Fortunately the facilities for comparing and testing the genuineness of the autographs of every distinguished person whose holographs are most in favour with the forger, are numerous. In addition to the splendid collection of specimens extant at the British Museum Library, there are many facsimiles available.
The excellent work on Autograph Collecting by Dr. Henry T. Scott (Upcott Gill, London) is indispensable to the collector. It contains some hundreds of specimens, specially selected for the purposes of comparison, and gives besides many very valuable rules and hints for detecting the real from the sham.
Dr. Scott, writing of the autographic letters of his distinguished namesake, says:
"Of Sir Walter Scott's autographs it may be observed (1) the paper is generally letter size, gilt edged, with a soft, firm feeling to the touch, and an unglazed surface. (2) The date and residence are placed on the top and right hand, with a good space before the 'My Dear Sir,' uniform margins on the left side of the paper of a quarter of an inch, but on the right side no margin at all, the writing being carried close to the edge. The folding is done with the precision of a man of business, forming the space for the address into a nice oblong almost in the centre of the sheet, and the first line of the address is written nearly in the centre of the space with the remainder below.
"The watermarks found on the paper are one of the following: Valleyfield, 1809; C. Wilmott, 1815; J. Dickinson and Co., 1813; J. Dickinson, 1816; J. Dickinson (without date); J. Whatman, 1814; J. Whatman (without date); Turkey Mill, 1819; Turkey Mill (without date); G. C. & Co., 1828."
The paper used by Burns for his correspondence was always large in size, rough in surface, never glossy, and all four edges had the rough edge that is the peculiarity of a Bank of England note.
It is worthy of remark that in the case of the A. H. Smith Burns forgeries, suspicion was first excited by a simple but significant matter. The paper contained several worm holes. These had been carefully avoided by the writer, he knowing that if his pen touched them the result would be a spluttering and spreading of the ink.
Now it is safe to assume that these worm holes, being the effect of age, did not exist at the time the letter—if genuine—was written; as the worm did its work long afterwards, it must be regarded as a fortunate circumstance that in perforating the paper it refrained from destroying the writing, carefully selecting the wider spaces that the poet had, with commendable foresight, left for the insect's depredations.
The letters of Thackeray are in two styles of handwriting, the earlier sloping slightly, the latter vertical, round, neat and print-like, the capital I being invariably a simple vertical stroke. His is the most neat and uniformly readable hand of all the great literary characters. It is somewhat unfortunate that he was not anything like so uniform in his choice of paper. Letters are in existence on an extraordinary variety of material, from a quarto sheet to a scrap torn from half a sheet of note paper. On many of these letters is neither address nor date, but when once the characteristics of the charming handscript have been mastered, they are never forgotten, and are recognisable amid the closest imitations.
There are extant a number of forged Thackeray's. Their distinguishing features are that they are invariably very short, as if the forger feared to provide sufficient matter to supply material for comparison; most are on single half sheets of note paper, many on quarto sheets of varying texture and quality, and the characteristic vertical I, Thackeray's trade mark, always occurs. It is shaky and often out of the perpendicular, as the genuine rarely is. In the forgeries we have seen and suspect to be the work of A. H. Smith, a very significant sign is a sudden thickening of the downstrokes of tailed letters like y, f, g, producing a tiny diamond-shaped excrescence in the middle of the letter. The glass reveals that ragged-edged stroke which is inseparable from the writing of the nervous copyist.