[pub. history of Leoni]

Note that photos of title page of 1868 printing in Dearden, "Wise and Ruskin II," between pp. 176 and 177; and in Wise and Smart bibliography

[describe forged pamphlet: Wise recorded a minor variant in copies of the pamphlet (see Dearden, "Wise and Ruskin II," 171.

The alleged printer, Strangeways & Co., Leicester Square, told Cook and Wedderburn that their records, which went back to 1845, revealed no such printing, although they did print Notes on the General Principles of Employment for the Destitute and Criminal Classes (Works ??) for Ruskin in 1868. Common date and mode of publication thus governed the accounts of the two pamphlets being listed adjacently in the Bibliography, one seeming to legitimize the other. Dearden ("Wise and Ruskin II," 171) suggests that Wise also chose this printer because <R. H. Shepherd> had used the firm to produce spurious editions of Tennyson's Lover's Tale, which would lend credibility to a tale should Wise venture to accuse his forebear of the forgery.

In their bibliographical note to Leoni, Cook and Wedderburn questioned the "authenticity" of an 1868 reprinting of Leoni as a 15-page pamphlet (Works, 1:288). This exposure, along with that of an 1849 reprinting of <"The Scythian Guest">, was one of the earliest condemnations of "certain nineteenth-century pamphlets" ultimately to be linked to the forgers, <T. J. Wise and Buxton Forman>. Since Cook and Wedderburn's bibliographic work for the first two volumes of the <Library Edition> probably proceeded at the same time, the editors' suspicion of the spuriousness of the two pamphlets may have grown side-by-side. In both cases, the style and substance of the preface to the pamphlet are first held up as implausible, and there follows additional detailed evidence against Ruskin's involvement.
	In the case of the Leoni pamphlet, Cook and Wedderburn raise doubts about the "constrained and artificial style" of the pamphlet's preface, the obscurity of the "friend" and "lady" to whom the preface is addressed, the denial by the pamphlet's alleged printer of any record of the work, the pamphlet's absence from the earliest bibliography of Ruskin (by <R. H. Shepherd>) combined with its relatively recent appearance on the market, and other more minor suspicious indications (see also <Scythian Guest>).
	Shepherd, who in his 1878 introduction to his Bibliography declared that "no entry has . . . been made at second-hand[,] but always with the actual book, pamphlet, magazine, or journal described lying before the compiler" (p. 7), expressly stated, as Cook and Wedderburn point out, that Leoni had never been reprinted. Specifically, the statement that "the Prose Legend has never been reprinted" first appeared in the ?? edition of the Bibliography (p. ?), released in 18??. This remark was too early to have been issued in defiance of the forgery, for the existence of the pamphlet was not asserted until May 1890, in part 5 of the Wise and Smart Bibliography of Ruskin. Instead, Shepherd's point was presumably to compare the printing history of Leoni as a prose piece with that of the early poems; it was the exclusion of Leoni from the <Poems [1850]> that appears to have interested the bibliographer.
	This forgery and several other bogus Ruskin pamphlets were the first for which Wise used the technique of bestowing legitimacy by listing them in his own scholarly bibliographies (see <forgery>). The manufacture of the physical pamphlet itself was presumably underway by May 1890, when Wise listed it in part 5 of the Wise and Smart Bibliography of Ruskin; however, Dearden ("Wise and Ruskin I," 48; "Wise and Ruskin II," 170) has pushed back the date of manufacture to 1889, having discovered a portion of a prospectus (undated, but ca. 1889 when the proposal for the Bibliography was sent to Brantwood) that already contains the description of the forgery.