We believe that historical and circumstantial evidence alone is adequate to settle or even to disturb this Shakespearean question; for it appears to be the unanimous verdict of criticism that the style of Bacon and the style of "Shakespeare" are as far apart as the poles. Experts have even gone so far as to reduce both to a "euphonic test," * and pronounce it impossible that the two could have been written by the same hand. But this is not very valuable as evidence; for never, we think, can mere expert evidence be of itself sufficient as to questions of forgery of authorship any more than of autograph. If mere literary style had been all the evidence accessible, our Shakespeareans would have been making oath to the Ireland forgeries to-day as stoutly as when, in the simplicity of their hearts, they swore the impromptus of a boy of eighteen surpassed any thing in "Hamlet" or Holy Writ. Even Mr. Spedding, who ignores any "Baconian Theory," in writing the life of Bacon, admits that whenever a literary doubt has to be decided by the test of style, "the reader must be allowed to judge for himself." * Wilkes's "Shakespeare from an American point of view," Part III. It was only by just such circumstantial evidence as has been grouped in these papers (such as the {295}Elizabethan orthography and philology--the use of Roman instead of Arabic numerals! etc.) that the Ireland imposture was exploded. Forgery is the imitation of an original, and, If the original be inimitable, there can surely be no forgery. In the case of forgery of a signature, lawyers and experts know that the nearer the imitation, the more easy is it detectable; for no man writes his own name twice precisely alike, and, if two signatures attributed to the same hand are found to be _fac similes_, and, on being superimposed against the light, match each other in every detail, it is irrefutable evidence that one is intentionally simulated. * In the case of literary style, however, we are deprived of this safeguard, because, the more nearly exact the counterfeit, the more easily the critic is deceived. Pope was not afraid to entrust whole sections of the paraphrase he called the "Odyssy of Homer," just as Michael Angelo did his frescoes, to journey-workmen--and not a critic has ever been able to pronounce, or even guess, which was Pope and which was Pope's apprentice; and not only the Chatterton, Ireland, and Macpherson forgeries, but the history of merely sportive imitation and parody prove that literary style is any thing but inimitable; that, in fact, it requires no genius, and very little cleverness to counterfeit it. ** Nor is--what is incessantly appealed {296}to--"the internal evidence of the plays themselves" of any particular value to the end in view.