On National Public Radio this morn there was a
segment about Donald Foster, an academic who once
identified an elegy signed only WS, as a genuine Bard
production. (More on this subject below. Foster had
developed a sophisticated computer program to accomplish
this attribution and made a case persuasive enuf to convince
most literary experts.) Foster also used his program to out
journalist Joe Klein as the anonymous author of Primary Colors
(a not entirely flattering account of Bill Clinton's rise to
the Presidency).
Now he's turned his literary sleuthing to a famous children's
poem, Twas The Night Before Christmas (aka A Visit From
St. Nick). He's determined, or strongly suspects, that this poem
was not written by Clement Clarke Moore, rather
Moore plagiarized it. Publishing it as his own in a collection
of poems. The poem had been published anonymously
years earlier, appearing in a newspaper in Troy NY(?).
Apparently it had been written by a man named
Livingston who liked to write light verse for his 12 children.
Finnegan

Lawrence, Sean. "Review of A Funeral Elegy for Master William Peter." Early
              Modern Literary Studies 2.3 (1996): 14.1-6 <URL:
              http://purl.oclc.org/emls/02-3/rev_law2.html>.
Donald Foster has initiated one of the few successful
          efforts to ascribe a "new" poem to Shakespeare. Foster has
          argued convincingly that the initials "W.S.," which serve as
          signature on an obscure poem from 1612, entitled "A Funeral
          Elegy for Master William Peter," stand for "William
          Shakespeare." Foster amasses an impressive array of internal
          and external evidence for this ascription in his 1989
          monograph, Elegy for W. S.: A Study in Attribution, though
          concluding modestly that "there is simply no way of knowing
          with certainty" (7). Since the publication of his monograph,
          however, he has subjected the text to more vigorous
          quantitative studies, particularly with the aid of the
          SHAXICON lexical database that provides a means of tracking
          Shakespeare's use of rare words through the canon and allows
          Foster to compare the elegy to contemporary texts contained
          within the Vassar Text Archive. On the whole, Foster's
          originality does not lie in the discovery of new
          bibliographical detail but rather in computer assisted
          applications of standard bibliographic procedures to vast
          numbers of texts. This is not to underestimate the
          importance of Foster's contribution. On the contrary, his
          application of established analytic strategies to extensive
          databases introduces a new rigour to bibliographical
          studies; moreover, such breadth allows for more subtle
          analyses than have hitherto been possible. His methods seem
          vindicated by the acceptance of "A Funeral Elegy" into
          recent and forthcoming editions of the complete works of
          Shakespeare compiled by David Bevington, G. Blakemore Evans,
          and Stephen Greenblatt. That these tools are not only
          reliable, but also broadly applicable across historical
          periods, was powerfully demonstrated by Foster's correct
          ascription of the anonymously published political satire on
          the American presidential election, Primary Colors, to
          journalist Joe Klein. In his confession and apology,
          published by Newsweek, even Klein had to admit that Foster
          had developed "a pretty good program" (76).