FIRST PAGE OF A.L.S. OF DR. JOHNSON TO SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS ON THE SUBJECT OF CRABBE'S POEMS, 1783.
LINES OF THOMAS CHATTERTON ON HORACE WALPOLE, WHICH COST SIR GEORGE WHITE, OF BRISTOL, £34.
CHAPTER III
THE CAVEAT EMPTOR OF AUTOGRAPH COLLECTING
Forgeries and fakes—Cases of mistaken identity—Some famous autograph frauds—Practical methods of detection
The success of an imposture depends chiefly upon the receptive disposition of those who are selected as its victims.—Introduction to "Ireland's Confessions."
Oui, il y a de faux autographes, comme il y a de faux antiques. Mais est-ce-qu'on devra supprimer le musée des antiques parce qu'on a découvert de faux bronzes.—Étienne Charavay, "L'Affaire Vrain-Lucas."
I must resist a strong temptation to enlarge on such interesting topics as W. H. Ireland's wholesale manufacture of Shakespearean MSS.; Thomas Chatterton's ingenious fabrication of Rowley's poems, and James Macpherson's alleged translations from Ossian. The main object of Ireland and Chatterton was obviously to deceive the world of letters rather than the then little-known autograph collector with whose interests I am solely concerned. By the irony of fate, however, there are at the present moment very few rarer or more costly autographs than that of Thomas Chatterton, who might very well have lived for a twelvemonth on the price paid by Sir George White for four or five lines of his handwriting scrawled on the back of a letter. Chatterton died by his own hand, with starvation staring him in the face, but Ireland lived to make money by the "Confessions"[8] of his misdoings, and more than thirty years ago £50 was paid for the scathing letter addressed to Macpherson by Samuel Johnson. The forger of autograph letters for the purpose of entrapping the over-trustful or ignorant collector is the product of the nineteenth century, although some of the French imitations may possibly be a little older. The modern forger obtains important aid from photography, but by way of compensation the enlargement of any given specimen by the same means is invaluable for the purposes of detection. The earliest imitations of autograph letters I have ever seen are of French origin, and are contained in the extra-illustrated copy of Madame de Sévigné's Letters already alluded to. They are frankly labelled as "tracings," "engravings," "lithographs," and so forth, and many of them seem to have been executed on old paper in order to simulate more completely the originals.
A SPECIMEN OF IRELAND'S SHAKESPEAREAN FORGERIES ATTESTED BY HIMSELF.
(By permission of the owners, Messrs. Sotheran.)
The inexperienced collector must, in the first instance, beware of facsimiles of letters which have been published bonâ fide as illustrations of works of biography, and, having been extracted from them, are offered for sale (sometimes innocently) as genuine specimens. The most familiar instance of this is a letter of Byron's addressed to "Mr. Galignani, at 18, Rue Vivienne, Paris." A facsimile of this, with address, &c., was prefixed to an edition of Byron's poems published in Paris. Not long ago I saw this lithographed facsimile figuring as genuine in a valuable collection of holograph letters, the rest of which were above suspicion.
This letter commences with the words:—
"Sir,—In various numbers of your journal I have seen mentioned a work entitled 'The Vampire' with the addition of my name as that of the author. I am not the author, and never heard of the work in question until now," and ends with the sentence, "You will oblige me by complying with my request of contradiction. I assure you that I know nothing of the work or works in question, and have the honour to be (as the correspondents to magazines say), 'your constant reader' and very obedient servant, Byron." To this is added the date, "Venice, April 27th, 1819." There is a well-known facsimile of a letter of Lord Nelson which occasionally does duty as an original. Some years ago I saw it in a catalogue priced at several pounds! It is inserted after the preface in T. O. Churchill's "Life of Nelson," published in 1808, and the paper is therefore not unlike that of the period at which the letter is supposed to have been written, and bears on the back the address, "To Thomas Lloyd, Esq., No. 15, Mary's Buildings, St. Martin's Lane, London." The original would be worth quite ten guineas. Buyers of Nelson letters should remember that this dangerous facsimile begins as follows: "Bath, January 29th, 1798. My dear Lloyd,—There is nothing you can desire me to do that I shall not have the greatest pleasure in complying with, for I am sure you can never possess a thought that is not strictly honourable. I was much flattered by the Marquis's[9] kind notice of me, and I beg you will make my respects acceptable to him. Tell him that I possess his place in Mr. Palmer's Box, but his Lordship did not tell me all its charms, that generally some of the handsomest Ladys at Bath are partakers in the Box, and was I a bachelor I would not answer for being tempted, but as I am possessed of everything that is valuable in a wife I have no occasion to think beyond a pretty face"—and so forth.
If either of these facsimiles had been touched with the end of a sable brush moistened with muriatic acid and water the print would remain unaffected. In a genuine letter the writing if so touched would grow faint or disappear. The same test may be applied to photographs or imitations in sepia. I once purchased a quaint note written by Edmund Kean, of which a reproduction is now given. Nearly a year later I saw an autograph, identical in every particular, offered for sale. I sent for it, and on applying the dilution of muriatic acid test found it to be a copy in sepia of the note already in my possession. The owner of the genuine note had sent it to two or three applicants for inspection. It had been traced over and then worked up in sepia. I once discovered a letter of William Pitt the Elder to be a forgery by the mere accident of the sun falling on it, and showing a narrow rim round each letter. In this case the basis was a photograph, touched up with black paint.
The autograph collector soon becomes accustomed to the appearance of genuine letters, for the creases and stains of time cannot be perfectly imitated any more than the old-world appearance of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ink. Watermarks are a good, but not an infallible, test of genuineness. The thick, gilt-edged letter paper of quarto size used by our ancestors cannot be satisfactorily counterfeited, and the inexperienced buyer should eschew documents of all sorts written on morsels of paper of irregular size, which may have been torn from books, and lack the usual tests of authenticity. Collectors of autographs should bear in mind the facts that "franks" ceased to be used after the introduction of the penny postage in 1840; that envelopes were first used about ten years earlier, and that the letters denoting the various London postal districts did not form part of the postmark till some time after the invention of the adhesive stamp. A forged letter of Thackeray was detected by the appearance of the letter W. after London in the counterfeit postmark quite ten years before it could have legitimately done so. If hot water is applied to a genuine watermark, it becomes clearer and stronger; if to a fabricated one it disappears. The autograph collector should carefully study a book which has quite recently been published on the subject of forgery and fabricated documents.[10] One chapter is devoted to the subject of forged literary autographs, but those who desire to acquire an expert knowledge of this important question should master the whole of its contents, and this is no difficult task, for the volume only contains seventy-seven pages. In proportion to the constant rise in the value of autographs the temptation to forgery increases, and the gradual absorption of genuine specimens is sure to bring into existence a number of shams. As the authors very rightly point out, "It is not surprising the profitable and growing autograph market should have attracted the fraudulent, for the prizes when won are generally of a substantial character, and amply repay the misapplied effort and ingenuity demanded. The success which has attended too many of these frauds may be largely accounted for by the fact that in many cases the enthusiasm of the collector has outrun his caution."
The letters of Washington, Franklin, Burns, Nelson, Byron, Keats, Shelley, and Scott were the first to attract the attention of the autograph forger in England. Thackeray and Dickens have been recently the object of his unwelcome attentions. Most of the Thackeray forgeries, like the example reproduced, are the work of one man, who uses an ordinary pen and has a fondness for half-sheets of paper. His feeble attempts to imitate Thackeray's wit and style are alone sufficient to excite suspicion. If the counterfeit is carefully compared with a genuine specimen like the one given, deception will be impossible. I possess a small collection of forged autograph letters to use for detective purposes, and as a warning to others. There are five of these "duffer" Thackerays amongst them. The forger apparently finds the upright hand Thackeray adopted later in life more to his taste than the less angular calligraphy of his youth. A few years ago the London autograph market was inundated with forged letters of Thackeray and Dickens. At present they are kept out of the light of day, and sold to the unwary in all sorts of out-of-the-way places, often in shops at the sea-side. The Dickens forgeries are generally betrayed by the printed address at the top of the letter being lithographed and not embossed. The gentleman to whom Dickens is said to have addressed his last letter is supposed to have had a certain number of facsimiles made for distribution amongst his friends. These are now used occasionally like the Galignani-Byron or the Churchill-Nelson. It is here a clear case of caveat emptor.
Very often a letter is offered for sale which is in no sense of the word a forgery, but which was never written by the person the buyer supposes. In nine cases out of ten the seller is as ignorant of the true state of the case as the buyer. I allude to letters written by persons bearing the same name, but whose autographs possess a very different value. In addition to the kings and queens whose names are identical, we have two Oliver Cromwells, two Horace Walpoles, two Sarah Siddonses, two Charles Dickenses, and many other "doubles." I have within the last few months seen a letter of the less-known Horace Walpole catalogued as one of the owner of Strawberry Hill, and a letter of Sarah Siddons the younger, whose usual signature is "S. M. Siddons," described as a "long and pleasing" specimen in the handwriting of her mother. In these cases there is no sort of resemblance in the calligraphy of the two persons. The error arises solely from the similarity of the name, and a lack of care or knowledge on the part of the cataloguer. As a matter of fact, the letter of Sarah Martha Siddons is an exceedingly interesting one, and was written about two years before her death under the tragic circumstances graphically described by Mr. Knapp in his "Artist's Love Story." I never saw any other letter of Sarah M. Siddons, and I give it in extenso to show how careful one should be in studying an autograph before purchasing it. It should be remembered that "Sally" Siddons promised her younger sister Maria, who died in 1798 at Bristol Hot Wells "all for the love" of the handsome painter, that under no circumstances would she ever marry him. The letter gives a striking picture of the Kemble-Siddons "circle" at Bath in the first year of the nineteenth century.
Miss Sarah M. Siddons at Bath to Miss Patty Wilkinson,[11] Blake Street, York.
Bath, July 19, 1801.
Indeed my dear Patty I am extremely concerned to hear of your mother's serious illness which you may believe is not a little augmented by the necessity I cannot but feel there is, for your staying with her if she does not soon get the better of this alarming attack, but you know my dear I am by nature (and heartily do I thank nature for it) dispos'd to see the fairest side of things, and I am flattering myself with the hopes that your next letter will bring me good tidings, and that I shall see my dear Patty arrive with my Mother[12] at Bath in less now than a fortnight. Heaven be prais'd, if I should but be well to receive you both, it will be one of the happiest days of my life. Did I tell you how sociable we all were while my uncle and Mrs. Kemble[13] were in Bath? dining every day together, either at our own or the Twiss's house. I never saw my Uncle so cheerful and like other people, and she was quite agreeable and did not overwhelm us with Lords, Ladies, Balls and Suppers. Mrs. Twiss[14] too is become quite kind, nay affectionate to me since I got well, but one smile, one tender word, or attention has more effect on me when I am ill and miserable than all the kindness and attention I can meet with, when I am well, and able (at least in some degree) to return pleasure for pleasure. I have heard Betty Sharp sing several times, and think she is very much improved in manner and I hope her voice will improve in power, at present it is often too weak to have much effect in a large room, crowded with people. She is good humour'd and unaffected as far as I have seen her, and her person as I told you before improv'd most astonishingly. While my uncle and Mrs. Kemble were here, we spent an evening at Mrs. Palmer's[15] which was rather dull, and one at Miss Lee's[16] which was a little better. I am sure they both would have been very tiresome to me if it had not been for my own people. Pray remember me very kindly to poor Mrs. Wilkinson, who is I hope recovering every day—and to your friend Miss Brook. I should like to see Cora in all her glory. I present by you a salute to her Ladyship's divine parts. George[17] will still be with us when you come. Cecy[18] will be gone to school and it is almost time she should, for she is got so riotous nobody can manage her when I am not in the way, for Patty is too good natured ... and tho' she continually threatens to tell me, she never does and Cecilia knows she never will. Adieu my dear girl. I shall hear from you surely in a day or two, till when, I am impatiently
Your ever sincere and affectionate
S. M. Siddons.
Of the forged letters in my private "pillory" that of Keats is by far the most cleverly executed. The facsimiles of Byron and Nelson were never intended to be used for the purposes of deception. The Keats and Thackeray counterfeits, on the other hand, are the work of a professional fabricator of spurious autographs. In the Keats letters (dated Wentworth Place, Hampstead, December 8, 1818) the postmarks, the creases, the faded colour of the paper, and the seal with the clasped hands and motto are all carefully imitated, but it would not for a moment deceive an experienced hand. Collectors should carefully examine all Keats letters offered for sale—particularly those addressed to "My dear Woodhouse." The same remark applies to correspondence by Burns, Scott, Shelley, and Byron, for those much-prized and eagerly-sought-after letters have been each in turn the subject of ingenious and carefully prepared forgeries. The Byron forger (who claimed relationship with the poet) escaped the punishment he richly merited, but the wholesale manufacturer of Burns and Scott MSS. was sent to jail for a twelvemonth.
