182 RIOARDUS CORINENSIS. 



serves the memory of this characteristic incident in the history of the 

 literature of a period, when vanity, and a craving for notoriety on any 

 terms, gave birth to a singular brood of literary bastards. 



In striving to elucidate the literary history of that period, the modern 

 editor gets more and more confounded between his reluctance to believe 

 that Lords and Ladies, Bishops, Scholars, Knights and Lord Justices, 

 deliberately penned forgeries, and persisted in contradictory falsehoods: 

 and the impossibility of deducing from their statements any honest ver- 

 sion of their story. Theobald, Macpherson, Walpole, Chatterton, and 

 others of minor note, all excited the interest of credulous contemporaries 

 by the same means, until such forgeries of the eighteenth century have 

 come to constitute a highly characteristic department of the literature 

 of that age. 



Young Bertram left England in the suite of the Princess Louisa, at a 

 time when such spurious offspring of antiquarian zeal found everywhere 

 an undoubting welcome. " Hardyknute" was then in as high esteem 

 as the " Nibelungen Lied" was destined to be; though the first instal- 

 ment of that genuine Germanic Iliad, printed in 1757, attracted little 

 attention. For years after, whatever interest he maintained in the lite- 

 rature of his native land, was rewarded by the perusal of ballads, heroic 

 epics, and other products of the same mint, possessing at times genuine 

 merit of their own ; but deriving a fictitious value, to which their chief 

 importance was due, from some romantic story of recovered parchment, or 

 antique record. There was nothing of the poet in the boy : or a Norse 

 Sao'a, after the model of "Hardyknute," would have been the fittest 

 discovery among the archives of Copenhagen ; but he had the ambition 

 to rank among the discoverers of his day, and achieved his triumph in 

 a more enduring fashion. The genuineness of his professed discovery 

 remained unchallenged for nearly a century, nor is it wholly discredited 

 even now. But its reputation was chiefly associated with its English 

 editor and little can be ascertained relating to its discoverer, beyond 

 what Dr. Stukeley has put on record. Slight, however, as are the 

 additions recoverable, they are sufficient to give a novel aspect to the 

 history of the most mischievous of all the literary forgeries of the eigh- 

 teenth century. 



When the boy-poet Chatterton set to work, after the fashion of his 

 a^'e on the creation of fifteenth century epics and interludes, his old 

 poet-priest, Kowley, was as genuine an offspring of his invention as the 

 poems ascribed to his pen. But the imaginative faculty was weak in 



