t; 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
generally with candor. Its view, however, is from the stand-point of
uncompromising hostility to Mr. Collier, and its spirit not unlike that
with which a man might set out to exterminate vermin.[B]

[Footnote A: October, 1859. No. XXIV.]

[Footnote B: We do not attribute the spirit of Dr. Ingleby's book to any
inherent malignity or deliberately malicious purpose of its author, but
rather to that relentless partisanship which this folio seems to have
excited among the British critics. So we regard his reference to
"almighty smash" and "catawampously chawed up" as specimens of the
language used in America, and his disparagement of the English in vogue
here, less as a manifestation of a desire to misrepresent, or even a
willingness to sneer, than as an amusing exhibition of utter ignorance.
In what part of America and from what lips did Dr. Ingleby ever hear
these phrases? We have never heard them; and in a somewhat varied
experience