The cumulative weight of the evidence set forth in the preceding pages is so overwhelming that prosecuting counsel is spared the necessity of addressing the court at any length as he asks for a verdict of ‘Guilty on all counts’ against the conspirators. The reader has had the facts placed before him both in summary and detail, and they speak for themselves. What, then, are the conclusions to which we seem to be compelled as the result of our somewhat tedious inquiry? They may be briefly stated as follows.

1. Abbreviations in the Prose.—It is impossible to believe that Shakespeare ever used the four-and-twenty suspected abbreviations in prose spoken by gentlefolk. He may perhaps have put some of them into the mouths of vulgar characters like servants and the Grave-digger in Hamlet, yet even this is improbable. Nowhere would they have been more in place than on the lips of Bottom and his friends in A Midsummer Night's Dream and of the roisterers and others in the First Part of Henry IV. Yet these plays, as they left his hands, must have been absolutely free from them. For no one, I imagine, will seriously contend that the three in the former and the six in the latter are genuine, unless he is also prepared to say that our greatest, having no fixed principles of composition, was subject to ridiculous caprices.