"In their broader characteristics, the features of the handwriting of
this country, from the time of the Reformation, may be arranged under
four epochs, sufficiently distinct to elucidate our argument:--

"1. The stiff upright Gothic of Henry VIII. and Edward VI.

"2. The same, inclining and less stiff, as a greater amount of
correspondence demanded an easier style of writing, under Elizabeth.

"3. The cursive, based on an Italian model, (the Gothic becoming more
flexible and now rapidly disappearing,) in the reign of James I., and
continuing in use for about a century.

"4. The round hand of the schoolmaster, under the House of Hanover,
degenerating into the careless, half-formed hands of the present day.

"Now it is perfectly possible that any two of these hands in succession
may have been practised by the same person.... That the first and third
or the second and fourth should be coexistent is very improbable. That
all, or that the first, second, and fourth, should be found together, as
belonging to one and the same era, we hold to be utterly impossible.

"Yet this is a difficulty that Mr. Collier has to explain; as the
handwritings of the MS. corrections in the Devonshire folio, including
those in pencil, vary as already said, from the stiff, upright,
labored, and earlier Gothic, to the round text-hand of the nineteenth
century."[R]

[Footnote R: A _Review_, etc., pp. 6, 7.]