From 1701 to 1721 Collier was employed on his Great Historical, Geographical, Genealogical and Poetical Dictionary, founded on, and partly translated from, Louis Moréri’s Dictionnaire historique, and in the compilation and issue of the two volumes folio of his own Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain from the first planting of Christianity to the end of the reign of Charles II. (1708-1714). The latter work was attacked by Burnet and others, but the author showed himself as keen a controversialist as ever. Many attempts were made to shake his fidelity to the lost cause of the Stuarts, but he continued indomitable to the end. In 1712 George Hickes was the only survivor of the nonjuring bishops, and in the next year Collier was consecrated. He had a share in an attempt made towards union with the Greek Church. He had a long correspondence with the Eastern authorities, his last letters on the subject being written in 1725. Collier preferred the version of the Book of Common Prayer issued in 1549, and regretted that certain practices and petitions there enjoined were omitted in later editions. His first tract on the subject, Reasons for Restoring some Prayers (1717), was followed by others. In 1718 was published a new Communion Office taken partly from Primitive Liturgies and partly from the first English Reformed Common Prayer Book,... which embodied the changes desired by Collier. The controversy that ensued made a split in the nonjuring communion. His last work was a volume of Practical Discourses, published in 1725. He died on the 26th of April 1726.
Bibliography.—There is an excellent account of Collier in A. Kippis’s Biographia Britannica, vol. iv. (1789), where some sensible observations by the editor are added to the original biography. A full list of Collier’s writings is given by the Rev. Wm. Hunt in the article in the Dictionary of National Biography. For particulars of Collier’s history as a nonjuring bishop, see Thomas Lathbury, A History of the Nonjurors ... (1845). There is an excellent account of the Short View and the controversy arising from it in A. Beljame’s Le Public et les hommes de lettres en Angleterre au XVIIIe siècle (2nd ed., 1897), pp. 244-263.
[1] “He is too much given to horse-play in his raillery, and comes to battle like a dictator from the plough. I will not say, ‘the zeal of God’s house has eaten him up’; but I am sure it has devoured some part of his good manners and civility.” (Dryden, Works, ed. Scott, xi. 239).
COLLIER, JOHN PAYNE (1789-1883), English Shakespearian critic, was born in London, on the 11th of January 1789. His father, John Dyer Collier (1762-1825), was a successful journalist, and his connexion with the press obtained for his son a position on the Morning Chronicle as leader writer, dramatic critic and reporter, which continued till 1847; he was also for some time a reporter for The Times. He was summoned before the House of Commons in 1819 for giving an incorrect report of a speech by Joseph Hume. He entered the Middle Temple in 1811, but was not called to the bar until 1829. The delay was partly due to his indiscretion in publishing the Criticisms on the Bar (1819) by “Amicus Curiae.” His leisure was given to the study of Shakespeare and the early English drama. After some minor publications he produced in 1825-1827 a new edition of Dodsley’s Old Plays, and in 1833 a supplementary volume entitled Five Old Plays. In 1831 appeared his History of English Dramatic Poetry and Annals of the Stage to the Restoration, a badly arranged, but valuable work. It obtained for him the post of librarian to the duke of Devonshire, and, subsequently, access to the chief collections of early English literature throughout the kingdom, especially to the treasures of Bridgwater House. These opportunities were unhappily misused to effect a series of literary fabrications, which may be charitably, and perhaps not unjustly, attributed to literary monomania, but of which it is difficult to speak with patience, so completely did they for a long time bewilder the chronology of Shakespeare’s writings, and such suspicion have they thrown upon MS. evidence in general. After New Facts, New Particulars and Further Particulars respecting Shakespeare had appeared and passed muster, Collier produced (1852) the famous Perkins Folio, a copy of the second folio (1632), so called from a name written on the title-page. On