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VIII.
As these pages have sought to explain a number of Wise's decisions and actions by reference to his desire to discredit Shepherd and Shepherd's bibliographical work, the matter should be briefly considered. In the later 1890's Wise was enjoying his fabulous career (1886?[53]-1905?) as a forger of literary rarities. According to the latest tally, by 1896 he had produced 40 forgeries (he was to add 22 more),[54] and there had already been some slight unpleasantness about one of them, the forged edition of Swinburne's Sienna.[55] In these circumstances, it does not seem unreasonable to suppose that Wise, who was both an imaginative and a prudent man, decided to erect a lightning rod — or, to speak more plainly, to arrange matters so that if his fraudulent productions should be denounced, and his connection with them intimated, the blame could be easily and convincingly placed upon another man.
For the position of lightning-rod Shepherd possessed exceptional qualifications.[56] He had been involved for over a quarter-century in bibliographical chores and adventures. He had had slight and usually unfortunate relations with such authors as Browning, Tennyson, and Swinburne. He had been publicly charged with producing and distributing unauthorized and illicit pamphlets, he had admitted his guilt, and he had died.
A number of questionable aspects of Shepherd's career had been broached and confirmed by his admissions under cross-examination in the trial of Shepherd v. Francis, the libel suit which he preferred against the Athenaeum in 1879 (Times, 17 July, p. 6). After the verdict went in his favor the Athenaeum, in its issue of 21 July, had vengefully broadcast whatever it could draw from the cross-examination to his discredit. The account included references to the Laureate's suit to stop the piracy of The Lover's Tale, and the resulting decision
Wise had already (about 1890) produced his forgery of Shepherd's 1870 reprint of the Tale; his effort to compose a convincing account of it for his bibliography of Tennyson may have brought the larger opportunity to his mind. He need only increase Shepherd's supposed editions of the Tale to the number of six, and provide ocular evidence of these farcical activities in the shape of The New Timon, whose date seemed to make clear that Shepherd had cocked a snook at the Court of Chancery: once these were accepted as evidence of Shepherd's conduct in the affair of the Tale, who could doubt that in his time he had achieved many shadier feats never called to the attention of the law?
If these speculations are correct, by the turn of the century Wise had prepared and held in readiness a defence against any suggestion that he had been the source of certain nineteenth century pamphlets. For about thirty years — from about 1905 to 1934 — he refrained from further illicit productions, his bibliographical authority rose to towering heights, and his earlier apprehensions naturally diminished. In 1934, when confronted by Messrs Carter and Pollard's Enquiry, he promptly brought forward the old defence. In his first public statement, in the Times Literary Supplement of 12 July 1934, he quoted a letter recently sent him by Maurice Buxton Forman, whom (he wrote) he had asked "for any information he could give me regarding his father's store of manuscripts and pamphlets." The son of his old friend had written, in part,
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