o set aside entirely. It is that
alleged identity of origin between the List of Players appended to the
letter from the Council to the Lord Mayor of London and the well-known
"Southampton" letter signed H.S., which is based upon an imagined
general similarity of hand and a positive identity of form in a certain
"very remarkable _g_" which is found in both.[gg] The general similarity
seems to us sheerly imaginary; but the _g_ common to the two documents
is undoubtedly somewhat unusual in form. That it is not peculiar to the
documents in question, however, whether they were written by one hand or
two, we happen to be in a position to show. _Ecce signum!_

[Footnote gg: See above, p. 266.]

[Illustration]

No. 1 of the above fac-similes is the _g_ of the H.S. letter, No. 2 the
_g_ of the List of Players, and in the name below is a _g_ of exactly
the same model. This name is written upon the last page of "The Table"
of a copy of Guevara's "Chronicle conteyning the lives of tenne
Emperours of Rome," translated by Edward Hellowes, London, 1577. This
book is bound up in ancient binding with copies of the "Familiar
Epistles" of the same writer, Englished by the same translator, 1582,
and of his "Familiar Epistles," translated by Geffrey Fenton, 1582.
The volume is defaced by little writing besides the names of three
possessors whose hands it passed through piecemeal or as a whole; but it
is remarkable, that, while one possessor has written on the first title
in ink the price which he paid for it, "_pr. 2s. 6d._," in a handwriting
like that of "_proverbe_" in the third fac-simile from Guazzo, on p. 268
above, another has recorded _in pencil_ on the next leaf the amount it
cost him, "pr: 5s.," in a hand of perhaps somewhat later date, more in
the style of the fac-similes from the "Life of Queen Mary," on p. 271.
This pencil memorandum is very plain.[hh] It is worthy of special note
also, that one of the owners of this volume, a Simon Holdip, writes on
the last page of the "Lives of the Ten Emperors," the last in order
of binding, "_per me Simone Holdip in te domine speravi_" in the old
so-called chancery-hand, while on the first page of the Dedication
of the "Familiar Epistles," the first in order of binding, he writes
"_Simon Holdip est verus possessor hujus libri_," in as fair an Italian
hand as Richard Gethinge or the Countess Olivia herself could show. This
evidence of property a subsequent owner has stricken through many t