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Whether Collier composed the ballads or not we can be quite sure that it was he who copied them into his old commonplace book. If, then, it can be demonstrated that the annotations in the Perkins folio are in the handwriting of those ballads, Collier's fabrication of these will have been proved. That demonstration is my next task. It ought not to be a difficult one, for, given two such ample specimens to work with, it will always be possible and usually easy to determine whether they are the work of one hand or two.

Each half century or so has its own characteristic handwriting, the norm being the work of the writing masters, the schoolteachers, and the copybooks. But every schoolboy sooner or later, depending upon how much writing he does, departs from the prescribed norm — adopting his own comfortable slant, his own penlifts and linkages, his own ways of forming certain letters. Thus by the time he reaches maturity he possesses his own peculiar hand, as much his own as his fingerprints. A close analysis of the writing of two persons will therefore bring to light many fairly consistent differences even though the two specimens bear a strong superficial resemblance. Without such a resemblance the question will hardly arise.

This is true of today's hands and of the hands of any century. It is more strikingly true of the secretary hand of the sixteenth century than of later English hands. Two men's secretary's hands are easier to distinguish than two later hands because many letters of the secretary alphabet are more complicated than those of later alphabets. This complexity provided greater scope for individuality, and men took advantage of this, for they set store by individuality in writing. A father admonishing a son at Oxford in 1622 charged him with a "barren invention" in his writing, for the son's hand lacked character and individuality — qualities that the father's possessed in abundance.

The two specimens that I am to examine are secretary only in part. They are of a style of writing common in the seventeenth century, for which the term mixed hand seems appropriate because of the mixture in it of secretary letters and italic. The secretary hand was a native English hand that for the greater part of the sixteenth century was

most widely in use for literary composition, letter-writing, and business. Since it developed from earlier hands its beginnings cannot be dated, but we find it fully developed by 1525. For the next hundred years it remained the common hand, taught to schoolboys and written by most men. But it was not the only hand of the sixteenth century in England. Before the beginning of the century the italic hand — a new hand in Italy that grew out of the humanistic script — was brought to England. It was in the sixteenth century a rather special hand regarded as more beautiful than the secretary, but at first used mainly at the universities, later adopted by many noblemen. Well before the end of the century we find other men using it as a second hand; Ben Jonson was one who did, a little later.

The increasing popularity of the italic hand near the end of the sixteenth century and in the seventeenth was, by 1700, to drive the secretary out and take its place as the common hand. The process by which this conquest took place is not clearly understood. Some schoolteachers may have been teaching it, but I suspect that it was the growing use of the italic as a second hand that gave rise to the mixed hands — half secretary, half italic — that are observable by 1625 and very common before 1650. For some letters, c and e, for example, there appears about the middle of the century to be a strong preference for the secretary in mixed hands; in several other letters the preference, more or less strong, was for the italic. Some letters can hardly be called secretary or italic because identical forms are used in both. Other considerations too limit the letters that we can profitably use in examining mixed hands to six minuscules and four capitals. In the table below, using these letters (with two kinds of s) I show the mixtures used by ten seventeenth-century writers and by Collier in the hand of the ballads. Columns 1 and 2 represent the two early writers in Collier's manuscript volume, columns 3 through 10, eight hands written between 1629 and 1665 drawn from a collection of the correspondence of Col. Robert Bennet (Folger MS. X.d.483 (1-209)). Column 11 represents Collier's hand. S stands for secretary, I for italic, SI for letters that are mixed by a single writer — now secretary, now italic.

init.-med.

final

Of the ten genuine hands represented here no two exhibit the same mixture. If we omit f and E because each shows a tendency to be of one kind or the other and ignore some other probable but imponderable tendencies, it will appear that the chance of finding the same mixture in two different hands of the midseventeenth century is one in 6,561. Collier's ballad hand, column 11, shows, of course, a unique mixture. The hand of the Perkins annotations shows the same mixture, with the exception of one letter which I will explain and which does not reduce the significance of the similarity.