The most extraordinary case in the annals of autograph forgery occurred in France—the country par excellence of cunningly devised facsimiles—on the eve of the Franco-Prussian War. It is known as the Affaire Vrain-Lucas, and an excellent account of it was published at the time by M. Étienne Charavay.[19] Vrain-Lucas was a needy adventurer; Michel Chasles was a scientist of European reputation. Incredible as it may appear, Vrain-Lucas, in the course of a few years, induced one Chasles to purchase from him at the aggregate price of about £6,000 no less than 27,000 autographs, nearly the whole of which were forgeries of the most audacious description. Vrain-Lucas bestowed on his counterfeits little of the care and attention to detail which characterises some of the Keats, Byron, Shelley, and Scott forgeries. Beginning with a supposed correspondence between the youthful Newton and Pascal, which Sir David Brewster proved conclusively to be impossible, he proceeded to fabricate letters of Rabelais, Montesquieu, and La Bruyère. Before he had finished M. Chasles became the possessor of letters in French and written on paper made in France of Julius Cæsar, Cleopatra, Mary Magdalene, and even of Lazarus, after his resurrection. On February 16, 1870, Vrain-Lucas was brought before a Paris Criminal Court (Tribunal Correctionnel). Amongst the forged MSS. produced on behalf of the prosecution were 5 letters of Abélard, 5 from Alcibiades to Pericles, 181 of Alcuin, 1 of Attila to a Gallic general, 6 of Alexander the Great to Aristotle, to say nothing of examples of the private correspondence of Herod, Pompey, Charles Martel, Judas Iscariot, Mary Magdalene, Sapho, Pontius Pilate, and Joan of Arc. Another long alphabetical list of these fictitious rariora began with Agnès Sorel, Anacreon, and the Emperor Adrian, and ended with St. Theresa, Tiberius, Turenne, and Voltaire.
Here is a delicious example of this farrago of transparent fraud.
Letter of Queen Cleopatra to Julius Cæsar.
Cléopatre royne à son très amé Jules César, Empereur.
Mon très amé, nostre fils Césarion va bien. J'espère que bientôt il sera en estat de supporter le voyage d'icy à Marseilles, où j'ai besoin de le faire instruire tant à cause de bon air qu'on y respire et des belles choses qu'on y enseigne. Je vous prins donc me dire combien de temps encore resterez dans ces contrées, car j'y veux conduire moy même nostre fils et vous prier par icelle occasion. C'est vous dire mon très amé le contentement que je ressens lorsque je me trouve près de vous, et ce attendant, je prins les dieux avoir vous en consideration. Le xi Mars l'an de Rome VCCIX.(!)
And next came a safe-conduct pass written by Vercingetorix in favour of "the young Trogus Pompeus on a secret mission to Julius Cæsar"! Vrain-Lucas was promptly sentenced to two years' imprisonment for fraud, together with a fine of 500 francs and the costs of the trial. The only excuse for M. Michel Chasles, mathematician of renown and Member of the Academy of Sciences, is to be found in his numerous preoccupations and advanced age. He was seventy-six in 1870.
In England the Affaire Vrain-Lucas has to some extent its counterpart in the literary forgery carried out with consummate skill by Dr. Constantine Simonides, who managed to deceive that too ardent collector, Sir Thomas Phillipps, with such tempting rarities from a monastery on Mount Athos as part of the original Gospel of St. Matthew, the Proverbs of Pythagoras, or a copy of Homer written on serpent's skin. But enough has been said of these literary frauds.
There is, however, one more class of forged autographs. I refer to letters fabricated in order to injure another, or in furtherance of some political object. The Parnell letters, forged twenty years ago by Richard Pigott, belonged to this class, but they raised many of the questions which belong to forgeries of autographs. I was lately shown a forged letter of Napoleon III., supposed to have been written in 1848, which had evidently been fabricated many years later, possibly in 1865, in order to discredit him when the Second Empire began to lose its popularity. According to the document he had ordered the assassination of some associate suspected of treason. Not only was the imitation of the calligraphy of Napoleon III. faulty in many respects, but the signature, "Napoleon Bonaparte," at once betrayed the falsity of the document. It was, curiously enough, enclosed in an official envelope of Prince Jérôme Bonaparte's addressed to Jules Favre!
The best-known dealers in autographs always guarantee what they sell, and will readily take back any doubtful specimen. In the early stage of autograph collecting it is a manifest advantage to confine one's transactions to men of this class. Whenever the origin of an autograph is suspicious or mysterious, it is always safest to obtain expert opinion. As M. Charavay points out in dealing with the Affaire Vrain-Lucas, the question of the source from which an article comes is often of capital importance. Never omit to read carefully any given letter, and consider it from an historical point of view, as well as a mere specimen of handwriting. If M. Michel Chasles had done this he would have saved his 140,000 francs. If the first Newton letter he purchased had been submitted to the historical test, he would have discovered that at the time the philosopher was supposed to discuss problems of the greatest abstruseness he was only three years old. It was on this deal that Vrain-Lucas built up his mountain of successful fraud. Bear in mind all that has been said of watermarks, postmarks, the shape and quality of paper, &c. Avoid notes written on scraps of paper and ragged half-sheets. If you suspect a letter to be a facsimile of some sort, touch the writing gently with diluted muriatic acid. Forgeries effected by the use of water-colour paint yield at once to the application of hot water. As yet the application of the useful maxim of caveat emptor is only necessary in the case of comparatively rare autographs. Letters of no great intrinsic value have as yet not proved remunerative to the forger, but it by no means follows that this will always remain so.
