There happens to be a recent case in which the reputation of a celebrated lady depended on a question of handwriting. Madame Blavatsky was accused of having forged the letters, from a mysterious being named Koot Hoomi, which were wont to drift out of metetherial space into the common atmosphere of drawing-rooms. A number of Koot Hoomi’s _later_ epistles, with others by Madame Blavatsky, were submitted to Mr. Netherclift, the expert, and to Mr. Sims of the British Museum. Neither expert thought that Madame Blavatsky had written the letters attributed to Koot Hoomi. But Dr. Richard Hodgson and Mrs. Sidgwick procured earlier letters by Koot Hoomi and Madame Blavatsky. They found that, in 1878, and 1879, the letter _d_, as written in English, occurred 210 times as against the German _d_, 805 times. But in Madame Blavatsky’s earlier hand the English _d_ occurred but 15 times, to 2,200 of the German _d_. The lady had, in this and other respects, altered her writing, which therefore varied more and more from the hand of Koot Hoomi. Mr. Netherclift and Mr. Sims yielded to this and other proofs: and a cold world is fairly well convinced that Koot Hoomi did not write his letters. They were written by Madame Blavatsky.[318] The process of counting thousands of isolated characters, and comparing them, was decidedly not undertaken in the hurried assembly on that short winter day at Hampton Court, when the letters ‘were long and minutely examined by each and every of the Lords who were present,’ as Mr. Froude says. On the following day (December 15) the ‘Book of Articles’ was read aloud; though the minute of December 14 would lead us to infer that it was read on that day. The minute states that ‘there was produced a writing in manner of Articles ... but, before these were read,’ the Casket Letters were studied. One would imagine that the ‘Book of Articles’ was read on the same day, after the Casket Letters had been perused. The deposition of Powrie, the Casket contracts, and other papers followed, and then another deposition of Crawford, which had been put in on December 13. This deposition is in the Lennox MSS. in the long paper containing the description of the mysterious impossible Letter, which Moray also described, to de Silva. Crawford now swore that Bowton and Tala, ‘at the hour of their death,’ confessed, to him, that Mary would never let Bothwell rest till he slew Darnley. Oddly enough, even Buchanan, or whoever gives the dying confessions of these men, in the ‘Detection,’ says nothing about their special confession to Crawford.[319] The object of Crawford’s account appears clearly from what the contemporaries, for instance the ‘Diurnal,’ tell us about the public belief that the confession ‘fell out in Mary’s favour.’