A volume purporting to contain thirty hitherto unpublished Letters of Shelley, appeared a few weeks ago from the press of Moxon, in London, edited by Robert Browning. It appears from an article in the Athenæum that these—letters, and many others recently sold to publishers and autograph collectors, are forgeries. The book referred to is of course suppressed. The Athenæum inquires:
"From whom did Mr. Moxon buy these letters? They were bought at Sotheby & Wilkinson's, at large prices. From whom did Messrs. Sotheby and Wilkinson receive them for sale? 'We had them from Mr. White, the bookseller in Pall Mall, over against the Reform Club.' Off runs the gentle man-detective. 'From whom did you, Mr. White, obtain these letters?' 'I bought them of two women—I believed them to be genuine, and I paid large prices for them in that belief.' Such are the words supposed to have been spoken by Mr. White. The two women would appear to have been like the man in a clergyman's band, but with a lawyer's gown, who brought Pope's letters to Curll.
"It is proper to say thus early that there has been of late years, as we are assured, a most systematic and wholesale forgery of letters purporting to be written by Byron, Shelley, and Keats,—that these forgeries carry upon them such marks of genuineness as have deceived the entire body of London collectors,—that they are executed with a skill to which the forgeries of Chatterton and Ireland can lay no claim,—that they have sold at public auctions, and by the hands of booksellers, to collectors of experience and rank—and that the imposition has extended to a large collection of books bearing not only the signature of Lord Byron, but notes in many of their pages—the matter of the letters being selected with a thorough knowledge of Byron's life and feelings, and the whole of the books chosen with the minutest knowledge of his tastes and peculiarities.
"But the 'marvel' of the forgery is not yet told. At the same sale at which Mr. Moxon bought the Shelley letters were catalogued for sale a series of (unpublished) letters from Shelley to his wife, revealing the innermost secrets of his heart, and containing facts, not wholly dishonorable facts to a father's memory, but such as a son would wish to conceal. These letters were bought in by the son of Shelley, the present Sir Percy Shelley—and are now proved, we are told, to be forgeries. To impose on the credulity of a collector is a minor offence compared with the crime of forging evidence against the dead, and still minor as, in one instance, against the fidelity of a woman.
"The forgery of Chatterton injured no one but an imaginary priest; the forgery of Ireland made a great poet seem to write worse than Settle could have written; but this forgery blackens the character of a great man, and, worse still, traduces female virtue.
"Mr. Moxon is not the only publisher taken in. Mr. Murray has been a heavy sufferer, though not to the same extent. Mr. Moxon has printed his Shelley purchases; Mr. Murray—wise through Mr. Moxon's example—will not publish his Byron acquisitions."
These forgeries seem to us to have been very clumsily executed.
The London Athenæum contains a very interesting letter from Mr. Payne Collier, in which he gives an account of the discovery of a copy of the second folio edition of Shakspeare, with numerous important corrections of the text, apparently by some learned contemporary actor, whose memory of parts, or access to original MSS., enabled him to restore all the readings vitiated by careless transcription or printing. Mr. Collier has such faith in these errata that he does not hesitate to avow that he would have adopted a large portion of them in his own edition of Shakspeare, had they been known to him when that was printed. Of the several instances he offers, this will serve as a specimen: