Let us examine the alleged grounds of these decisions,--"the varieties of forms assignable to different periods," and the extension of those varieties "from the stiff, labored Gothic hand of the sixteenth century to the round-text hand of the nineteenth." This judgment is passed upon _all_ the writing on the margins of the folio, including the pencil memorandums. For the present we shall set aside the latter,--the pencil memorandums,--as not properly belonging to this branch of the subject. For this pencil writing, although it has a most important bearing upon the question of the good faith of the marginal readings, has no professed character, antique or modern: it is, of course, not set forth directly or indirectly, either by the unknown writer of the marginalia, or by Mr. Collier, as evidence of the date at which they were made. And as, according to Dr. Ingleby, "the primal evidence of the forgery lies in the ink writing, and in that alone," with that alone we shall at present concern ourselves. As the careless, half-formed hand of the present day, degenerate from "the round hand of the school-master," appears only in the pencil writing, we have therefore to deal but with the first three styles of writing enumerated by Mr. 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. Collier's folio.