CHAPTER IV
SOME FAMOUS AUTOGRAPH "FINDS"
Personal reminiscences and experiences
No pursuit is more exciting than that of Autographs.—The Archivist, 1888.
If autograph collecting is, as Mr. Joline defines it, "one of the gentlest of emotions," it certainly gives its votaries occasional moments of harmless excitement. Many of my readers will doubtless remember the faded handwriting on the battledores of our childhood, which, it may be presumed, represented the periodical clearings-out of lawyers' offices; but it requires a considerable stretch of the imagination to credit the presence of a portion of one of the copies of the Magna Charta on a drum-head, although the anecdote finds its place in all autograph handbooks. Ample evidence, however, exists of the strong natural affinity which once existed between ancient documents and the callings of the grocer and the fishmonger, but the use for old paper in this connection has almost entirely gone out of fashion, and the greater part of the discarded MSS. go straight to the pulp-mills for the purposes of reconversion. I will not attempt to disguise my envy of the pleasurable sensations Dr. Raffles must have experienced when he picked up the original account of the expenses incurred at the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, duly attested by Burleigh, for eighteenpence at a book-stall on Holborn Hill. Almost equally lucky was the discoverer, on a printing-house file at Wrexham, of the MS. of Bishop Heber's famous missionary hymn, which not very long ago fetched forty guineas at Sotheby's; and still more so the traveller who reclaimed the whole of the forty years' correspondence between James Boswell and the Rev. W. J. Temple from the proprietor of a Boulogne fish-shop.
As the value of autographs becomes more and more widely known, and the search for them becomes keener, chances of important "finds" become rarer, but the possibilities of this kind of treasure-trove are by no means exhausted. English MSS. of great interest and value continually come to light abroad. Letters of the early Reformers often turn up in Holland. Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester, sent the whole of his MSS. to his friend Bullinger, and as yet only a single letter of Tyndall has ever come to light. Others, in all human probability, are hidden away in the bahuts and presses of the Low Countries, where letters of the Duke of Marlborough are not unfrequently offered for sale. Fine Stuart autographs constantly turn up both in Germany and Rome. It was in the Eternal City that the priceless MSS. of Cardinal York were offered for sale at the modest price of £20. The English collector cannot too carefully examine the catalogues regularly issued by foreign dealers. I have already alluded to my discovery of the marriage settlement of Pamela FitzGerald and the sixteenth-century deed relating to a French commission for the colonisation of Canada. It was in a Paris price-list that I came across the following extraordinary letter of Sir Humphry Davy on the subject of his quarrel with George Stephenson:—
Sir Humphry Davy to John Buddle, Esq., Wallsend, Newcastle.
London, February 8, 1817.
Dear Sir,—Newman appears dilatory and has not yet made the apparatus to my mind; but I hope soon to send it you and to give you your new right. I hope no one will try expts with platinum in explosive atmospheres till my paper is published for if fine wire is used and suffered to hang out of the lamp so as to ignite to whiteness in the external air explosion will follow; but by the most simple precaution security is absolute. Stevenson's Pamphlet has proved to the satisfaction of every person who has looked at it in London, that he endeavoured to steal from what he had heard of my researches, safety tubes and apertures: no one could have established his piracy so effectively as himself.
It is stated in one of these malignant advertisements which are below my contempt that I was in the coal district in the end of September 1815. Whereas I left it two days after I saw you at Wallsend which I think was the 23rd or 24th of August and went to Bishop Auckland where I stayed only three days and I spent the greater part of the month of September with Lord Harewood and was in London working in my Laboratory early in October and had discovered several apertures and tubes in the middle of last month whilst Mr. Stevenson's absurd idea of admitting Hydrogen in undetached portions by a slider was fermenting in his mind. I certainly never thought of employing capilliary [sic] tubes. My tubes were merely safe tubes for I knew perfectly well and have proved by expts that no lamp could be fed on air through real capilliary tubes. To make a lamp that will burn on three capilliary tubes is as impossible as to make it burn in a closed decanter. Stevenson's capilliary tubes are evidently stolen from what Mr. Hodgson communicated early in November of my small safe tubes and made capilliary to suit Mr. Brandlings marvellous discovery that wire gauze is the extremity of capilliary tubes.
