Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 47, September, 1861 | Page 5

and to shirk by making counter-insinuations against the integrity of his opponents and the correctness of their motives. He attributes to the pettiest personal spite or jealousy the steps which they have taken in discharge of a duty to the interests of literature and the literary guild, and at the risk of their professional reputations, and then slinks back from his charges with,--"I have been told this, but I don't believe it: this may be so, but yet it cannot be: I did something that Mr. So-and-so's father did not like, yet I wouldn't for a moment insinuate," etc., etc.[H] Then, Mr. Collier, why do you insinuate? And what in any case do you gain? Suppose the men who deny the good faith of your marginalia are the small-souled creatures you would have us believe they are, they do not make this denial upon their personal responsibility merely; they produce facts. Meet those; and do not go about to make one right out of two wrongs. Cease, too, this crawling upon your belly before the images of dukes and carls and lord chief-justices; digest speedily the wine and biscuits which a gentleman has brought to you in his library, and let them pass away out of your memory. Let us have no more such sneaking sentences as, "I have always striven to make myself as unobjectionable as I could"; but stand up like a man and speak like a man, if you have aught to say that is worth saying; and your noble patrons, no less than the world at large, will have more faith in you, and more respect for you.
[Footnote G: Such hasty examinations as those which it must have received at the Society of Antiquaries and the Shakespeare Society, where Mr. Collier took it, are of little importance.]
[Footnote H: See, for instance, "I have been told, but I do not believe it, that Sir F. Madden and his colleagues were irritated by this piece of supposed neglect; and that they also took it ill that I presented the Perkins folio to the kindest, most condescending, and most liberal of noblemen, instead of giving it to their institution." (_Reply_, p. 11.) And see the same pamphlet and Mr. Collier's letters, passim.]
But what has been established by the examination of Mr. Collier's folio and the manuscripts which he has brought to light? These very important points:--
The folio contains more than twice, nearly three times, as many marginal readings, including stage-directions and changes of orthography, as are enumerated in Mr. Collier's "List of Every," etc.
The margins retain in numerous places the traces of pencil-memorandums.[I]
[Footnote I: This is finally admitted even by Mr. Collier's supporters. The Edinburgh Reviewer says,--"But then the mysterious pencil-marks! They are there, most undoubtedly, and in very great numbers too. The natural surprise that they were not earlier detected is somewhat diminished on inspection. Some say they have 'come out' more in the course of years; whether this is possible we know not. But even now they are hard to discover, until the eye has become used to the search. But when it has,--especially with the use of a glass at first,--they become perceptible enough, words, ticks, points, and all."]
These pencil-memorandums are in some instances written in a modern cursive hand, to which marginal readings in ink, written in an antique hand, correspond.
There are some pencil-memorandums to which no corresponding change in ink has been made; and one of these is in short-hand of a system which did not come into use until 1774.[J]
[Footnote J: In _Coriolanus_, Act v. sc. 2, (p. 55, col. 2, of the C. folio,) "struggles or instead noise,"--plainly a memorandum for a stage-direction in regard to the impending fracas between Menenius and the Guard.]
These pencil-memorandums in some instances underlie the words in ink which correspond to them.
Similar modern pencil-writing, underlying in like manner antique-seeming words in ink, has been discovered in the Bridgewater folio, (Lord Ellesmere's,) the manuscript readings in which Mr. Collier was the first to bring into notice.
Some of the pencilled memorandums in the folio of 1632 seem to be unmistakably in the handwriting of Mr. Collier.[K]
[Footnote K: Having at hand some of Mr. Collier's own writing in pencil, we are dependent as to this point, in regard to the pencillings in the folio, only upon the accuracy of the fac-similes published by Mr. Hamilton and Dr. Ingleby, which correspond in character, though made by different fac-similists.]
Several manuscripts, professing to be contemporary with Shakespeare, and containing passages of interest in regard to him, or to the dramatic affairs of his time, have been pronounced spurious by the highest palaeographic authorities in England, and in one of them (a letter addressed to Henslow, and bearing Marston's signature) a pencilled guide for the ink, like those above mentioned, has been discovered. These