"It is proper to say thus early that there has been of late years, as we are assured, a most systematic and wholesale forgery of letters purporting to be written by Byron, Shelley, and Keats,--that these forgeries carry upon them such marks of genuineness as have deceived the entire body of London collectors,--that they are executed with a skill to which the forgeries of Chatterton and Ireland can lay no claim,--that they have sold at public auctions, and by the hands of booksellers, to collectors of experience and rank--and that the imposition has extended to a large collection of books bearing not only the signature of Lord Byron, but notes in many of their pages--the matter of the letters being selected with a thorough knowledge of Byron's life and feelings, and the whole of the books chosen with the minutest knowledge of his tastes and peculiarities. "But the 'marvel' of the forgery is not yet told. At the same sale at which Mr. Moxon bought the Shelley letters were catalogued for sale a series of (unpublished) letters from Shelley to his wife, revealing the innermost secrets of his heart, and containing facts, not wholly dishonorable facts to a father's memory, but such as a son would wish to conceal. These letters were bought in by the son of Shelley, the present Sir Percy Shelley--and are now proved, we are told, to be forgeries. To impose on the credulity of a collector is a minor offence compared with the crime of forging evidence against the dead, and still minor as, in one instance, against the fidelity of a woman. "The forgery of Chatterton injured no one but an imaginary priest; the forgery of Ireland made a great poet seem to write worse than Settle could have written; but this forgery blackens the character of a great man, and, worse still, traduces female virtue. "Mr. Moxon is not the only publisher taken in. Mr. Murray has been a heavy sufferer, though not to the same extent. Mr. Moxon has printed his Shelley purchases; Mr. Murray--wise through Mr. Moxon's example--_will not_ publish his Byron acquisitions." These forgeries seem to us to have been very clumsily executed. * * * * *