of personal malignity, and the real object was
not so much to raise a laugh, as to "grin horribly a ghastly smile," on
the individual. It is more than rumoured that he carried his ingenious
malignity into the privacies of domestic life; and it is to be regretted
that Mr. Nichols, who might have furnished much secret history of this
extraordinary literary forger, has, from delicacy, mutilated his
collective vigour.

George Steevens usually commenced his operations by opening some
pretended discovery in the evening papers, which were then of a more
literary cast than they are at present; the _St. James's Chronicle_, the
_General Evening Post_, or the _Whitehall_, were they not dead in body
and in spirit, would now bear witness to his successful efforts. The
late Mr. Boswell told me, that Steevens frequently wrote notes on
Shakspeare, purposely to mislead or entrap Malone, and obtain for
himself an easy triumph in the next edition! Steevens loved to assist
the credulous in getting up for them some strange new thing, dancing
them about with a Will-o'-the-wisp--now alarming them by a shriek of
laughter! and now like a grinning Pigwigging sinking them chin-deep into
a quagmire! Once he presented them with a fictitious portrait of
Shakspeare, and when the brotherhood were sufficiently divided in their
opinions, he pounced upon them with a demonstration, that every portrait
of Shakspeare partook of the same doubtful authority! Steevens usually
assumed a _nom de guerre_ of Collins, a pseudo-commentator, and
sometimes of Amner, who was discovered to be an obscure puritanic
minister who never read text or notes of a play-wright, whenever he
explored into a "thousand notable secrets" with which he has polluted
the pages of Shakspeare! The marvellous narrative of the upas-tree of
Java, which Darwin adopted in his plan of "enlisting imagination under
the banner of science," appears to have been another forgery which
amused our "Puck." It was first given in the _London Magazine_, as an
extract from a Dutch traveller, but the extract was never discovered in
the original author, and "the effluvia of this noxious tree, which
through a district of twelve or fourteen miles had killed all
vegetation, and had spread the skeletons of men and animals, affording a
scene of melancholy beyond what poets have described, or painters
delineated," is perfectly chimerical. A splendid flim-flam! When Dr.
Berkenhout was busied in writing, without much