three excellent officers of the Record Department and Rolls, whose names are also appended to this certificate, and who can only have acted through a laudable desire to preserve the purity of our archives. We can only answer, most sincerely as well as officially,' that any such imputation is as far as possible from our thoughts. Not only are those gentlemen above all such suspicion, but they have no connexion whatever with this unhappy controversy. But we must speak the language of common sense. Sir F. Madden and Mr. Hamilton may have been actuated by a desire to preserve the purity of ar'chives' of which they are not the keepers; but they were certainly also actuated by their desire to strengthen their case against Mr. Collier.

The document has been returned to the State Paper Office with the certificate of spuriousness attached to it, but without the slightest account of the evidence on which this opinion has been formed. In spite of this verdict, to which Sir F. Madden and Mr. Hamilton have pledged whatever reputation they enjoy as palæographers, the authenticity of the paper is still maintained by the best authorities in the State Paper Office to be equal to that of any other document in the collection; and this opinion is curiously confirmed by the fact, that there are spots of corrosion by rust in the paper, which have eaten away not only the paper but the ink, showing that the writing as well as the paper is old. The handwriting is not only not the handwriting of the Corrector, but it is of an essentially different character and period. Moreover, this paper, which was published in 1831, can be proved to have been in the office for a much longer period. Mr. Lemon, the assistant-keeper of the State Papers, and his father before him, have been well known to the public for half a century as the faithful and learned guardians of this class of records; he writes as follows to the editor of the Athenæum':

The petition of the players of the Blackfriars Theatre, alluded to in your note, was well known to my father and myself, before Mr. Payne Collier began his researches in the office. I am pretty confident that my father first brought it under the notice of Mr. Collier.'

Mr. Lemon's recollection and evidence being perfectly clear and positive on this point, we hold that Mr. Collier is wholly freed from the charge of forging this document; and, if so, Mr. Hamilton is bound to admit him innocent of every other charge also. For that gentleman has no doubt that all the alleged forgeries (those of the Perkins Folio inclusive) are by the same hand! But what then becomes of the authority of Sir F. Madden and Mr. Hamilton, who pledge themselves that

the document is spurious? Tried by this test, of their own selection, their evidence on the whole case is utterly worthless.

Lastly Mr. Collier published in 1839, as an extract from an alleged manuscript volume in his possession, a trashy ballad called The Inchanted Island,' the plot of which is similar to that of The Tempest.' Mr. Douce, he says, shook his venerable head, and called it one of the most beautiful ballads he had ever read;' which must have been in some strange fit of after-dinner enthusiasm. Mr. Collier conjectures' that it was written between 1642 and 1660. It has been fac-similed for Mr. Halliwell. Mr. Hamilton says that the writing is suspicious;' of which we say nothing. But we fully agree with him that the intrinsic character of the verses themselves by no 'means serves to allay these suspicions.' It would take a good deal to persuade us that lines, in which it is said of a magician, that.

--

Sooth to say, in dangerous hour,

He had some more than human power,'

6

in which a lady's hair is described as 'like to sunlit gold,' and in which it is said of a father that his little Ida's morning smile made him forget his woe,' were by any very ancient ballad-monger. But we know not whether Mr. Collier in this particular instance is either deceived or deceiver.

We must leave to our readers the further consideration of this most remarkable and as yet unfinished case. We have no hesitation in stating our own opinions concerning it, nor in admitting at the same time that those opinions have not been formed without much hesitation, and that we hold some of them liable to future changes. We do not see any external (that is, palæographical) evidence brought home by Mr. Hamilton or his allies, to show that the mass of the corrections in the Perkins Shakspeare are of modern date. We think the internal (or critical) evidence extremely strong against any such supposition. We consider the charge of forgery, if forgery there be, not established, nor rendered probable, as against Mr. Collier. And if Mr. Collier did not forge the Corrections, it is certainly all but inexplicable how they can be forged at all. As to the charges of forgeries and misprisions respecting other documents, we have said, we think, enough to explain the views which we ourselves entertain. But no reasonable and fair inquirer would pronounce upon them without a far less superficial examination than they have as yet received.

Of the tone and temper with which these accusations are preferred, there cannot be two opinions. Long before any charge

VOL. CXI. NO. CCXXVI.

K K

of forgery had been brought against Mr. Collier, and when his only alleged crime was that of bad judgment, he was assailed by the late Mr. Singer and by many others in language which utterly disgraces all literary controversy. His replies to all these ferocious onslaughts, if often inconclusive, were always those of a gentleman. It is very strange that his assailants should not have perceived, that when these trifling charges deepened into accusations ruinous to the reputation of the accused, or very damaging to that of the accusers accusations

more serious than almost any that can be made out of the precincts of a court of justice, and of a nature as highly criminal as many which are investigated there then their violence of language, which before had been an error, became a misdemeanour. When the endeavour is to drag a culprit to trial, to insult him beforehand is as ill-advised as it is wrong. Taunts, gibes, collateral charges hastily made and hastily withdrawn, the constant endeavour to catch a judgment by omitting known facts for the defence, the mixing together of imputations the most serious and most trifling, the perpetual reiteration of a belief that the defendant is at once the greatest of knaves and the greatest of fools - and all this, scattered weekly to the ends of the world through the newspaper press these are really not the weapons with which English justice allows even criminals to be hunted down. And it is not to be endured that the Master of the Rolls, the Record Office, and the British Museum, should have been made to appear to lend their authority to such proceedings, which they no doubt condemn, as strongly as we do.

