duction
of many of its specious and ingenious, though inadmissible, original
readings.

[Footnote oo: _Reply_, p. 22.]

[Footnote pp: Rev. N.L. Frothingham, D.D., in the _Christian Examiner_
for November, 1853.]

We see, then, no way of avoiding the conclusion that this notorious
folio was first submitted to erasure for stage purposes; that afterward,
at some time between 1650 and 1675, it was carefully corrected for
the press with the view to the publication of a new edition; and that
finally it fell into the hands of Mr. Collier, who, either alone or by
the aid of an accomplice, introduced other readings upon its margins,
for the purpose of obtaining for them the same deference which he
supposed those already there would receive for their antiquity.
Either this is true, or Mr. Collier is the victim of a mysterious
and marvellously successful conspiracy; and by his own unwise and
unaccountable conduct--to use no harsher terms--has aided the plans of
his enemies.

Mr. Collier's position in this affair is, in any case, a most singular
and unenviable one. His discoveries, considering their nature and
extent and the quarters in which they were made, are exceedingly
suspicious:--the Ellesmere folio, the Bridgewater House documents,
including the Southampton letter, the Dulwich College documents,
including the Alleyn letter, the Petition of the Blackfriars Company
in the State Paper Office, and the various other letters, petitions,
accounts, and copies of verses, all of which are justly open to
suspicion of tampering, if not of forgery. What a strange and
unaccountable fortune to befall one man! How has this happened? What
fiend has followed Mr. Collier through the later years of his life,
putting manuscripts under his pillow and folios into his pew, and so
luring him on to moral suicide? Alas! there is probably but one man
now living that can tell us, and he will not. But this protracted
controversy, which has left so much unsettled, has greatly served the
cause of literature, in showing that by whomsoever and whensoever these
marginal readings, which so took the world by storm nine years ago, were
written, they have no pretence to any authority whatever, not even
the quasi authority of an antiquity which would bring them within the
post-Shakespearian period. All must now see, what a few at first saw,
that their claim to consideration rests upon their intrinsic merit only.
But what that merit is, we fear will be dispu