[Footnote L: See Putnam's Magazine, October, 1853, and Shakespeare's
Scholar, 1854, p. 74.]
[Footnote M: See the London Athenaeum of January 8th, 1853:—"We cannot hesitate to infer that there must have been something more than mere conjecture,—some authority from which they were derived…. The consideration of the nine omitted lines stirs up Mr. Collier to a little greater boldness on the question of authority; but, after all, we do not think he goes the full length which the facts would warrant."
Compare this with the following extracts from the same journal of July 9th, 1859;—"The folio never had any ascertained external authority. All the warrant it has ever brought to reasonable critics is internal." "If anybody, in the heat of argument, ever claimed for them [the MS. readings] a right of acceptance beyond the emendations of Theobald, Malone, Dyce, and Singer, (that is, a right not justified by their obvious utility or beauty,) such a claim must have been untenable, by whomsoever urged.">[
Other points sought to be established against Mr. Collier and the genuineness of his manuscript authorities must be noticed in an article which aims at the presentation of a comprehensive view of this subject. These are based on certain variations between Mr. Collier's statements as to the readings of his manuscript authorities and a certain supposed "philological" proof of the modern origin of one of those authorities, the folio of 1632. Upon all these points the case of Mr. Collier's accusers breaks down. It is found, for instance, that in the folio an interpolated line in "Coriolanus," Act iii. sc. 2, reads,—
"To brook controul without the use of anger,"
and that so Mr. Collier gave it in both editions of his "Notes and Emendations," in his fac-similes made for private distribution, in his vile one-volume Shakespeare, and in the "List," etc., appended to the "Seven Lectures." But in his new edition of Shakespeare's Works (6 vols. 1858) he gives it,—
"To brook reproof without the use of anger,"
and hereupon Dr. Ingleby asks,—"Is it not possible that here Mr. Collier's remarkable memory is too retentive, and that, though second thoughts may be best, first thoughts are sometimes inconveniently remembered to the prejudice of the second?"[N] Here we see a palpable slip of memory or of the pen, by which an old man substituted one word for another of similar import, as many a younger man has done before him, tortured into evidence of forgery. Such an objection is worthy of notice only as an example of the carping, unjudicial spirit in which this subject is treated by some of the British critics.
[Footnote N: The Shakespeare Fabrications, p. 45.]
Mr. Collier is accused at least of "inaccuracy" and "ignorance" on account of some of these variations. Thus, in Mrs. Alleyn's Letter, she says that a boy "would have borrowed x's." (ten shillings); and this Mr. Collier reads "would have borrowed x'li." (ten pounds). Whereupon Mr. Duffus Hardy, Assistant Keeper of the Public Records, produces this as one of "the most striking" of Mr. Collier's inaccuracies in regard to this letter, and says that it "certainly betrays no little ignorance, as 10_l_. in those days would have equalled about 60_l_. of our present money." "A strange youth," he adds, "calls on Mrs. Alleyn and asks the loan of 10_l_. as coolly as he would ask for as many pence!" Let us measure the extent of the ignorance shown by this inaccuracy, and estimate its significance by a high standard. In one of the documents which Mr. Collier has brought forward—an account by Sir Arthur Mainwayring, auditor to Sir Thomas Egerton, in James I.'s reign, which is pronounced to be a forgery, and which probably is one—is an entry which mentions the performance of "Othello" in 1602. The second part of this entry is,[O]—