At the end of the eighteenth century the literary forgers were
especially active. The Ossianic poems, the work of a Highland
schoolmaster, James McPherson, who pretended to have translated
them from the Gaelic, raised a controversy that stirred up
much ill-feeling among the rulers of the literary world of
England. Then Chatterton, “the sleepless soul that perished in
its pride,” as Wordsworth sings, with his remarkable forgeries,
deceived many of the antiquarians, among them Horace Walpole,
and even Dr. Johnson “wondered how the young whelp could have
done it.” Another young forger was Ireland, a most remarkable
impostor, who, at the age of 18, not only forged papers and
legal documents purporting to be under Shakespeare’s own hand
and seal, and so deceived some of the most learned Shakespearian
scholars, but also produced a play “Vortigern,” which he claimed
was by that great bard, and which was actually performed at
Sheridan’s theater. Whether or not Payne Collier tried his hand
at correcting Shakespeare is still a matter of question; if
guilty, his so-called “corrections” of the poet’s text appear
but slight deceptions compared to the forgery of a whole play,
altho these notes proved far more deceptive than the spurious
drama. Mention must be made of George Paslmanazar, who called
himself a native of Formosa, invented a Formosan language, and
wrote a history of the island; of the forgeries of ballads by
Surtees, who deceived Sir Walter Scott himself, and of the
forged letters of Shelley, to which Browning, who supposed
them genuine, wrote an introduction. Instances of this kind of
forgery have been so frequent of late years that editors and
publishers are at last beginning to realize that there is often
less in a name than they suppose.--Boston _Globe_.
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