this book were numerous MS. emendations of Shakespeare said by Collier to be from the hand of “an old corrector.” He published these corrections as Notes and Emendations to the Text of Shakespeare (1852), and boldly incorporated them in his edition (1853) of Shakespeare. Their authenticity was disputed by S. W. Singer in The Text of Shakespeare Vindicated (1853) and by E. A. Brae in Literary Cookery (1855) on internal evidence; and when in 1859 the folio was submitted by its owner, the duke of Devonshire, to experts at the British Museum, the emendations were incontestably proved to be forgeries of modern date. Collier was exposed by Mr Nicholas Hamilton in his Inquiry (1860). The point whether he was deceiver or deceived was left undecided, but the falsifications of which he was unquestionably guilty among the MSS. at Dulwich College have left little doubt respecting it. He had produced the Memoirs of Edward Alleyn for the Shakespeare Society in 1841. He followed up this volume with the Alleyn Papers (1843) and the Diary of P. Henslowe (1845). He forged the name of Shakespeare in a genuine letter at Dulwich, and the spurious entries in Alleyn’s Diary were proved to be by Collier’s hand when the sale of his library in 1884 gave access to a transcript he had made of the Diary with interlineations corresponding with the Dulwich forgeries. No statement of his can be accepted without verification, and no manuscript he has handled without careful examination, but he did much useful work. He compiled a valuable Bibliographical and Critical Account of the Rarest Books in the English Language (1865); he reprinted a great number of early English tracts of extreme rarity, and rendered good service to the numerous antiquarian societies with which he was connected, especially in the editions he produced for the Camden Society and the Percy Society. His Old Man’s Diary (1871-1872) is an interesting record, though even here the taint of fabrication is not absent. Unfortunately what he did amiss is more striking to the imagination than what he did aright, and he will be chiefly remembered by it. He died at Maidenhead, where he had long resided, on the 17th of September 1883.
For an account of the discussion raised by Collier’s emendations see C.M. Ingleby, Complete View of the Shakespeare Controversy (1861).
COLLIN, HEINRICH JOSEPH VON (1771-1811), Austrian dramatist, was born in Vienna, on the 26th of December 1771. He received a legal education and entered the Austrian ministry of finance where he found speedy promotion. In 1805 and in 1809, when Austria was under the heel of Napoleon, Collin was entrusted with important political missions. In 1803 he was, together with other members of his family, ennobled, and in 1809 made Hofrat. He died on the 28th of July 1811. His tragedy Regulus (1801), written in strict classical form, was received with enthusiasm in Vienna, where literary taste, less advanced than that of North Germany, was still under the ban of French classicism. But in his later dramas, Coriolan (1804), Polyxena (1804), Balboa (1806), Bianca della Porta (1808), he made some attempt to reconcile the pseudo-classic type of tragedy with that of Shakespeare and the German romanticists. As a lyric poet (Gedichte, collected 1812), Collin has left a collection of stirring Wehrmannslieder for the fighters in the cause of Austrian freedom, as well as some excellent ballads (Kaiser Max auf der Martinswand, Herzog Leupold vor Solothurn). His younger brother Matthäus von Collin (1779-1824), was, as editor of the Wiener Jahrbücher für Literatur, an even more potent force in the literary life of Vienna. He was, moreover, in sympathy with the Romantic movement, and intimate with its leaders. His dramas on themes from Austrian national history (Belas Krieg mit dem Vater, 1808, Der Tod Friedrichs des Streitbaren, 1813) may be regarded as the immediate precursors of Grillparzer’s historical tragedies.
His Gesammelte Werke appeared in 6 vols. (1812-1814); he is the subject of an excellent monograph by F. Laban (1879). See also A. Hauffen, Das Drama der klassischen Periode, ii. 2 (1891), where a reprint of Regulus will be found. M. von Collin’s Dramatische Dichtungen were published in 4 vols. (1815-1817); his Nachgelassene Schriften, edited by J. von Hammer, in 2 vols. (1827). A study of his life and work by J. Wihan will be found in Euphorion, Ergänzungsheft, v. (1901).