external evidence of their genuineness, though it has not been quite so
satisfactory upon all points, has brought to light so many suspicious
circumstances connected with Mr. Collier's production of them before the
public, that they must be regarded as unsupported by the moral weight of
good faith in the only person who is responsible for them.

Since our previous article upon this subject,[A] nothing has appeared
upon it in this country; but several important publications have
been made in London concerning it; and, in fact, this department of
Shakespearian literature threatens to usurp a special shelf in the
dramatic library. The British Museum has fairly entered the field, not
only in the persons of Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Maskelyne, but in that of
Sir Frederic Madden himself, the head of its Manuscript Department, and
one of the very first paleographers of the age; Mr. Collier has made a
formal reply; the Department of Public Records has spoken through Mr.
Duffus Hardy; the "Edinburgh Review" has taken up the controversy on one
side and "Fraser's Magazine" on the other; the London "Critic" has kept
up a galling fire on Mr. Collier, his folio, and his friends, to which
the "Athenaeum" has replied by an occasional shot, red-hot; the author
of "Literary Cookery," (said to be Mr. Arthur Edmund Brae,) a well-read,
ingenious, caustic, and remorseless writer, whose first book was
suppressed as libellous, has returned to the charge, and not less
effectively because more temperately; and finally an LL.D., Mansfield
Ingleby, of Trinity College, Cambridge, comes forward with a "Complete
View of the Controversy," which is manifestly meant for a complete
extinction of Mr. Collier. Dr. Ingleby's book is quite a good one of its
kind, and those who seek to know the history and see the grounds of this
famous and bitter controversy will find it very serviceable. It gives,
what it professes to give, a complete view of the whole subject from the
beginning, and treats most of the prominent points of it with care, and