Iago underplot supplied them with an evidence
wholly distinct from that of the metrical test which yet confirmed in
every point the conclusion independently arrived at and supported by the
irresistible coincidence of all the tests. He defied anybody to accept
his principle of study or adopt his method of work, and arrive at a
different conclusion from himself.

The reading of Mr. G.'s paper on the authorship of the soliloquies in
_Hamlet_ was unavoidably postponed till the next meeting, the learned
member having only time on this occasion to give a brief summary of the
points he was prepared to establish and the grounds on which he was
prepared to establish them. A year or two since, when he first thought
of starting the present Society, he had never read a line of the play in
question, having always understood it to be admittedly spurious: but on
being assured of the contrary by one of the two foremost poets of the
English-speaking world, who was good enough to read out to him in proof
of this assertion all that part of the play which could reasonably be
assigned to Shakespeare, he had of course at once surrendered his own
former opinion, well grounded as it had hitherto seemed to be on the most
solid of all possible foundations. At their next meeting he would show
cause for attributing to Ben Jonson not only the soliloquies usually but
inconsiderately quoted as Shakespeare's, but the entire original
conception of the character of the Prince of Denmark. The resemblance of
this character to that of Volpone in _The Fox_ and to that of Face in
_The Alchemist_ could not possibly escape the notice of the most cursory
reader. The principle of disguise was the same in each case, whether the
end in view were simply personal profit, or (as in the case of Hamlet)
personal profit combined with revenge; and whether the disguise assumed
was that of madness, of sickness, or of a foreign personality, the
assumption of character was in all three cases identical. As to style,
he was only too anxious to meet (and, he doubted not, to beat) on his own
ground any antagonist whose ear had begotten {291} the crude and
untenable theory that the Hamlet soliloquies were not distinctly within
the range of the man who could produce those of Crites and of Macilente
in _Cynthia's Revels_ and _Every Man out of his Humour_. The author of
those soliloquies could, and did, in the parallel passages of _Hamlet_,
rise near the height of the master