March 17, 1625, in which she describes herself" of the Savoy, servant unto the right honourable the Countess of Totness." She directs that her body shall be carried to the parish church of Stratford-upon-Avon, "where it pleased my honourable lady the Countess to declare her affection and desire to be there also buried herself, in whose service I have spent all my time, and do acknowledge her exceeding bounty and goodness to me; and in token of my humble thankfulness, out of that small means which it pleased God to bless me withall, I give and bequeath unto Mrs. Clopton, her honour's sister, for her and her children, the sum of 100%." She then gives to the children of her brother John Smith, of Upton Park, in the county of Bedford, deceased, 20%.; to Mrs. Elizabeth Slingsby, daughter of Sir William Slingsby, out of my good will to her father, 10%. She gives legacies to her fellow-servants. To her cousin, Elizabeth Gee, 601. The body is to be removed with as little expense as possible; Mr. Wright, my Lord's chaplain, to be assisting, and to have 57. for his pains. She makes Sir William Slingsby and John Berners her executors, who proved the will September 13, 1626. A will like this illustrates such characters as Nerrissa in The Merchant of Venice. The name of Shakespeare has never been in any way brought into connection with the Cloptons, whose seat was much nearer the town of Stratford than Cherlecote.

The few notes of wills in these volumes shew what a rich store of biographical and other information must be contained in the depositories of testamentary evidence.

It may be mentioned, as accounting for the appearance of persons of the name of Clopton at Stratford later than the time of the Countess of Totness, that a sister of the Countess and co-heir of the old line of Clopton married a gentleman of her own name, and that from this marriage

the later Cloptons descended. She is the Mrs. Clopton mentioned in the will of Mrs. Amy Smith.

P. 86. That Shakespeare died on the 23d of April, the day consecrated to the memory of England's patron Saint, is delivered down to us on evidence that is unquestionable. Probably in the same month and year died Cervantes. That Shakespeare was born on the 23d of April rests on no punctual authority, and seems to have been but the Stratford tradition, first committed to writing by Greene, master of the grammar school, brother of Greene who formed the museum at Lichfield in the last century. All we know with certainty is that he was baptised on the 26th of April, 1564.

The searchers after remarkable coincidences will be struck with the fact that Shakespeare died on his birth-day, and that his friend the Earl of Pembroke died also on his birthday, when he had lived just half a century. There are some very remarkable circumstances attending the death on that day of the Earl, it having been well-known to the Earl and to his friends that an astrologer had predicted he should not outlive his fiftieth year. The Earl fifty, Shakespeare, alas! only fifty-two.

Archbishop Williams was another eminent man of those times who died on the anniversary of his birth-day. Somner the antiquary another. Sir Kenelm Digby is said to have been a third.

The Greene above-mentioned was in possession of the original probate copy of Shakespeare's will, that which was given to the executors from the prerogative office when the original will was deposited. It is not known what is become of it. Mr. Greene presented a copy of it to Mr. West of Alscot. The original letter which accompanied the present is now among the Lansdowne manuscripts at the Museum (No. 729, f. 2), dated Stratford-upon-Avon, September 17,

1747. So little capable was Greene of appreciating the value of the document that he writes of it in these terms:"I am pretty certain the thing itself will not come up to the idea you may have formed of it. The legacies and bequests therein are undoubtedly as he intended; but the manner of introducing them appears to me so dull and irregular, so absolutely void of the least particle of that spirit which animated our great Poet, that it must lessen his character as a writer to imagine the least sentence of it his production. The only satisfaction I receive in reading it is, to know who were his relations and what he left them, which perhaps may just make amends for the trouble of perusing it." Few persons think so now. The will contains less of sentiment than might be wished, because we wish to get at any thing which can shew us the man Shakespeare, and are satisfied with nothing; but there is much in it to suggest thought and to lead to inference.

