Page:An Inquiry into the Authenticity of certain Papers and Instruments attributed to Shakspeare.djvu/46

Rh word for, here and almost uniformly afterwards exhibited forre: a mode of orthography, I believe, unprecedented. The clumsy fabricator had seen far written in old books farre, and took it for granted, that a word so nearly similar as for had anciently the same terminating letters.

absurd manner in which almost every word is over-laden with both consonants and vowels will at once strike every reader, who has any knowledge of the state of our language at the period referred to: but instead of wearying you with minute remarks, the most satisfactory mode, I conceive, will be to produce a few specimens of orthography from the time of Chaucer to near the end of the sixteenth century, a period of above two hundred years. Out of some hundred books of that period, with which I am surrounded, I shall quote a few which happen to be near at hand, and which will shew the progressive changes in the mode of orthography during that time.

To begin with Chaucer, who, we know, died in the year 1400;—I quote from the