Scythian Guest publication history

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

See Dearden, "Wise and Ruskin II," for variants between forgery and other versions, which "make it cledar that Wise took his text from Friendship's Offering" (178).

In their bibliographical note to The Scythian Guest, Cook and Wedderburn questioned the "authenticity" of an 1849 reprinting of The Scythian Guest as a small pamphlet (Works, 2:101-2). This exposure, along with that of an 1868 reprinting of <Leoni>, was one of the earliest condemnations of "certain nineteenth-century pamphlets" ultimately to be linked to the forgers, <T. J. Wise and Buxton Forman>. With bibliographic work for the first two volumes of the <Library Edition> proceeding simultaneously, the editors' suspicions must have developed from mutually supporting evidence of the two pamphlets' spuriousness.
	In the case of the Scythian Guest pamphlet, Cook and Wedderburn raised doubts about the uncharacteristic style of the preface, a discord that had also struck them respecting the Leoni pamphlet preface. In this case, however, the editors were all the more incredulous that, a year prior to the publication of <Poems (1850)> and at a time when that latter project must have been well in hand by Ruskin's father and W. H. Harrison, Ruskin would have decided to reissue a single poem separately and on his own. Moreover, the editors had found <John James Ruskin's list of his son's poetry publications> in <MS ?>, which contains no mention of the pamphlet.
	In addition, whereas in the case of the Leoni pamphlet the editors troubled to follow up with the alleged printer, who could find no record of the arrangement, in this case they remarked the lack of any printer's mark at all. Finally, as with Leoni, they noted the pamphlet's absence in Shepherd's Bibliography, yet its presence in Wise and Smart's Bibliography of Ruskin, as well as a recent sale at a high price.
	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??, but the remark was still too early to have been issued in defiance of the forgery, for the existence of the pamphlet was not asserted until 1889, in part ? 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.)
	The forgery was the first of the class that Wise attempted to authenticate by planting it in an otherwise legitimate bibliography of an author's works. . . .