P. 91. The QUINEYS were mercers at Stratford. This appears by a bond by which Adryan Quiney, of Stratford, mercer; Richard Quiney, of the same place, mercer; and Richard Baylye, of the same place, also a mercer, are bound to John Somervile, of Edreston, in Warwickshire, Esq., in 200 marks, to secure 100 marks to be paid by Adryan Quiney. The date is October 14, 25th of Elizabeth, 1583; the autograph signatures are well written. This Richard Quiney was the father of Shakespeare's son-in-law. P. 55. Last line, for 1722 read 1727.

P. 71. A paper found at Dulwich (See Collier's Shakespeare, vol. i. p. ccvii.) containing a list of the King's players as they stood April 9, 1604, raises a strong presumption that Kemp was not one of them in 1605, the date of the supposed memorial from the corporation of London. The names are Burbage, Shakespeare, Fletcher, Philips, Cundall,

Heminge, Armin, Sly, Cowley, Ostler, and Day. Kemp it will be perceived is not amongst them.

P. 86. Date of the will. The fact is that in the original "Januarii" was first written, cancelled, and "Martii" written over the line. Between January and March the marriage with Quiney took place.

P. 94. Second line of the first note, for "Waller" read "Welles."

P. 96. Countess of Pembroke, Dorset, and Montgomery. -A critic has been pleased to animadvert on this designation of the countess, and speaks of it as a remarkable error for the writer of this work to have fallen into. It is the critic not the author who is mistaken. After her marriage with the Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery she did not call herself Countess of Dorset but Countess of Pembroke, and when she came forth in state she described herself as I have arranged the titles, Countess of Pembroke, Dorset, and Montgomery. This, to prevent writers of the lives of the English poets of that period from being misled in respect of a lady whose name often occurs; and I will next inform the critic who has favoured me with the animadversion why the Countess gave Pembroke the first place in her style; it was because the Earldom of Pembroke had a precedency of fifty years before either Dorset or Montgomery, and the Countess was not of a disposition to lose the benefit of fifty years' precedency.

P. 102. While every effort has been made to recover the particulars of the life of the elder Thomas Nash, the antagonist of Harvey, nothing has ever been done for the later Thomas Nash, the author of Quaternio, who is yet a deserving English author, who ought by no means to be forgotten. The Quaternio has the faults of its period, being too diffuse and too much overloaded with quotation; but it has some

pleasing painting, and parts of the dialogue, especially that which passes between Urbanus and Rusticus, are curious and instructive. The title is Quaternio, or a Four-fold Way to a happy Life; set forth in a Dialogue between a Countryman and a Citizen, a Divine and a Lawyer. The first edition has the date 1633, the second 1636. It was published by John Benson, at a shop under Saint Dunstan's Church in Fleet-street; so close in the neighbourhood of Izaac Walton, who may seem to have thought of this work when he formed the design of his Angler. There is something in Nash not unlike the character of Walton. He was a religious man, as appears by his character of a good Pastor and by other passages in his book, but he disliked Separatists as much as Walton did. He bears a testimony however against the cruelties of field-sports, hawking and hunting. The book is dedicated to Lord Coventry from the Inner Temple.

Nash published also an account of the voyage of Captain James to discover the North-west passage into the South Sea, in 1633; and a translation from Evenkellius of The School of Potentates.

This Thomas Nash died in 1648. A copy of his monumental inscription may be seen in Lansd. MS. 878, f. 185.

In his translation of Evenkellius he speaks of his meditations in the park of the good old gentlewoman, his worthy aunt by alliance, Mrs. Anne Fleete, whose great-grandfather was high sheriff of Warwickshire in 1485, and was slain in that year in Bosworth Field. The sheriff spoken of appears to have been a Throckmorton.

There is great danger of this person being confounded with Shakespeare's grandson-in-law, Thomas Nash, being of the same name, same profession, and their lives extended through about the same period. They have both also some connection with Warwickshire. I suspect the author of the