges.’
‘I was here when Mr. Albany Wallis came and the other deed was found,’ was the young man’s reply.