Mr. Collier's position in this affair is, in any case, a most singular and unenviable one. His discoveries, considering their nature and extent and the quarters in which they were made, are exceedingly suspicious:--the Ellesmere folio, the Bridgewater House documents, including the Southampton letter, the Dulwich College documents, including the Alleyn letter, the Petition of the Blackfriars Company in the State Paper Office, and the various other letters, petitions, accounts, and copies of verses, all of which are justly open to suspicion of tampering, if not of forgery. What a strange and unaccountable fortune to befall one man! How has this happened? What fiend has followed Mr. Collier through the later years of his life, putting manuscripts under his pillow and folios into his pew, and so luring him on to moral suicide? Alas! there is probably but one man now living that can tell us, and he will not. But this protracted controversy, which has left so much unsettled, has greatly served the cause of literature, in showing that by whomsoever and whensoever these marginal readings, which so took the world by storm nine years ago, were written, they have no pretence to any authority whatever, not even the quasi authority of an antiquity which would bring them within the post-Shakespearian period. All must now see, what a few at first saw, that their claim to consideration rests upon their intrinsic merit only. But what that merit is, we fear will be disputed until the arrival of that ever-receding Shakespearian millenium when the editors shall no longer rage or the commentators imagine a vain thing. * * * * * THE BATH. Off, fetters of the falser life,-- Weeds that conceal the statue's form! This silent world with truth is rife, This wooing air is warm. Now fall the thin disguises, planned For men too weak to walk unblamed; Naked beside the sea I stand,-- Naked, and not ashamed. Where yonder dancing billows dip, Far-off, to ocean's misty verge, Ploughs Morning, like a full-sailed ship, The Orient's cloudy surge. With spray of scarlet fire before The ruffled gold that round her dies, She sails above the sleeping shore, Across the waking skies. The dewy beach beneath her glows; A pencilled beam, the light-house burns: Full-breathed, the fragrant sea-wind blows,-- Life to the world returns! I stand, a spirit newly born, White-limbed and pure, and strong, and fair,-- The first-begotten son of Morn, The nursling of the air! There, in a heap, the masks of Earth, The cares, the sins, the griefs, are thrown Complete, as, through diviner birth, I walk the sands alone. With downy hands the winds caress, With frothy lips the amorous sea, As welcoming the nakedness Of vanished gods, in me. Along the ridged and sloping sand, Where headlands clasp the crescent cove, A shining spirit of the land, A snowy shape, I move: