"In their broader characteristics, the features of the handwriting of this country, from the time of the Reformation, may be arranged under four epochs, sufficiently distinct to elucidate our argument:—
"1. The stiff upright Gothic of Henry VIII. and Edward VI.
"2. The same, inclining and less stiff, as a greater amount of correspondence demanded an easier style of writing, under Elizabeth.
"3. The cursive, based on an Italian model, (the Gothic becoming more flexible and now rapidly disappearing,) in the reign of James I., and continuing in use for about a century.
"4. The round hand of the schoolmaster, under the House of Hanover, degenerating into the careless, half-formed hands of the present day.
"Now it is perfectly possible that any two of these hands in succession may have been practised by the same person…. 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."[T] He expresses also the same confidence that "there can be but one intelligent opinion" that another important document, known as "The Blackfriars Petition," was, as Mr. Hamilton believes, "executed by the same hand" as that to which we owe the Certificate, and, consequently, the folio readings.[U] Again, with regard to another of these documents, known as "The Daborne Warrant," Dr. Ingleby says,—"Mr. Hamilton remarks, what must be plain to every one who compares the fac-simile of the Daborne Warrant with those of the manuscript emendations in the Perkins folio, that the same hand wrote both. In particular the letters E, S, J, and C are formed in the same peculiar pseudo-antique manner."[V] And finally, Mr. Hamilton decides, 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.]