348 



COLLIER 



nise the authority of the government so far as 

 hardly to be persuaded by his friends to let them 

 bail him out of prison when arrested in 1692 on 

 suspicion of being involved in a treasonable plot. 

 In 1696, along with two other clergymen, he out- 

 raged public feeling by solemnly pronouncing 

 absolution, without any public confession, on the 

 scaffold at Tyburn upon the heads of Friend and 

 Parkyns just before their execution for a plot to 

 murder the king. For this gross and public 

 offence he was obliged to go into hiding, but 

 though he was formally outlawed, no attempt was 

 made to punish him. In 1697 he published his 

 famous Short View of the Immorality and Profane- 

 ness of the English Stage, which fell like a thunder- 

 bolt among the wits. The boldness of the 

 onslaught can only be understood by remembering 

 the greatness of the odds and the might of his 

 antagonists. ' It is inspiriting, ' says Macaulay, 

 ' to see ho\v gallantly the solitary outlaw advances 

 to attack enemies, formidable separately, and, it 

 might have been thought, irresistible when com- 

 bined, distributes his swashing blows right and 

 left among Wycherley, Congreve, and Vanbrugh, 

 treads the wretched D'Urfey down in the dirt 

 beneath his feet, and strikes with all his strength 

 full at the towering crest of Dry den.' Collier's 

 argument carried the country with it, and brought 

 back the English drama to good morals and good 

 sense. That excessive stage-profligacy which was 

 a mere reaction against the rigidity of Puritan- 

 ism, and had far outrun the parallel laxity of 

 contemporary social morals, at once disappeared, 

 and the theatre in England again became a mirror 

 in which nature and truth were reflected without 

 distortion. But it was not without a struggle that 

 the wits consented to be worsted. Congreve and 

 Vanbrugh, with many of the smaller fry, answered 

 angrily but weakly, and were crushed anew by the 

 redoubtable non juror, who was ' complete master 

 of the rhetoric of honest indignation. 'Contest,' 

 says Dr Johnson, ' was his delight ; he was not to 

 be frighted from his purpose or his prey.' The 

 great Dryden stood apart at first, but at length in 

 the preface to his Fables ( 1700) acknowledged with 

 a no me honesty that he had been justly reproved. 

 'I shall say the less of Mr Collier,' he says, 

 ' because in many things he has taxed me justly ; 

 and I have pleaded guilty to all thoughts and 

 expressions of mine which can be truly argued of 

 obscenity, profaneness, or immorality, and retract 

 them. If lie be my enemy, let him triumph ; if he 

 be my friend, as I have given him no personal 

 occasion to be otherwise, he will be glad of my 

 repentance. It becomes me not to draw my pen 

 in the defence of a bad cause, when I have so often 

 drawn it for a good one.' But Dryden complained, 

 and fairly, that his antagonist had often perverted 

 his meaning, that he was ' too much given to 

 horse-play in his raillery, and came to battle like a 

 dictator from the plough.' Spite, however, of all 

 its pedantry and overstatement of the case, and 

 its faults of taste and of relative proportion in 

 charges made with equal indignation, the Short 

 View was a noble protest against evil, and was 

 as effective as it deserved to be. 



Collier continued to preach to a congregation of 

 Nonjurors(q.v. ), and was consecrated bishop in 1713. 

 A great controversy soon rent the nonjuring com- 

 munity on the lawfulness of returning to certain 

 ' usages ' allowed in the communion-office of the 

 first prayer-book of Edward VI., which Collier's 

 party preferred to the revision of 1552. Collier 

 at length pronounced these usages essential, and 

 not unnaturally laid himself open to a charge of 

 holding Romish views. He masqueraded as ' Jere- 

 mias, Primus Anglo-Britannife Episcopus ' in some 

 abortive attempts to form a union with the Eastern 



Church. His last years were racked by the 

 torments of the stone, from which he found relief 

 in death, April 26, 1726. Of his forty-two books 

 and pamphlets, those on the stage alone are still 

 read. The fifth edition of his famous treatise 

 (1730) contains all the successive pamphlets which 

 fortified the first. His largest works were the 

 Great Historical, Geographical, Genealogical, and 

 Poetical Dictionary (4 vols. folio, 1701-21 ), and An, 

 Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain . . . to 

 the end of the Reign of Charles II. ( 2 vols. folio, 

 1708-14; new ed. by T. Lathbury, with Life, 9 

 vols. 1852). 



