[Illustration] Now how monstrous the last two letters are is a matter of taste,--how impossible, a matter of knowledge; but we submit that any man with a passable degree of either taste or knowledge is able to decide, and will decide that No. 6 is not more impossible than No. 1, or No. 4 more monstrous than No. 2; while in Nos. 1, 2, 3, and 4, there is exhibited a variation in the form of capital letters, instances of which Dr. Ingleby intimates it is impossible to find in genuine handwriting, and the existence of which in the Collier folio Mr. Hamilton sets forth as one reason for invalidating the good faith of its marginal readings.[Y] [Footnote Y: Inquiry, p. 23.] But our copy of Guazzo is of further use to us in the examination of this subject. It exhibits, within less than one hundred folios of marginal annotations, almost all the characteristics (except, be it remembered, those of the pencil writing) which are relied upon as proofs of the forgery of the marginalia of Mr. Collier's folio. The writing varies from a cursive hand which might almost have been written at the present day to (in Mr. Duffus Hardy's phrase) "the cursive based on an Italian model,"--that is, the "sweet Roman hand" which the Countess Olivia wrote, as became a young woman of fashion when "Twelfth Night" was produced; and from this again to the modified chancery hand which was in such common use in the first half of the century 1600, and again to a cramped and contracted chirography almost illegible, which went out of general use in the last years of Elizabeth and the first of James I. All these varieties of handwriting, except the last, were in use from 1600 to the Restoration. They will be found in the second edition of Richard Gethinge's "Calligraphotechnia, or The Arte of Faire Writing, 1652." This, in spite of its sounding name, is nothing more than a writing-master's copper-plate copy-book; and its republication in 1652, with these various styles of chirography, is important accessory evidence in the present case.[Z] [Footnote Z: Lowndes mentions no other edition than that of 1652; and Mr. Bohn in his new edition of the Bibliographer has merely repeated the original in this respect. But if Lowndes had seen only the edition of 1652, he might have found in it evidence of the date of the publication of the book. It is dedicated to "Sir Francis Bacon Knight, his Ma'ties Attorney Generall"; and as Bacon was made Attorney General in 1613 and Lord Keeper in 1617, the book must have been published between those dates; and one of the plates, the 18th, is dated "Anno 1615," and another, the 24th, "1616."] But to return to the margins of our Guazzo, from five pages of which we here give fac-similes. [Illustration]