Evening star., 1909-01-24
Chatterton and Stevens


Chatterton and Stevens
CHATTERTON had been far less for
- tunate, succeeding in deceiving only
the stupid merchants of his native Bris-
tol He had little difficulty in imposing
on pewterer who was glad to have
pedigree dug out of the old records in St.
Mary Redcliffe for him; and in pulling
the wool over the eyes of another worthy
citizen, who was writing ponderous his
tory of the town. But he was soon found
out after he sent his supposed old English
poetry to Horace Wa1pole. The elegant
with THE Castle of Otranto," which he
assured the public had been printed at
Naples, in the black letter, in the year
1920" The novel was purely the work
of his own brain, however. This mad
him no kinder to Chatterton, it appears,
and the unhappy boy, younger even than
Ireland, was driven to his last resource,
a bottle of arsenic 1t is hardly just to
group the two names, since Chatterton's
deCeptions were more excusable than
Ireland's, and since his work is as full
of poetic power as Ireland's is beneath
contempt.
One of the men who first suspected Ire
land was the critic Stevens, who was
more or less of forger himself. He
played all manner of tricks upon his
rivals, scratching Anglo-Sax characters
on a piece of stone, for example, and hug
ging himself to see learned antiquary
whom he detested accept it as genuine
relic His most famous hoax was The
Deadly Upas Tree of Java" which was
described in a letter purporting to be
written by Dutch traveller. The public
were astonished to hear of the eff1uvia
of this noxious tree, which through dis
trict of twelve or fourteen miles had killed
all vegetation, and had spread the skele
tons of men and animals, affording a
scene of melancholy beyond what poets
have described and painters dellneated.'
Golfers Discoveries
TRELAND'S successor in the nineteenth
century was a most respectable man,
one of the most learned and painstaking
of the scholars of his time, John Payne
Collier In his anxiety to offer con-
tributions to knowledge, he apparently
could not wait to make discoveries in a
legitimate way. His most famous i'm.
posture was the Perkins Folio" of
Shakespeare He pretended to have dis
covered in this old volume marginal notes
by a man of the seventeenth century. who
had heard the plays in the theater and
was able to correct many of the lines in
the published versions. But these mar
ginaf annotations, purporting to have
been added by Thomas Perkins, were
really the work of Collier himself.
The high reputation of Collier pre-
vented suspicion for considerable time;
but when the authorities of the British
Museum tested these entries under a
powerful microscope, the deception stood
revealed Underneath the ink there
were faint traces of pencil marks, which
showed how carefully the writing had
been sketched out beforehand, in order
to have it quite correct, and in the man
ner of the seventeenth century. Further
investigation showed that Collier had
made forged entries and false references
in most of his works dealing with the
stage history of the Elizabethan period.
All this did not become fully known until
his death His punishment has come in
the fact that nothing he ever wrote can
be trusted, and that his reputation is that
of a clever forger rather than a great
scholar, which it was his ambition to be-
come.
The Wonders of Formosa
THE most picturesque fakes of modern
times belong to the eighteenth CEN
In 70 I