Collier, JOHN, known under the pseudonym of 

 'Tim Bobbin,' was the son of the curate of Stret- 

 ford, near Manchester, and from 1739 to his death 

 in 1786 was master of a school at Milnrow, near 

 Rochdale. He early wrote verse and painted 

 grotesque pictures ; his rhyming satire, The 

 Blackbird, appeared in 1739, and his Vieiv of the 

 Lancashire Dialect ( in humorous dialogue ), his most 

 notable production, in 1775. It has been often 

 reprinted. Other works are Truth in a Mask, The 

 Fortune-teller, The Human Passions. See Life by 

 Fishwick, prefixed to his works (Rochdale, 1895). 



Collier, JOHN PAYNE, Shakespearian critic and 

 commentator, was born in London, llth January 

 1789, son of an unprosperous merchant who had 

 succeeded as a reporter and journalist. His parents- 

 were friends of Lamb, Hazlitt, Coleridge, and 

 Wordsworth. The boy passed some years at Leeds, 

 and early began to write. Still a boy, he became 

 parliamentary reporter for the Times, next for 

 the Morning Chronicle, and wrote regularly for 

 the latter down to 1847. His call to the bar was 

 delayed till 1829, probably through the odium he 

 incurred by a foolish, volume of satirical verse. His 

 real literary career commenced in 1820 with the 

 publication of The Poetical Decameron. From 1825 

 to 1827 he issued a new edition of Dodsleifs Old 

 Plays, and in 1831 his best work, a History of 

 English Dramatic Poetry to the Time of Shake- 

 speare, and Annals of the Stage to the Restoration. 

 This opened up to him the libraries of Lord Francis 

 Gower, afterwards Lord Egerton and Earl of Elles- 

 mere, and of the Duke of Devonshire, the latter 

 appointing him his librarian. From 1835 to 1839 

 Collier published his New Facts regarding the life 

 and works of Shakespeare, followed by an edition 

 of Shakespeare (8 vols. 1842-44), and supplemented 

 by Shakespeare's Library (2 vols. 1844), a reprint 

 of the histories, novels, and early dramas on which 

 Shakespeare founded his plays. He was one of the 

 leading members of the Camden Society from its 

 foundation in 1838, and he edited for its issues Bale's 

 Kynge Johan (1838), the Egerton Papers (1840), 

 and the Trevelyan Papers (1857 and 1863). He 

 contributed ten publications (1840-44) to the Percy 

 Society, and twenty-one ( 1841-51 ) to the Shake- 

 speare Society, of which he was long director. In 

 1852 he announced his discovery of an extensive 

 series of marginal annotations in a 17th-cen- 

 tury hand on a copy of the second Shakespeare 

 folio (1631-32) he had bought the famous Perkins 

 folio, so called from a name inscribed on the cover. 

 Late in the same year he published these to the 

 world as Notes and Emendations to the Plays of 

 Shakespeare, and calmly lifted them into the text 

 in his 1853 edition of Shakespeare, and again in 

 his annotated six- volume Shakespeare in 1858. 

 The emendations caused a great commotion in the 

 literary world, and were furiously applauded or 

 furiously assailed. The best Shakespearian students 

 were more or less sceptical, but S. W. Singer and 

 E. A. Brae were the first to express openly an 

 unfavourable opinion. The latter also attacked 

 Collier's alleged discovery of his suspiciously long- 



