IF Mr. Erin imagined that ‘what Malone would say _now_’—i.e. after the discovery of the ‘Lear’ manuscript—must needs be in the way of apology and penitence, he was doomed to disappointment. So far from the circumstance carrying conviction to the soul of that commentator, and making him remorseful for his past transgressions, it seemed to incite him to the greater insolence, just as (so Mr. Erin expressed it) the discovery of a new Scripture might have incited the Devil not only against it, but against the old ones. He reiterated all his old objections and fortified them with new ones; he refused to accept the testimony of the Hemynge note of hand, which had satisfied his friend and ally Mr. Wallis; he repeated his horrid suggestions that the Shakespeare lock was a girl’s ringlet, and, in a word, ‘raged’ like the heathen. Having declined to look at the ‘Lear’ upon the ground of ‘life being too short for the examination of such trash,’ he pronounced it to be ‘plain and palpable forgery.’ ‘Three words,’ he said, ‘would suffice for the matter,’ and published ‘An Inquiry into Certain Papers Attributed to Shakespeare,’ extending to four hundred pages quarto. Whereto Mr. Erin responded at equal length, with ‘a studious avoidance of the personality which Mr. Malone had imported into the controversy,’ but at the same time taking the liberty to observe that in acting his various parts on the stage of life, Fortune had denied that gentleman every quality essential to each, inasmuch as he was a critic without taste, a poet without imagination, a scholar without learning, a wit without humour, an antiquary without the least knowledge of antiquity, and a man of gallantry, in his dotage. This was a very pretty quarrel as it stood; but, far from being confined to two antagonists, it was taken up by scores on each side: it was no longer ‘a gentle passage of arms,’ as the combat _à outrance_ used to be euphoniously called, but a mêlée. Only the ancient rules of a fair fight were utterly disregarded; both parties went at it hammer and tongs, and hit one another anywhere and with anything. One would have almost imagined that instead of a disagreement among scholars it had been a theological controversy. To the statement that no one who was not a fool or a knave believed in the Shakespearean manuscripts, Mr. Samuel Erin, scorning to make any particular rejoinder, replied by simply publishing a list of those who had appended their names to his certificate. To this he added a footnote stating the opinion which Dr. Parr had expressed concerning the Profession—namely, that there were many beautiful things in the liturgy of the Church of England, but all inferior to it, which produced a vehement disavowal from that hot-tempered cleric; he mentioned that he had never stated anything so foolish, and that the words in question had been used by Dr. Warton, an observation which caused some coolness between the two learned divines.