I am my dear Sir,
Very sincerely yours,
H. Davy.
A specimen of an advertisement suited to Mr. W. Brandling.
Aladdin should sign his name Assassin for he endeavours to stab in the dark. An assassin is a proper associate for a private purloiner. One may attempt to murder while the other carries off the plunder. Mr. W. J. Brandling must be ashamed of such friends as Aladdin and Fair play, at least he cannot wish to be seen in public with them even though he should love them as dearly as himself.
Truth.
One suited to Stevenson.
Mr. George Stevenson has changed his note from capilliary tubes to small tubes. No one can doubt that he pilfered these from Mr. Hodgson's communication of Sir H. Davy's discoveries. His original principle to admit Hydrogen in small detached portions (detached by a slider) is now kept out of sight. A man who in the face of the whole world and in open day light steals the safety trimmer and a safe top in Killingworth Colliery and in the dark may endeavour to steal safety apertures and tubes. But does he now know what is a safe aperture? Let those people who use his lamp, his capilliary tube lamp, look to themselves.
Vindex.
It is fit that great ingratitude and little malevolence should be united in the same cause, fortunately in this case they are associated with great ignorance.
From the same source came the correspondence between Lord Brougham and his friend Arago, in the course of which the ex-Chancellor of Great Britain proposed to abandon his own nationality, and, if elected, take his seat in the French Assembly.
TWO PAGES OF A LETTER BY LORD BROUGHAM TO E. ARAGO, OFFERING TO BECOME A NATURALISED FRENCHMAN AND A CANDIDATE FOR THE FRENCH CHAMBERS.
There is scarcely a country house or muniment-room in England which may not afford a happy hunting-ground to the collector. It is only quite lately missing originals of the Paston Letters (lost ever since 1789) were recovered in the library of the descendants of Pitt's friend and literary executor, Bishop Pretyman-Tomline. Although Moore, Murray, and Hobhouse burned one copy of Byron's MS. autobiography in 1824, a duplicate is supposed to be in existence, but its present whereabouts is unknown. In a quiet corner of the Harcourt Library at Nuneham, Whitelock's MS. was found quite unexpectedly, and Burckhardt's journal of the Euphrates Expedition of 1811, and the MSS. of William Oldys are still missing. A bundle of genuine Keats letters was disinterred at Melbourne, and the letters of the Rev. George Crabbe to Miss Elizabeth Charter, now in my possession, sojourned for many years in the Antipodes.
Within the last half-century letters of Addison, Prior, and Mordaunt Earl of Peterborough, and other MSS. of great value, were saved from imminent destruction in a manor house, near Llangollen.
It was only seventy years ago that a dealer in Hungerford Market, named Jay, purchased at £7 a ton a large accumulation of "waste-paper" from the Somerset House authorities. By the merest accident it transpired that amongst the MSS. thus unceremoniously treated were Exchequer Office Accounts of the reign of Henry VII., Secret Service Accounts signed by Eleanor Gwynne, and Wardrobe Accounts of Queen Elizabeth. Several bundles of parchments were sold by Jay to a Fleet Street confectioner, and turned into jelly, before any suspicion arose as to their possible value or importance. It was seventeen years later than this, in 1857, that three hundred tons of papers, including the records of the Indian Navy, went from the old India House to the paper-mill. Comparatively few of the Jay MSS. were recovered, for three tons of paper which remained untouched were accidentally burned.
There is no more picturesque incident in the annals of literary discovery than Sir H. Maxwell Lyle's account of his "find" in a loft at Belvoir, the clue to which was afforded by a faded label on a rusty key. "The disturbance of the surface," we are told, "caused a horrible stench, and it soon became evident that the loft had been tenanted by rats, who had done lasting damage to valuable MSS. by gnawing and staining them. Some documents had been reduced to powder, others had lost their dates or their signatures. The entire centre of a long letter in the hand of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, had entirely disappeared. Those that remained were of a very varied character. A deed of the time of Henry II. was found among some granary accounts of the eighteenth century, and gossiping letters of the Court of Elizabeth among modern vouchers. Letters to Henry Vernon of Haddon from the Duke of Clarence, the Earl of Warwick, and Kings Edward IV., Richard III., and Henry VII., written on paper and folded very small, lay hidden between large leases engrossed on thick parchment."
