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.
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