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 To which his confidant rejoins:

And in the sixth scene of the same act the messenger observes:

I only heard the prince wish He had fewer by a thousand men.

Could any member doubt that we had here the same hand which gave us the like debate between King Henry and Westmoreland on the eve of Agincourt? or could any member suppose that in the subsequent remark of the same military confidant, "I smell a rat, sir," there was merely a fortuitous coincidence with Hamlet's reflection as he "whips out his rapier"—in itself a martial proceeding—under similar circumstances to the same effect?

In the very next scene a captain observes of his own troops

a touch that could only be due to the pencil which had drawn Falstaff's ragged regiment. In both cases, moreover, it was to be noted that the tattered rogues proved ultimately victorious. But he had—they might hardly believe it, but so it was—even yet stronger and more convincing evidence to offer. It would be remembered that a play called The Double Falsehood, formerly attributed to Shakespeare on the authority of Theobald, was now generally supposed to have been in its original form the work of Shirley. What, then, he would ask, could be more natural or more probable than that a play formerly ascribed to Shirley should prove to be the genuine work