It is, however, the individual letters that must carry the burden of proof. In working with the minuscules we must look for letter-shapes or other characteristics that are eccentric, unusual, highly individual in the period under consideration — the seventeenth century because the hand purports to be of that century. If we find frequently recurring in one specimen a certain letter formed in a curious and uncommon way and then find the same curious form in the other specimen, again recurring frequently, this will suggest a single writer. If we find half a dozen such letters a single writer is strongly indicated. In what follows I attempt to demonstrate that certain letter-shapes common in Collier's ballads do not conform to standard or common practice of the midseventeenth century. To make this demonstration I refer to Plate IV, where I reproduce many examples of three minuscles and one capital letter found in the Bennet correspondence described above. In gathering these examples I took the characteristic shape or shapes of each of four letters as I found them in each of a large number of documents written by different hands. Written above each letter is the number of the document from which I took it. Several of the shapes reproduced are unique among those shown; had I gathered other letters too, I should have found more unique shapes, possibly some of them at least roughly identical with shapes common in Collier's ballads. I cannot

assert that any letter-shape in the ballads is unique. What the reproductions in Plate IV do show, I think, is what we may regard as the common, usual shapes that we might expect to find in most mixed hands of the midseventeenth century. These reproductions, as I have taken the liberty of calling them, are not facsimiles, but the best copies that I could make by hand. Each of my reproductions fairly represents the proportions and shapes of the letters; a photograph would prove no more than these prove. For the letters that I discuss but do not reproduce in Plate IV I made a careful search through the Bennet letters to assure myself that the shapes that I discuss in the ballads are not (unless I so designate them) generally standard or common shapes.

Below I examine in detail three minuscules and three capital letters that are to be found both in the ballads and in the Perkins annotations.

f This minuscule differs from the tall s of the ballads (hereafter abbreviated Bal.) and the annotations (hereafter Ann.) in having, usually, instead of the straight shank of the s (as in staring, Plate II, f. 114v, line 4), a bowed or hooked descender (finde, faire, Plate I, f. 114, lines 16, 17), in having, often, a looped head (first, Plate I, f. 113v, line 6), and in being crossed just above the baseline. The cross is what makes it an f, not an s. About this letter, as found in Bal. and Ann., there is nothing distinctive or interesting. It becomes so only when followed by and joined to a t, for here Collier almost, but not quite, always forms an s instead of an f; that is he does not cross the shank. An example may be seen in often, Plate II, f. 114v, line 14. Elsewhere I have found ten more of these in Bal. and four in Ann. — three of the four shown in Plate III: oft in (b), line 1; after in (d), line 2; left in (g), line 1. Three times (to fifteen) I have found ft properly made — one of them shown in Plate II, f. 114v, line 13 (soften). I attach considerable weight to the appearance in both Bal. and Ann. of this curious abberration.

g Collier's typical g, an italic, may be seen in all of the reproduced pages of Bal. Those in staring and louing (Plate II, f. 114v, lines 4 and 15) are typical. The common italic g of the seventeenth century is essentially the same as the g of today. The secretary g is distinguished by being open at the top, like our y, then crossed by a separate stroke that usually forms the link with the following letter. Several of the examples shown in Plate IV are secretary letters that the writer forgot to cross. Of the italic forms there shown none resembles the characteristic Bal. g with its hooked descender, which we must conclude is not a usual or standard form of about 1650. The same g is to be found abundantly in Ann. and may be seen in Plate III (c),

line 1, in the words grace and high. A variant to be discussed later can be seen in brings, in Plate III (e) and in other words in (f) and (g).

h The secretary h of Bal. is a perfect copybook shape, almost identical, at its best and most typical, with the shape shown in the secretary alphabet in De Beau Chesne and Baildon, A Booke Containing Divers Sortes of Hands (1571). But in practice few writers of any time formed the letter in that way; most men made the loop lower and rounder, like the secretary specimens numbered 2, 5, and 15 in Plate IV, which are typical Elizabethan shapes. The examples in that plate indicate that the Bal. h is not the usual one in the midseventeenth century. The common shape of h in Bal. may be seen in might in Plate I, f. 113v, line 1. It can also be seen in thankes and thanke in III (b) and (c), respectively, and it is the usual h in Ann.

s The secretary hand makes a distinction between the s used initially or medially and the final s; they are two quite different characters. That Collier makes this distinction may be seen in Plate I, f. 113v, line 3, shines. Only the initial-medial s now concernes us. This can be seen in virtually every line in Plates I and II and in Plate III (b), (c), (f), and (h). That it is not a standard or usual form is evident in Plate IV, where Nos. 3, 6, 7, 10, 31, and others are secretary. The Bal. s, also found everywhere in Ann. is not really either secretary or italic; in fact I do not remember that I have elsewhere seen such an s. So highly eccentric and abnormal is this letter that it is hard to see how Collier came to adopt it.

Before beginning the examination of individual capitals I must make one or two observations about capital letters in general. Most of these had in the sixteenth century, as they have now, more than one acceptable, almost standard, shape, and many writers used interchangeably two or more shapes for certain capitals. Again, in the sixteenth century and now a plain roman block capital, resembling roman type, may be used for almost any letter. Many sixteenth-century writers commonly used both a standard secretary C and a roman block capital, either plain or embellished, and so with other letters as well. Plain block capitals are almost worthless for the kind of investigation I am attempting, but a number of secretary capitals and some italic are useful.

F Collier's ordinary form of this capital, a secretary form, has little individuality and is not useful. The F that concerns us is an italic letter. In Plates I and II, on ff. 114 and 176v, two titles of ballads are written in pure italic. From the sixteenth century onward it was a common practice in secretary writing to use italics for titles, for Latin

words, and for such other purposes as printers used italic type for. Following this custom, Collier's ballad titles are almost all in italics, though with some scattered mixture, presumably unintentional, of secretary letters. Likewise in the Perkins annotations stage-directions and speakers' names are by and large italic, and here I find three examples (Comedies p. 274, Histories pp. 56 and 79 [2H4]) of an eccentric and therefore useful F. The peculiarity of this F (not shown in Plate III) is that the lower, short bar is not horizontal but a mere dot elongated vertically. No such F is to be found in the ballads, but an E of exactly the same sort can be seen in Plate II, f. 176v, in Earthquake, and another example of the E is on f. 154 (not illustrated).

G Typical examples of the italic Bal. G are to be seen in Plate II, f. 176v, lines 5 and 9-up. Of the twenty-eight examples of this letter shown in Plate IV, most are, like the Bal. G, italic, but only No. 31 is of the same type. The same G as that common in Bal. occurs throughout Ann. and may be seen in Plate III (a).

H This capital, shown in Plate I, f. 113v, line 5, occurs throughout both Bal. and Ann. with little variation. Though a perfectly acceptable secretary letter, its shape is not a common one at any time. Of eighteen examples of H that I found in the Bennet collection only three were secretary, and none bore close resemblance to Collier's.

Several capital letters must be approached in a different way, since what is interesting about them is not any striking eccentricity of form, but the variety of forms in which they appear. This could be shown to hold true in both Bal. and Ann. of the letters B, C, D, L, M, N, P, R, S, and W. A single one of these letters will perhaps be sufficient to show how any or all of them would confirm the evidence that I have already produced. Though the N exhibits fewer varieties than either M or W it will, through the exigencies of the Bal. reproductions, serve well. I find five major types of N, all of which can be seen in Plates I and II. They are as follows: (1) a type common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the commonest of the five in Bal. — Plate II, f. 176v, line 3-up; (2) almost as common as the first, in Bal. — Plate II, f. 114v, line 9-up; (3) Plate I, f. 113v, line 1; (4) Plate I, f. 113v, line 8-up, and f. 114, line 4-up; (5) the only secretary form of the letter in Bal. and one of only two examples there — Plate I, f. 114, line 13-up, a form that I have not found in the seventeenth century. All of these forms of N occur in Ann., including (5), which I have found there only once. Similarly all the types of M and W that I have seen in Bal. I have found also in Ann., together with at least one additional type of each and several variants not found in Bal.

In discussing the minuscule g above I pointed out one of several examples of a g not found in Bal. In Ann. this variant occurs about as frequently as does the Bal. g. The only other minuscule of which I have observed a new variety peculiar to Ann. is the w. The Bal. w may be seen in Plate I, f. 113v, lines 2, 5, 6, and 7; it may also be seen in Ann. in Plate III (a), with, (c), wthout, and (g) way. The new Ann. variety is shown in III (b), wth , (c), which, and (e), what. Like the g, the old Bal. w and the new variant appear to be evenly mixed in Ann.

Of the capital letters that we have examined, F, G, and H, no significant variants are to be found in Ann. (always excepting wholly italic stage-directions and speakers' names). But I find in Ann. three other capital letters, A, E, and I, that are either unknown in Bal. or almost unknown. Of the A the Bal. type (of which some half dozen are to be seen in Plate I, f. 114) is common in Ann as well (Plate III (b)). But there is a new Ann. type, visible in Plate III (b), line 2, (e), first word, and (f), first word, and this type I have not seen in Bal. Apart from stage-directions and speakers' names, the old Bal. A appears to outnumber the new variety by about five to three. The E common in Bal. is a secretary letter, a rather malformed example of which may be seen in Plate II, f. 114v, line 3. In Ann. this is replaced by an italic E that can be seen in Plate III (g). The switch from the secretary E of Bal. to the italic of Ann. would be perfect were it not for a curious single appearance of an italic E in Bal., at f. 159 (not illustrated) and a balancing secretary E in Ann., where it appears twice (at 3H6, p. 164, and Tragedies p. 127. With the letter I the story is different, for the switch from the Bal. I to the new I of Ann. is, so far as I have discovered, flawless. Actually two types are common in Bal. — a crossed form (Plate II, f. 114v, line 17) and a less correct form without the cross (f. 176v, line 6). Neither of these have I seen in Ann., where instead we everywhere find the quite different shape that can be clearly seen in Plate III (h), line 1.

In view of the overwhelming evidence that one hand wrote the ballads and the Perkins annotations, we are forced to look for an explanation of the new types of three capital letters and two minuscules that make their appearance in the annotations that will be consistent with the view that Collier wrote these as well as the ballads.

For this explanation we must go back again to the time when Collier began to learn the writing of an old hand. Clearly we can ascribe to him a superior manual dexterity and perhaps superior coordination of hand and brain. Even so it was a long and taxing labor —this learning to write a new hand. I can see him bent over his task

for an hour or two at a time, day after day, week after week, slowly acquiring the automatic translation of thought into written words. For when a man writes he is unconscious of the shapes of letters, or only half conscious of them, and yet they come out in his own peculiar hand. Such facility Collier obviously possessed when he wrote, with remarkable consistency, more than a hundred and fifty pages of ballads in his old commonplace book. To have stuck at the learning of that hand he must have been strongly urged forward by an objective that was very important to him. It is not necessary to suppose that he had the Perkins folio in view from the start; in fact this is highly unlikely, since he was writing the hand with at least some facility more than fifteen years before he announced the discovery of the annotations. Ingleby reproduces, in his Complete View, many documents which Collier had "discovered" in the Bridgewater collection, in Dulwich College, and in other collections and had announced and printed, and which N. E. S. A. Hamilton had tracked down and found to be forgeries (as Halliwell-Phillipps and others had earlier suspected). One of these, in the Bridgewater collection, which Collier announced and printed in New Facts regarding the Life of Shakespeare (1835), is in a hand differing from that of the ballads only slightly. Several others are in hands differing only a little more, and in others the ballad hand can be seen, as it were, bleeding through the attempt to disguise it. For a short document Collier could in various ways quite consistently and with fair success give his hand a number of different appearances. But for an extended job, like the ballads, he had only one hand.

When, in 1851 or 1852, Collier began work on the Second Folio he had no strong reason to fear detection, and it is therefore a little hard to understand why he wanted to alter his hand. It is even harder to see how he could have thought that altering two minuscules and three capitals could effectually disguise the hand. Nevertheless he appears to have made the attempt from the moment he began work on his new adventure in fabrication. But even in the small attempt he made at alteration, his inability to make the switch in his capital A and the minuscules g and w exhibits the difficulty of the task. Even so he must have been helped by the nature of the job, for few of his additions consist of more than one line, and not more than a couple of dozen are of more than four or five words. Probably eighty percent of the corrections, as he called them, consist of single words, a letter or two, or a mark of punctuation. There are certainly not less than 20,000 of them in all. This kind of writing would never be automatic; the writer would be working slowly and carefully. On the whole, I find

it a little surprising that Collier's success in altering was not greater than we find it to have been.

The fact, then, that a few letters in the annotations are different from those in the ballads does not weaken the strong evidence that both were written by one hand. The paleographical case against Collier is therefore complete. If weakness is found in the whole argument of this paper, it will hardly be found, I think, in the paleographical part of it, and if the demonstration that it was Collier who copied the ballads into his book falls short of mathematical proof, there is another point to be thought about. If Collier acquired his manuscript volume about 1840 and it then contained the ballads, he could hardly have failed to see, three or four years after he had copied out thirty-four of the ballads, that his remarkable annotated folio, assuming it to be genuine, was in the same hand. And if he saw it, why should he not have mentioned such a very remarkable coincidence?