Again, Medwin (_Conversations_, 1824, p. 409) records the fact that Byron told him "that he had almost finished another play ... called _Werner_;" and (p. 412) "that _Werner_ was written in twenty-eight days, and one entire act at a sitting." It is almost incredible that Byron should have recopied a copy of the duchess's play in order to impose on Mrs. Shelley and Williams and Medwin; and it is quite incredible that they were in the plot, and lent themselves to the deception. It is certain that both Williams and Medwin believed that Byron was the author of _Werner_, and it is certain that nothing would have induced Mrs. Shelley to be _particeps criminis_--to copy a play which was not Byron's, to be published as Byron's, and to suffer her copy to be fraudulently endorsed by her guilty accomplice. The internal evidence of the genuineness of _Werner_ is still more convincing. In the first place, there are numerous "undesigned coincidences," allusions, and phrases to be found in _Werner_ and elsewhere in Byron's _Poetical Works_, which bear his sign-manual, and cannot be attributed to another writer; and, secondly, scattered through the play there are numerous lines, passages, allusions--"a cloud of witnesses" to their Byronic inspiration and creation. Take the following parallels:-- _Werner_, act i. sc. 1, lines 693, 694-- "... as parchment on a drum, Like Ziska's skin." _Age of Bronze_, lines 133, 134-- "The time may come, His name shall beat the alarm like Ziska's drum." _Werner_, act ii. sc. 2, lines 177, 178-- "... save your throat From the Raven-stone." _Manfred_, act iii. (original version)-- "The raven sits On the Raven-stone." _Werner_, act ii. sc. 2, line 279-- "Things which had made this silkworm cast his skin." _Marino Faliero_, act ii. sc. 2, line 115-- "... these swoln silkworms masters." ("Silkworm," as a term of contempt, is an Italianism.) _Werner_, act iii. sc. 1, lines 288, 289-- "I fear that men must draw their chariots, as They say kings did Sesostris'." _Age of Bronze_, line 45-- "The new Sesostris, whose unharnessed kings." _Werner_, act iii. sc. 3, lines 10, 11-- "... while the knoll Of long-lived parents." _Childe Harold_, Canto III. stanza xcvi. lines 5, 6-- "... is the knoll Of what in me is sleepless." (Byron is the authority for the use of "knoll" as a substantive.) Or, compare the statement (see act i. sc. 1, line 213, _sq._) that "A great personage ... is drowned below the ford, with five post-horses, A monkey and a mastiff--and a valet," with the corresponding passage in _Kruitzner_ and in Byron's unfinished fragment; and note that "the monkey, the mastiff, and the valet," which formed part of Byron's retinue in 1821, are conspicuous by their absence from Miss Lee's story and the fragment.