AMERICAN LITERARY FORGERIES. 135 



English Poetry;" Chatterton, with Ma "Rowley Poems/' recovered 

 from aa old chest in St. Mary Redcliffe Church, Bristol, the work of 

 an imaginary priest of the reign of Edward IV. ; and so the decep- 

 tions proceeded with more or less ingenuity and poetical genius. In 

 prose also an equal success was achieved. Charles Julius Bertram, a 

 youth of English descent at Copenhagen, palmed on Dr. Stukely his 

 "De Situ Britannia3," as a manuscript of Richard of Cirencester, a monk 

 of the fourteenth century ; and not only did it deceive that credulous 

 dupe, but antiquaries and historians of the highest class continued to 

 quote, and appeal to its authority, for nearly a century. The ingenious 

 frauds culminated at last in the forgeries of Ireland, who not only pro- 

 duced a contemptible play of his own writing, styled " Vortigern and 

 Rowena," as one of Shakespeare's lost dramas, but had it accepted by 

 Chalmers, Boswell, and other literary authorities, and actually produced 

 as such on the stage at Drury Lane. 



The history of this peculiar phase of the literature of England's 

 eighteenth century, with the volumes of critical controversy it gave 

 birth to, curiously illustrates the transitional stage in which, while a 

 better taste was reviving, the requisite knowledge had to be mastered, 

 and the first principles of criticism were undetermined, "Warton, 

 Bryant, Milles, Walpole, Chalmers, and a host of other literary men, 

 are found publishing volumes of controversy about professed antiques, 

 which would now be discarded as spurious by the merest tyro in early 

 literature. But just as the revival of learning had to precede the rise 

 of an original native literature in the sixteenth century : so, in that 

 eighteenth century the taste for the antique, with its spurious creations, 

 preceded alike the return to a higher standard in poetry, and a just and 

 critical estimate of early English literature. 



In this New World we are passing through an analogous stage, and 

 accompanying it with the production of not a few spurious antiques, 

 modeled to suit the taste of our own day ; though European critics seem 

 scarcely alive to what is transpiring in America's nineteenth century. 

 Vague fancies of the lost Atlantis; of analogies and synchronisms 

 between Egyptian and Mexican antiquities ; of Phoenician, Punic, or 

 other remotest relations between the Old World and the New, had been 

 floating dimly before the minds of American antiquaries : when the 

 publication of the Antiquitates AmericancB by the Antiquaries of 

 Copenhagen, gave shape and consistency to this pleasant dreamland. 

 It was no longer Egyptian hieroglyphics, or Punic inscriptions that had 



