As for forged letters, they are thick as leaves in Vallambrosa. A few years ago a writer in the ‘Athenæum,’ referring to this fact, remarked, ‘In no age has literature been free from the intrusion of spurious records into the domain of truth. One man forges for the pure love of sport, throws his forged papers into a collection, to be found a hundred years later, merely to perplex the pundits. Another forges to sustain a crotchet or a principle. But the most industrious and the most facile are those who forge for profit. Everyone familiar with old papers is aware that the publication of historical documents--letters, plays, poems, maps, charts, and cylinders--has now ceased to be a learned profession, and has become a manufacture. As the Old Bailey had its tribes of rascals ready to witness against anybody and anything for money, so literature has its race of outcasts ready to furnish any document that may be wanted, from a Wardour Street pedigree, derived from scrolls in a Cheshire muniment room, up to a copy of Homer from a monastery at the summit of Mount Athos.’ Of the above there is no doubt. We may add that, in some cases, letters have been authentic and yet have been no more genuine than if they had been forged. That is to say, they misrepresented the feelings of the writers themselves. We have one sample of something intended in this way, though not carried out, by Crebillon and Sterne. Fun, profit, and mystification were at the bottom of it. Sterne, writing to Garrick in April 1762, says: ‘Crebillon has made a convention with me, which, if he be not too lazy, will be no bad persiflage. As soon as I get to Toulouse he has agreed to write me an expostulatory letter upon the indecorums of “Tristram Shandy,” which is to be answered by recriminations upon the coarseness of his own works. These are to be printed together--Crebillon against Sterne: Sterne against Crebillon. The copy to be sold, and the money to be equally divided. This is good Swiss policy!’ Nothing came of this design, but it illustrates how a letter may be authentic and yet not be genuine. Widows’ letters are rudely said to be sometimes of this quality. This is, no doubt, untrue. The idea, however, is as old as Massinger. That dramatic poet makes his Hilario, in ‘The Picture,’ remark: There be some That in their husband’s sicknesses have wept Their pottle of tears a day; but, being once certain, At midnight, he was dead, have in the morning Dried up their handkerchiefs, and thought no more on’t! But Hilario, who says this, is the fool of the piece.