[Footnote 51: Since the appearance of the _eleventh_ edition of this
work, the detection of a singular literary deception has occurred. The
evidence respecting _The English Mercurie_ rests on the alleged
discovery of the literary antiquary, George Chalmers. I witnessed, fifty
years ago, that laborious researcher busied among the long dusty shelves
of our periodical papers, which then reposed in the ante-chamber to the
former reading-room of the British Museum. To the industry which I had
witnessed, I confided, and such positive and precise evidence could not
fail to be accepted by all. In the British Museum, indeed, George
Chalmers found the printed _English Mercurie_; but there also, it now
appears, he might have seen _the original_, with all its corrections,
before it was sent to the press, written on paper of modern fabric. The
detection of this literary imposture has been ingeniously and
unquestionably demonstrated by Mr. Thomas Watts, in a letter to Mr.
Panizzi, the keeper of the printed books in the British Museum. The fact
is, the whole is a modern forgery, for which Birch, preserving it among
his papers, has not assigned either the occasion or the motive. Mr.
Watts says--"The general impression left on the mind by the perusal of
the _Mercurie_ is, that it must have been written after the
_Spectator_"; that the manuscript was composed in modern spelling,
afterwards _antiquated_ in the printed copy; while the type is similar
to that used by Caslon in 1766. By this accidental reference to the
originals, "the unaccountably successful imposition of fifty years was
shattered to fragments in five minutes." I am inclined to suspect that
it was a _jeu d'esprit_ of historical antiquarianism, concocted by Birch
and his friends the Yorkes, with whom, as it is well known, he was
concerned in a more elegant literary recreation, the composition of the
Athenian Letters. The blunder of George Chalmers has been repeated in
numerous publications throughout Europe and in America. I think it
better to correct the text by this notice than by a silent suppression,
that it may remain a memorable instance of the danger incurred by the
historian from forged documents; and a proof that multiplied authorities
add no strength to evidence, when nil are to be traced to a single
source.]