forged Thackeray's. Their distinguishing
features are that they are invariably very short, as if the forger
feared to provide sufficient matter to supply material for comparison;
most are on single half sheets of note paper, many on quarto sheets of
varying texture and quality, and the characteristic vertical _I_,
Thackeray's trade mark, always occurs. It is shaky and often out of the
perpendicular, as the genuine rarely is. In the forgeries we have seen
and suspect to be the work of A. H. Smith, a very significant sign is a
sudden thickening of the downstrokes of tailed letters like _y_, _f_,
_g_, producing a tiny diamond-shaped excrescence in the middle of the
letter. The glass reveals that ragged-edged stroke which is inseparable
from the writing of the nervous copyist.

It is generally safe to be cautious about very short letters. The forger
well knows how difficult is the task of maintaining an assumed
character. Just as the mimic may succeed in reproducing the tone and
manner of a person with sufficient closeness to deceive even the most
intimate acquaintances of the subject, yet fail to carry the deception
beyond a few words or phrases, so the literary forger invariably breaks
down when he attempts to simulate handwriting over many sentences. So
conscious is he of this great difficulty that he often avoids it by
boldly copying some genuine letter. We have had offered to us
"guaranteed" Thackeray letters which we immediately recognised as such.
In one particularly glaring case the forger had copied the original
letter very fairly so far as the penmanship was concerned, but while the
original was written on a half sheet of note paper, the forgery was on a
different size paper, and the writing across the length of the paper
instead of the breadth. This naturally disarranged the spacing between
the words, which in all Thackeray's writings is a pronouncedly regular
feature, and this variation was in itself sufficient to excite
suspicion.

The popularity of Dickens among collectors grows steadily. Despite the
fact that he was an industrious correspondent, and that a very large
number of his letters appear from time to time in the market, the demand
is ever in excess of the supply. As a consequence he has suffered
perhaps more than any of the literary immortals at the hands of the
forger. Yet it is safe to say that there should be no writer so safe
from fraudulent imitation, for there is a peculiar distinctiveness abou