is not the Department of Public Records likely to come to grief?[Q]

[Footnote P: _A Review_, etc., p. 60.]

[Footnote Q: We could point out numerous other similar failures and
errors in the publications in which Mr. Collier is attacked; but we
cannot spare time or space for these petty side-issues.]

A very strong point has been made upon the alteration of "so eloquent as
a _chair_" to "so eloquent as a _cheer_" in Mr. Collier's folio. It is
maintained by Mr. Arthur Edmund Brae, and by Dr. Ingleby, that "cheer"
as a shout of "admirative applause" did not come into use until
the latter part of the last century. This is the much vaunted
philologico-chronological proof that the manuscript readings in that
folio are of very recent origin. Dr. Ingleby devotes twenty pages to
this single topic. Never was labor more entirely wasted. For the
result of it all is the establishment of these facts in regard to
"cheer":--that shouts of encouragement and applause were called "cheers"
as early, at least, as 1675, and that in the middle of the century
1500, if not before, "to cheer" meant to utter an audible expression of
applause. The first appears from the frequent use of the noun in the
Diary of Henry Teonge, a British Navy Chaplain, dated 1675-1679, by
which it appears that "three cheers" were given then, just as they are
now; the second, from a passage in Phaer's Translation of the "Aeneid,"
published in 1558, in which "_Excipiunt plausu pavidos_" is rendered
"The Trojans them did _chere_." And now will it be believed that
an LL.D. of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a professed student of
Shakespeare, seeks to avoid the force of these facts by pleading, that,
although Teonge speaks of "three cheers," it does not follow that there
was such a thing known in his day as a cheer; that "three cheers" was