We saw in Chapter six that stylistics, variously understood, has been one of the most important tools of attribution studies but that in the past its effectiveness rested on the erudition and intuitive flair of the investigator. When Aulus Gellius called some lines from Boeotia ‘Plautinissimi’, he was working from an intuitive holistic response to the text intensified by a local activation of the pleasure principle. There is nothing wrong with intuition: we use it successfully every time we manage to cross a busy highway in one piece; but its results are not always shareable. We might not have such success in guiding a blindfolded experimental subject across the same road by mobile phone. Erasmus in rejecting the Jerome-spuria was forced to look more closely at aspects of language and style, but still relied strongly on his intuitive sense of authentic Jerome as a unique integration of style, matter and ethos. By the time of Richard Bentley, arguments over authenticity had acquired a strong philological emphasis, informed by a newly acquired understanding of the historical development of languages. Cases began to be argued in a more forensic way from systematically marshalled evidence. It was also understood by this time that a negative case was easier to make than a positive one in that a single anachronism or historically impossible form might overturn an otherwise persuasive attribution.