The loft at Belvoir is certainly not the only place in the United Kingdom where autographic treasure-trove lies hid, and no opportunity should be missed of turning over collections of MSS., when the occasion presents itself. Some five years ago an entry in one of the catalogues of Mr. B. Dobell, of 77, Charing Cross Road, led me to become the possessor of the holograph project for the Defence of England drawn up in 1803-5 by General Dumouriez, on behalf of the last Pitt Administration. The MS. covers nearly four hundred pages, and is carefully bound in white vellum. Every page of it is in Dumouriez's handwriting. From first to last the work done by Dumouriez cost the Government quite £20,000. Only fragments of the scheme exist in the archives of the War Office. This book contains the project in its entirety. It cost me twenty-seven shillings, and formed the basis of a book written in collaboration with Dr. Holland Rose.[20] I have certainly been fortunate in acquiring a great many unknown documents relating to Napoleon and the Napoleonic wars. While rummaging amongst the miscellaneous papers in the possession of Mr. George Mackey, the well-known Birmingham antiquary, I lighted on the whole correspondence between Lord Cawdor and the Duke of Portland relating to the landing in February, 1797, of the French "Black Legion" under Tate at Fishguard, then an almost entirely unknown Welsh fishing village, and now transformed by the Great Western Railway into an important port-of-call. By the kind permission of Mr. J. C. Inglis, General Manager of the G.W.R., a reproduction is now given of the important Cawdor letter first published in the Company's travel-books, "The Country of Castles." The unexpected recovery of these MSS. enabled me to give an exhaustive account of the romantic occurrence with which they deal in "Napoleon and the Invasion of England."[21]
ORIGINAL DISPATCH OF LORD CAWDOR TO DUKE OF PORTLAND DESCRIBING THE LANDING AND SURRENDER OF THE FRENCH AT FISHGUARD, FEBRUARY, 1797.
(By permission of the G.W.R.)
But these were not the only discoveries I made in Mr. Mackey's autographic store. I came upon a number of the original drafts of unpublished patriotic songs by Charles Dibdin, including three in honour of Trafalgar, of which the following is a specimen:—
For some unaccountable reason the commonplace book of the unofficial laureate of the Navy had drifted to Birmingham. It was found by me in the same bin of literary odds and ends as the Cawdor dispatches, which obviously ought to have been in the Home Office or the Record Office. At the same time and place I lighted on the letters of Colonel Digby, the "Mr. Fairly," of Fanny Burney's Journal, to the beautiful sisters Margaret and Isabella Gunning, the first of whom he afterwards married, thereby (if the Court gossip of the day may be trusted) sorely disappointing the literary Assistant-Keeper of the Royal Robes.
It was from Mr. Dobell that I obtained another of the MSS. in my collection which I specially prize—I allude to the holograph copy of Mrs. Robinson's "Memoirs," written nearly entirely on the covering sheets of old letters upon which one reads the signatures of such important and fashionable personages as the Duke of Clarence, Duchesses of Ancaster and Dorset, the Earl of Jersey, the Marquis of Lothian, the Duke of Grafton, and so forth. It is also curious to trace the frequent flittings of the unfortunate "Perdita," the early love of the Prince described in bitter irony as "the first gentleman in Europe." From Berkeley Square she moves to Clarges Street, and thence in rapid succession to Piccadilly, Curzon Street, St. James's Place, Hill Street, Stanhope Street, and South Audley Street. Now she is at the Ship Inn at Brighton; now at the Hôtel de Russie and the Hôtel de Chartres at Paris; now at No. 10, North Parade, Bath. One or two letters seem to have been addressed to Englefield Cottage, where she died. On an ivy-grown tomb in Old Windsor churchyard one can still decipher Samuel Pratt's lines beginning:—
From this MS. the "Story of Perdita and Florizel" may some day be re-written or re-edited.
By the kindness of Dr. Scott I added to my collection a genuine letter of great Shakespearean interest, for it is addressed to Edward Alleyn, the Founder of Dulwich College, by William Wilson, one of the actors in Shakespeare's troop at the Fortune Theatre. It runs as follows:—
To my most dear and especial good friend Mr. Edward
Alleyn at Dulwich.
Right worshipful, my humble duty remembered hoping in the Almighty that your health and prosperity, which on my knees I beseech Him long to continue, for the many favours which I have from time to time received. My poor ability is not in the least degree able to give you satisfaction unless as I and mine have been bound to you for your many kindnesses so will we during life pray for your prosperity. I confess I have found you my chiefest friend in the midst of my extremities which makes me loth to press or request your favour any further, yet for that I am to be married on Sunday next and your kindness may be a great help and furtherance unto me towards the raising of my poor and deserted estate I am enforced once again to entreat your worship's furtherance in a charitable request which is that I may have your worship's letter to Mr. Dowton and Mr. Edward Juby to be a means that the company of players of the Fortune [may] either offer at my wedding at St. Saviour's Church or of their own good nature bestow something upon me on that day and as ever I and mine will not only rest bounden unto yourself but continually pray for your worship's health with increase of all happiness long to continue. I hope of your worship's favour herein. I humbly take my leave. Resting your Worship's during life to be commanded
William Wilson.
