... That the first and third
or the second and fourth should be coexistent is very improbable. That
all, or that the first, second, and fourth, should be found together, as
belonging to one and the same era, we hold to be utterly impossible.
"Yet this is a difficulty that Mr. Collier has to explain; as the
handwritings of the MS. corrections in the Devonshire folio, including
those in pencil, vary as already said, from the stiff, upright,
labored, and earlier Gothic, to the round text-hand of the nineteenth
century."[R]
[Footnote R: A _Review_, etc., pp. 6, 7.]
On this point Dr. Ingleby says, succinctly and decidedly, "The primal
evidence of the forgery lies in the ink writing, and in that alone";[S]
but he expressly bases this dictum upon the decisions of the professed
palaeographers of the British Museum and the Record Office. He goes on,
however, to assign important collateral proof of the forgery, both of
the readings in the folio and the documents brought forward by Mr.
Collier, by connecting them with each other. Thus he says, that whoever
will compare the fac-similes of the document known as "The Certificate
of the Blackfriars Players" with those which he gives of two passages in
the folio "will surely entertain no doubt that one hand wrote both.
Pages:
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41