a fresh poet, he had robbed it of one, shrunk back from the touch of a second grand impostor--_another knave_ come to forge for the public another _great poet_! It was a new kind of crime, this endowment of the republic of literature with enormous accessions of wealth; and, what was more extraordinary, the endowers were not only denounced as thieves, but as thieves from themselves! Macpherson and Chatterton did not assert that _they_ had written new and great poems, which the acute critics proved to be stolen from the ancients, Ossian and Rowley; that and their virtuous indignation we might have comprehended; but, on the contrary, while the critics protested that Chatterton and Macpherson _themselves_ were the actual poets, and had only put on _the masks_ of ancients, they treated them, not as clever maskers, joining in the witty conceit, and laughing over it in good-natured triumph, but they denounced them in savage terms, as base thieves, false coiners, damnable impostors! Oh glorious thieves! glorious coiners! admirable impostors! would to God that a thousand other such would appear, again and again appear, to fill the hemisphere of England with fresh stars of renown! And of what were they impostors? Were not the poems _real_? Were they not genuine, and of the true Titanic stamp? Of what were they thieves? Were not the treasures which they came dragging into the literary bank of England genuine treasures? and if they were found not to have, indeed, dug them out of the rubbish of the ruined temple of antiquity, were they not _their own_? Did the critics not protest that they were _their own_? What, then, was their strange crime? That they would rob themselves of their own intellectual riches, and deposit them on the altar of their country's glory. Wondrous crime! wondrous age! Let us rejoice that a better time has arrived. Not thus was execrated and chased out of the regions of popularity, and even into a self-dug grave, "The Great Unknown," "The Author of Waverley." He wore his mask in all peace and honor for thirteen years, and not a soul dreamed of denouncing Sir Walter Scott, when he was compelled to own himself as the real author, because he had endeavored to palm off his productions as those of Peter Pattison or Jedediah Cleishbotham.