20
necting them with each other. Thus he says, that whoever will compare the fac-similes of the document known as "The Certificate of the Blackfriars Players" with those which he gives of two passages in the folio "will surely entertain no doubt that one hand wrote both."[T] He expresses also the same confidence that "there can be but one intelligent opinion" that another important document, known as "The Blackfriars Petition," was, as Mr. Hamilton believes, "executed by the same hand" as that to which we owe the Certificate, and, consequently, the folio readings.[U] Again, with regard to another of these documents, known as "The Daborne Warrant," Dr. Ingleby says,--"Mr. Hamilton remarks, what must be plain to every one who compares the fac-simile of the Daborne Warrant with those of the manuscript emendations in the Perkins folio, that the same hand wrote both. In particular the letters E, S, J, and C are formed in the same peculiar pseudo-antique manner."[V] And finally, Mr. Hamilton decides, and Dr. Ingleby concurs with him, that a certain List of Players appended to a letter from the Council to the Lord Mayor, in which Shakespeare's name stands third, is "done by the same hand" which produced the professed contemporary copy of a letter signed H.S. about Burbage and Shakespeare, supposed to be from the Earl of Southampton. Giving his reason for this opinion, Dr. Ingleby says,--"Among other similarities in the forms of the letters to those characterizing the H.S. letter, is the very remarkable g in 'Hemminges'."[W]
[Footnote S: A _Complete View_, p. 114.]
[Footnote T: _Ib._ p. 250.]
[Footnote U: _Ib._ p. 293.]
[Footnote V: _Ib._ p. 256.]
[Footnote W: _Ib._ p. 271.]
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 wr