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Those famous lines, for example, which open the fourth act of the Second Part of King Henry VI. are not to be found in the corresponding scene of the first part of the Contention; yet, whether they belong to the original sketch of the play, or were inserted as an afterthought into the revised and expanded copy, the authorship of these verses is surely unmistakable:
False indications of authorship exist, some foisted upon insignificant works in order to enhance their value, some appended to works of merit in order to serve the reputation of a particular person, or to mystify posterity; and there are a hundred other motives which may easily be imagined, and of which a list has been drawn up: the "pseudepigraphic" literature of antiquity and the middle ages is enormous.
Of Zeluco everybody, without perhaps a very clear knowledge of its authorship, knows one passage the extremely humorous letter containing the John Bull contempt of the sailor Dawson for the foolish nation which clothes its troops in "white, which is absurd, and blue, which is only fit for the artillery and the blue horse."
The truth in shortest about matters of importance shall be taken for good style." With great love of power, which he was conscious of exerting with ease to himself and for the good of the public, he had little personal vanity, and not the smallest ambition of authorship. Many volumes might be collected out of the vast accumulation of his writings now mouldering and forgotten in archives.
"Well, and then?" said such of the audience as understood. "That is the end of the chapter," said Lousteau. "The fact of this tailpiece changes my views as to the authorship. To have his book got up, under the Empire, with vignettes engraved on wood, the writer must have been a Councillor of State, or Madame Barthelemy-Hadot, or the late lamented Desforges, or Sewrin."
Just as when a letter comes to a forest cabin, it is turned over and over, and many guesses are made as to the handwriting and the authorship before it occurs to any one to open it and see who sent it, so was this rude knocking at the gate the occasion of argument among the rustic revellers as to what it might portend. Some thought it was the arrival of the belated band.
But I said that it was easy to condescend, and that Bulwer knew he could not put off his rank, and that he would have all the advantages of it in spite of his authorship.
‘Well, young gentleman,’ said Taggart to me one morning, when we chanced to be alone a few days after the affair of the cancelling, ‘how do you like authorship?’ ‘I scarcely call authorship the drudgery I am engaged in,’ said I. ‘What do you call authorship?’ said Taggart. ‘I scarcely know,’ said I; ‘that is, I can scarcely express what I think it.’
An assumption that sets aside the claims of Scripture, as to authorship, in order to harmonize the book with one's literary and critical judgment, may be dismissed on its own lack of merit.
The mature and experienced reasoner, in whom enthusiasm had undergone its usual change, with the calm brow and commanding aspect of sober manhood, was a being so different from the romantic boy, new to the actual world of civilized toils and pleasures, fresh from the adventures of Eastern wanderings, and full of golden dreams of poetry before it settles into authorship or action!
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