and Dr. Ingleby concurs with him, that a certain List of Players appended to a letter from the Council to the Lord Mayor, in which Shakespeare's name stands third, is "done by the same hand" which produced the professed contemporary copy of a letter signed H.S. about Burbage and Shakespeare, supposed to be from the Earl of Southampton. Giving his reason for this opinion, Dr. Ingleby says,—"Among other similarities in the forms of the letters to those characterizing the H.S. letter, is the very remarkable g in 'Hemminges'."[W]

[Footnote S: A Complete View, p. 114.]

[Footnote T: Ib. p. 250.]

[Footnote U: Ib. p. 293.]

[Footnote V: Ib. p. 256.]

[Footnote W: Ib. p. 271.]

Let us examine the alleged grounds of these decisions,—"the varieties of forms assignable to different periods," and the extension of those varieties "from the stiff, labored Gothic hand of the sixteenth century to the round-text hand of the nineteenth." This judgment is passed upon all the writing on the margins of the folio, including the pencil memorandums. For the present we shall set aside the latter,—the pencil memorandums,—as not properly belonging to this branch of the subject. For this pencil writing, although it has a most important bearing upon the question of the good faith of the marginal readings, has no professed character, antique or modern: it is, of course, not set forth directly or indirectly, either by the unknown writer of the marginalia, or by Mr. Collier, as evidence of the date at which they were made. And as, according to Dr. Ingleby, "the primal evidence of the forgery lies in the ink writing, and in that alone," with that alone we shall at present concern ourselves. As the careless, half-formed hand of the present day, degenerate from "the round hand of the school-master," appears only in the pencil writing, we have therefore to deal but with the first three styles of writing enumerated by Mr. Hardy; and as he himself admits that "it is perfectly possible that any two of these hands in succession may have been practised by the same person," if those who maintain the side of forgery fail to show that "the stiff upright Gothic of Henry VIII. and Edward VI." appears upon the margins of this folio, we shall only have the second and third styles enumerated by Mr. Hardy, i.e., the hands of Elizabeth and James I., to take into consideration; and the so-called "primal evidence of the forgery," in the "varieties of forms assignable to different periods," falls to the ground.

Now it is most remarkable, that, among all the numerous fac-similes of the writing in this volume which have been published either by Mr. Collier himself, or by his opponents, with the very purpose of proving the forgery, not a word or a letter has appeared in a hand which was not in common use from the latest years of Elizabeth's reign, through James I.'s and Charles I.'s, down through the Commonwealth to and well past the time of the Restoration,—a period, be it remembered, of only between fifty and seventy-five years. We are prepared to show, upon the backs of title-pages and upon the margins of various books printed between 1580 and 1660, and in copy-books published and miscellaneous documents dated between 1650 and 1675, writing as ancient in all its characteristics as any that has been fac-similed and published with the purpose of invalidating the genuineness of the marginal readings of Mr. Collier's folio.

We are also prepared to show that the lack of homogeneousness (aside from the question of period or fashion) and the striking and various appearance of the ink even on a single page, which have been relied upon as strong points against the genuineness of the marginal readings, are matters of little moment, because they are not evidence either of an assumed hand or of simulated antiquity; and even further, that the fact that certain of the pencilled words are in a much more modern-seeming hand than the words in ink which overlie them is of equally small importance in the consideration of this question. Our means of comparison in regard to the folio are limited, indeed, but they are none the less sufficient; for we may be sure that Mr. Collier's opponents, who have followed his tracks page by page with microscopes and chemical tests, who hang their case upon pot-hooks and trammels, and lash themselves into palaeographic fury with the tails of remarkable g-s, have certainly made public the strongest evidence against him that they could discover.

Among many old books, defaced after the fashion of old times with writing upon their blank leaves and spaces, in the possession of the present writer, is a copy of the second edition of Bartholomew Young's translation of Guazzo's "Civile Conversation," London, 4to., 1586. This volume was published without that running marginal abstract of the contents which is so common upon the books of its period. This omission an early possessor undertook to supply; and in doing so he left evidence which forbids us to accept all the conclusions as to the Collier folio and manuscripts which the British palaeographists draw from the premises which they set forth. Upon the very first page of the Preface he writes, in explanation of the phrase "hee which fired the temple of Diana," the name "Erostrato" in a manner which brings to mind one point strongly made by Dr. Ingleby against the genuineness of a Ralegh letter brought forward by Mr. Collier, as well as of the manuscript readings in the two folio Shakespeares, which he also brought to light. Dr. Ingleby says, "I have given a copy of Mr. Collier's fac-simile in sheet No. II., and alongside of that I have placed the impossible E in the Ralegh signature, and the almost exactly similar E which occurs in the emendation End, vice 'And,' in the Bridgewater Folio. By means of this monstrous letter we are enabled to trace the chain of forgery from the Perkins Folio through the Bridgewater Folio, to the perpetration of the abomination at the foot of the Ralegh letter."[X]

[Footnote X: Complete View, p. 309.]

Below we give fac-similes of six E-s. No. I is from the margin of the first page of the Preface to Guazzo, mentioned above; No. 2 from the third, and No. 3 from the fifth page of the same Preface; No. 4 from fol. 27 b of the body of the work; No. 5 is the "monstrous letter" of the Bridgewater folio; and No. 6 the "impossible E" of the Ralegh signature.

[Illustration]

Now how monstrous the last two letters are is a matter of taste,—how impossible, a matter of knowledge; but we submit that any man with a passable degree of either taste or knowledge is able to decide, and will decide that No. 6 is not more impossible than No. 1, or No. 4 more monstrous than No. 2; while in Nos. 1, 2, 3, and 4, there is exhibited a variation in the form of capital letters, instances of which Dr. Ingleby intimates it is impossible to find in genuine handwriting, and the existence of which in the Collier folio Mr. Hamilton sets forth as one reason for invalidating the good faith of its marginal readings.[Y]

[Footnote Y: Inquiry, p. 23.]

But our copy of Guazzo is of further use to us in the examination of this subject. It exhibits, within less than one hundred folios of marginal annotations, almost all the characteristics (except, be it remembered, those of the pencil writing) which are relied upon as proofs of the forgery of the marginalia of Mr. Collier's folio. The writing varies from a cursive hand which might almost have been written at the present day to (in Mr. Duffus Hardy's phrase) "the cursive based on an Italian model,"—that is, the "sweet Roman hand" which the Countess Olivia wrote, as became a young woman of fashion when "Twelfth Night" was produced; and from this again to the modified chancery hand which was in