that other pretender in the (now dispersed) "--Collection"? And was not Samuel Ireland (_nomen invisum_!) the, if not fraudulent, at least too-credulous father of one William Henry Ireland, who, at eighteen, wrote _Vortigern and Rowena_, and palmed it off as genuine Shakespeare? I fear me--I much fear me--that, in the words of the American showman, I have been "weeping over the wrong grave." To prolong these vagrant adversaria would not be difficult. Here, for example, dated 1779, are the _Coplas_ of the poet Don Jorge Manrique, which, having no Spanish, I am constrained to study in the renderings of Longfellow. Don Jorge was a Spaniard of the Spaniards, Commendador of Montizon, Knight of the Order of Santiago, Captain of a company in the Guards of Castile, and withal a valiant _soldado_, who died of a wound received in battle. But the attraction of my volume is, that, at the foot of the title-page, in beautiful neat script, appear the words, "Robert Southey. Paris. 17 May 1817,"--being the year in which Southey stayed at Como with Walter Savage Landor. Here are the _Works_ of mock-heroic John Philips, 1720, whose _Blenheim_ the Tories pitted against Addison's _Campaign_, and whose _Splendid Shilling_ still shines lucidly among eighteenth-century parodies. This copy bears--also on the title-page--the autograph of James Thomson, not yet the author of _The Seasons_; and includes the book-plate of Lord Prestongrange,--that "Lord Advocate Grant" of whom you may read in the _Kidnapped_ of "R.L.S." Here again is an edition (the first) of Hazlitt's _Lectures on the English Comic Writers_, annotated copiously in MS. by a contemporary reader who was certainly not an admirer; and upon whom W.H.'s cockneyisms, Gallicisms, egotisms, and "_ille_-isms" generally, seem to have had the effect of a red rag upon an inveterately insular bull. "A very ingenious but pert, dogmatical, and Prejudiced Writer" is his uncomplimentary addition to the author's name. Then here is Cunningham's _Goldsmith_ of 1854, vol. i., castigated with equal energy by that Alaric Alexander Watts,[2] of whose egregious strictures upon Wordsworth we read not long since in the _Cornhill Magazine_, and who will not allow Goldsmith to say, in the _Haunch of Venison_, "the porter and eatables followed behind." "They could scarcely have followed before,"--he objects, in the very accents of Boeotia. Nor will he pass "the hollow-sounding bittern" of the _Deserted Village_. A barrel may sound hollow, but not a bird--this wiseacre acquaints us. Note: [2] So he was christened. But Lockhart chose to insist that his second pre-name should properly be "Attila," and thenceforth he was spoken of in this way.