It is very much to be lamented that questions of such high interest are not likely to receive any complete solution. Many of those more or less implicated, are dead; others are old, and their testimony becoming day by day more liable to the charge of decay, as well as that of bias, and the animosity which has been aroused is adverse to all fair trial. The ruling of a Court -the verdict of a jury-nay, much better than these, the opinion of unbiassed and capable literary men- even these would probably but strengthen partisanship on one side or other, and not decide these questions authoritatively and finally. The theory which would dispose of the whole question by a charge of wholesale forgery against any individual, requires a far greater amount of evidence before it can be accepted by fair and reasonable men; but at the same time there is a mystery and an obscurity hanging over the Corrected Folio, and some of the Shakspeare documents, which we cannot pretend to remove.

ART. VIII.-1. On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. By CHARLES DARWIN, M.A. 8vo. 1859. 2. On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type. By ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE. (February, 1858.) Proceedings of the Linnæan Society, August,

1858.

3. BUFFON, Histoire de ses Travaux et de ses Idées.

Par

P. FLOURENS, Sec. Perp. de l'Académie des Sciences. 12mo. 1846.

4. Contributions to the Natural History of the United States. By M. AGASSIZ. 4to. Vol. I. ( I. Essay on Classification.) 1857. 5. On the Flora of Australia, &c. By Dr. JOSEPH D. HOOKER, F.R.S. (Introductory Essay.) 4to. 1859.

6. Essays on the Spirit of the Inductive Philosophy_and_the Philosophy of Creation. By the Rev. BADEN POWELL. 12mo. 1855.

7. Hétérogénie, ou Traité de la Génération Spontanée. By Professor V. A. POUCHET. 8vo. Paris, 1859.

8. Recherches sur l'Archetype et les Homologies du Squelette Vertebré. Par Professor R. OWEN. 8vo. Paris: 1855.

9. Address to the British Association, Leeds. By Professor R. OWEN. 8vo. 1858.

10. Paleontology; or a Systematic Summary of Extinct Animals, &c. By Professor R. OWEN. 8vo. 1860.

IN

N the works above cited the question of the origin, succession, and extinction of species is more or less treated of, but most fully and systematically by the accomplished Naturalist who heads the list. Mr. Charles Darwin has long been favourably known, not merely to the Zoological but to the Literary World, by the charming style in which his original observations on a variety of natural phenomena are recorded in the volume assigned to him in the narrative of the circumnavigatory voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, by Capt. (now Admiral) Fitz Roy, F.R.S. Mr. Darwin earned the good opinion of geologists by the happy application of his observations on coral reefs*, made during that voyage, to the explanation of some of the phenomena of the changes of level

* On the Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs, 8vo. 1842.

of the earth's crust. He took high rank amongst the original explorers of the minute organisation of the invertebrate animals, upon the appearance of his monographs, in the publications by the Ray Society, on the Cirripedia, Sub-classes Lepadida (1851), and Balanidæ (1854). Of independent means, he has full command of his time for the prosecution of original research: his tastes have led him to devote himself to Natural History; and those who enjoy his friendship and confidence are aware that the favourite subject of his observations and experiments for some years past has been the nature and origin of the so-called species of plants and animals. The octavo volume, of upwards of 500 pages, which made its appearance towards the end of last year, has been received and perused with avidity, not only by the professed naturalist, but by that far wider intellectual class which now takes interest in the higher generalisations of all the sciences. The same pleasing style which marked Mr. Darwin's earliest work, and a certain artistic disposition and sequence of his principal arguments, have more closely recalled the attention of thinking men to the hypothesis of the inconstancy and transmutation of species, than had been done by the writings of previous advocates of similar views. Thus several, and perhaps the majority, of our younger naturalists have been seduced into the acceptance of the homoeopathic form of the transmutative hypothesis now presented to them by Mr. Darwin, under the phrase of 'natural selection.'

Dr. Joseph Hooker, in his latest work, above cited, writes:

In the Introductory Essay to the New Zealand Flora, I advanced certain general propositions as to the origin of species, which I refrained from endorsing as articles of my own creed; amongst others was the still prevalent doctrine that these are, in the ordinary acceptation of the term, created as such, and are immutable. In the present essay I shall advance the opposite hypothesis, that species are derivative and mutable, and this chiefly because, whatever opinions a naturalist may have adopted with regard to the origin and variation of species, every candid mind must admit that the facts and arguments upon which he has grounded his convictions require revision, since the recent publication by the Linnæan Society of the ingenious and original reasonings and theories of Mr. Darwin and Mr. Wallace.' (P. ii.)

Mr. Darwin claims another convert in an older name of scientific note: in reference to the immutability of species, he tells. us, 'I have reason to believe that one great authority, Sir Charles 'Lyell, from further reflection, entertains grave doubts on this subject.' For our own part, governed by the motto of the parent society for the promotion of natural knowledge, nullius in verba,'