Page:1902 Encyclopædia Britannica - Volume 27 - CHI-ELD.pdf/165

This page needs to be proofread.

COLLINGWOOD — COLOGNE Shakespeare had appeared and passed muster, Collier produced (1852) the famous Perkins Folio, claiming to possess numerous MS. emendations of Shakespeare by “ an old corrector.” The authenticity of these was disputed in several quarters on internal evidence; and when in 1859 they were submitted to experts at the British Museum they were incontestably proved to be forgeries. The point whether Collier was deceiver or deceived was left undecided, but it must be feared that the falsifications of which he was unquestionably guilty among the MSS. at Dulwich College have left little doubt respecting it. Apart from these unhappy mystifications, which have thrown so much suspicion upon his antiquarian work that no statement of his can be accepted without verification, his literary career was useful and honourable. He published excellent editions of Shakespeare and Spenser, reprinted a great number of early English tracts of extreme rarity, and rendered good service to the numerous antiquarian societies with which he was connected. His Old Maris Diary is an interesting record, though even here the taint of fabrication is not absent. Unfortunately what he did amiss is more striking to the imagination than what he did aright, and he will be chiefly remembered by it. He was active with his pen almost to the end of his life; and died at Maidenhead, where he had long resided, on 17th September 1883. (e. g.) Colling'WOOCi, a town and railway station of Simcoe county, Ontario, Canada, 71 miles north-north-west of Toronto, on Lake Huron. It is the eastern terminus of two lines of steamers plying to Lake Huron and Lake Superior ports. It contains a large stone dry-dock and shipyard, pork factory, and saw and planing mills, and has a large lumber, grain, and produce export trade, besides large shipbuilding plant and steel works. Exports for the year 1899-1900 were valued at |2,657,413 ; imports at $277,770. Population (1881), 4435; (1900), 5587. Collins, William Wilkie (1824-1889),English novelist, the elder son of William Collins, B.A., the wellknown landscape painter, was born in London, 8th January 1824. He was educated at a private school in Highbury, and when only a small boy of twelve was taken by his parents to Italy, where the family lived for three years. On their return to England Wilkie Collins was articled to a firm in the tea trade, but four years later he abandoned that business for the law. He found little pleasure in his new career, however; though what he learned in it was exceedingly valuable to him later. On his father’s death in 1847 young Collins made his first essay in literature, publishing the Life of William Collins, in two volumes, in the following year. This gave him an incentive towards writing, and in 1850 he put forth his first work of fiction, Antonina, or the Fall of Rome, which was clearly inspired by his life in Italy. Basil appeared in 1852, and Hide and Seek in 1854. About this time he made the acquaintance of Charles Dickens, and began to contribute to Household Words, where After Dark (1856) and The Dead Secret (1857) ran serially. His great success was achieved in 1860 with the publication of The Woman in White, which was first printed in All the Year Round. From that time he enjoyed as much popularity as any novelist of his day, and was continually employed in writing, No Name (1862), Armadale (1866), and The Moonstone (1868) being among his most successful achievements. The last-named story, for many of the details of which Collins was indebted to the curious history of the Road murder, is certainly the best detective novel ever written in the English language. After The New Magdalen (1873) his ingenuity became gradually exhausted, and his later stories were little more

137

than faint echoes of earlier successes. He died in Wimpole Street, London, 23rd September 1889. Collins’s gift was of the melodramatic order, and while many of his stories made excellent plays, several of them were actually reconstructed from pieces designed originally for stage production. But if his colours were occasionally crude, and his methods violent, he was at least a master of situation and effect. His trick of telling a story through the mouths of different characters is sometimes irritatingly disconnected; but it had the merit of giving an air of actual evidence and reality to the elucidation of a mystery. He possessed in the highest degree the gift of absorbing interest; the turns and complexities of his plots are surprisingly ingenious, and many of his characters are not only real, but uncommon. Count Fosco in The Woman in White is perhaps his masterpiece; the character has been imitated again and again, but no imitation has ever attained to the subtlety and humour of the original. (a. wa.) Colmar, a town of Germany, in the imperial territory of Alsace-Lorraine, district of Upper Alsace, 40 miles south-south-west from Strasburg by the railway to Basel. The town still has numerous narrow and picturesque streets, with good houses of the 16th and 17th centuries. It is the seat of several textile industries, and manufactures sewing thread, starch, sugar, and machinery; there are also bleachfields, breweries, and cultivation of wine and fruit. Population (1885), 26,537 ; (1900), 36,824. Colne, a municipal borough (1895) and market-town in the Clitheroe parliamentary division of Lancashire, England, 6 miles north-north-east of Burnley by rail. Area of borough, 5330 acres. Population (1901), 23,000. Cologne, in German Koln (officially Coin, since 1900), a town and archiepiscopal see of Prussia, in the Rhine province, on the left bank of the Rhine, by rail 44 miles east by north from Aix-la-Chapelle, 24 south by east from Diisseldorf, and 57 north-north-west from Coblenz. It is a much improved town, and is no longer distinguished by its smells as it used to be. In 1881-85 the old fortifications were dismantled and the site (bought by the municipality from the War Office for ,£600,000) converted into a fine boulevard, the Ring Street, nearly 4 miles long. Beyond the Ring Street now extends a new continuous line of fortifications, covering an area of 1000 acres, thus doubling the area of the city of Cologne. Within the outer municipal boundary are further included (1888) the suburbs of Bayenthal, Lindenthal, Ehrenfeld, Nippes, Deutz (on the opposite side of the river), Siilz, Bickendorf, Mel, and Poll, protected by another widely extended circle of detached forts on both banks of the Rhine. Of the former city gates four have been retained, restored, and converted into museums: the Severin gate, on the south, contains the geological section of the natural history museum ; the Hahnen (cocks) gate, on the west, is fitted as the historical and antiquarian museum of the city; and the Eigelstein gate, on the north, accommodates the zoological section of the natural history museum. Along this same promenade are the technical trades school, the Roman Catholic church of the Heart of Jesus (1900), a monumental fountain to the memory of the Emperor William I. (1897), and the industrial art museum (18991900). The building of the cathedral was finally completed in 1880. It has since been supplied with fine bronze doors. The Great Bell {Kaiserglocke), cast in 1874, weighs 543 cwt., and is the largest and heaviest bell that is rung; it was put up in 1880. The view of the cathedral has been much improved by a clearance of the old houses in t le Dorn Platz, including the Archiepiscopal Palace. The new Platz is now flanked by fine buildings. Many new S. III. — 18