l, upon the suggestion of
that gentleman's son, it is serviceable to Mr. Collier to remember it.
By reference to Mr. Grant White's "Shakespeare," Vol. ii. p. lx., an
instance may be seen of a positive misstatement by Mr. Collier, of
which, whatever the motive or the manner, the result is to deprive
Chalmers of a microscopic particle of antiquarian credit and to
bestow it upon himself. In fact, our confidence in Mr. Collier's
trustworthiness, which, diminished by discoveries like these, as our
knowledge of his labors increased, has been quite extinguished under the
accumulated evidence of either his moral obliquity or his intellectual
incapacity for truth. We can now accept from him, merely upon his word,
no statement as true by which he has anything to gain.

[Footnote F: See Dyce's _Strictures_, etc., pp. 2, 22, 28, 35, 51, 54,
56, 57, 58, 70, 123, 127, 146, 168, 192, 203, 204.]

The bad effect of what he does is increased by the manner in which he
seeks to shield himself from the consequences of his acts. He should
have said at once, "Let this matter be investigated, and here am I to
aid in the investigation," Soon after this folio was brought into public
notice, Mr. Charles Knight proposed that it should be submitted to a
palaeographic examination by gentlemen of acknowledged competence; but
so far was Mr. Collier from yielding to this suggestion, that we have
good reason for saying that it was not until after the volume passed, in
1859, into the hands of Sir Frederic Madden of the British Museum,
that the more eminent Shakespearian scholars in London had even an
opportunity to look at it closely.[G] The attacks upon the genuineness
of the writing on its margins Mr. Collier was at once too ready to
regard as impeachments of his personal integrity, 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