From the registers of St. Saviour's, Southwark, it is clear that Wilson's marriage took place there on Sunday, November 2, 1617, about eighteen months after Shakespeare's death. Dowton, like Farren, is an hereditary theatrical name, and the Wilson letter reveals another actor Dowton, probably an ancestor of the Dowtons of a later time. Dr. Wallace, the erudite discoverer of the new Shakespeare document at the Record Office, writes me that he considers the letter of William Wilson an excellent specimen of the epistolary style of Shakespeare's time, and of singular interest to Shakespearean students.
Some of my most interesting "finds" are now placed in my Napoleonic collection, which I have almost doubled in extent since the publication of "Collectanea Napoleonica."[23] For £5 I obtained, some five years ago at Sotheby's, the letter of 24 4to pages in which Sir Stamford Raffles describes his visit to St. Helena and his interview with Napoleon. As I received a very substantial sum for permission to reproduce a portion of it in a daily paper, this interesting and valuable MS. cost me nothing. At the Bunbury sale a great many letters of historical importance fetched a comparatively low price. It was at this sale that Mr. Frank Sabin bought the second and more lengthy letter from George Crabbe to Edmund Burke now in my possession. It was at the Bunbury "dispersal" that the late Mr. Frederick Barker bought for me the extraordinary official letter and holograph proclamation to the Vendéans penned by Louis Larochejaquelein on June 2, 1815, an hour or two before his death. These documents would certainly have fetched five times the price I paid for them in Paris, where I had to pay £10 for a letter of his more famous brother Henry, killed in 1794. I also purchased at the Bunbury sale two long letters of C. J. Fox to his uncle, General Fox, and a confidential letter of Earl Bathurst giving Bunbury his opinion of Gourgaud, and enclosing four sheets of a private letter from Sir Hudson Lowe. The companionship of autographs is curious. In a letter of the Marquis Montchenu, the garrulous French Commissioner at St. Helena, I found an autograph of Sir Hudson Lowe, written in 1780 at the London Inn, Exeter, when he was a boy-ensign in the Devon Militia! It was Montchenu who caused a sensation at the Courts of the Allied Powers by declaring that Lowe was about to make Napoleon the godfather of his son, who in 1857 was one of the garrison in the Lucknow Residence. In June, 1906, M. Noël Charavay bought for me at the Dablin sale a number of Napoleonic rariora, amongst them the Longwood Household Expenses Book kept by Pierron, the maître d'hôtel, between March, 1818, and April 30, 1821. The entries are always countersigned by Montholon, and in many cases are controlled by Napoleon, who frequently made calculations as to the relative value of pounds and shillings in francs. All these papers will, doubtless, be useful to some one who desires to say the last word on the Last Phase, and I am very grateful to Mr. Frank Sabin, who procured for me the original copy of the elaborately-bound "Last Reign of Napoleon," which Mr. J. C. Hobhouse, afterwards Lord Broughton, sent out to Sir Hudson Lowe for presentation to Napoleon, but which was never given to him. On the flyleaf the author copied out a suggestive quotation from Tacitus. The romance of these volumes belongs rather to the subject of extra-illustration, which I hope to deal with in a future work. I have already pointed out the utility of this interesting pursuit for the proper preservation of valuable autographs. In America, where so many collectors believe that "the political is ephemeral and the literary eternal," thousands of autographs are inserted in as many books, to which the special charm and value of "association" is thus given. I need not say that I have placed a characteristic John Cam Hobhouse letter in the second volume of this unique copy of "The Last Reign of Napoleon." Some two years since I obtained through Messrs. Maggs, of 109, Strand, two very interesting MSS. connected with the Irish Rebellion of 1798. One of these is the Camolin Cavalry Detail Book, May 25-October 8, 1798, and the other is made up of a collection of the letters written between 1796 and 1815 by Arthur, Earl of Mount Norris, a Royalist leader. With the new light obtained from them and the MS. journal of a lady who was an eye-witness of the occurrences she describes, Mr. H. F. B. Wheeler and the writer have endeavoured to again deal with the story of the "War in Wexford." I have by no means completed my list of "finds." I trust, however, I have said enough to illustrate the utility of autograph-hunting and the pleasurable excitement derivable from the unexpected running to earth of some long-since forgotten letter or document which is not only of money value, but can help to throw new light either on the life of the writer, or the far-off times in which it was written.