"Item, for the Carpenters setting upp the Scaffold at the plaie xxd.[181]" At this time, Mr Still was twenty-three years old; but an entry in the registers of the Stationers' Company, under the year 1563, is considered by Mr Collier to have very possible reference to the present comedy, and, in this case, the young clergyman would have begun, and ended, his authorship ere he was nineteen: "Received of Thomas Colwell for his lycense for pryntinge of a play intituled Dyccon of Bedlam, iiijd." There is no such play, Mr Collier points out, as "Dyccon of Bedlam," but Diccon of Bedlam is a principal character in "Gammer Gurton's Needle;" and it is further to be observed that Thomas Colwell is the same publisher, "at the sygne of S. John Evangelist, beneth the Conduit in Fleetestreat," by whom the earliest known edition of the present comedy was produced. The circumstance, after all, is as inconclusive as the fact is immaterial. The true subject of regret is, not that we cannot determine precisely whether Still wrote comedy when he was nineteen, or when he was twenty-three, but that having written one play so well, he did not write more. Had he so elected to do, indeed, the See of Bath and Wells might not have seen the name of Still in its _Catena Episcoporum_, but the other prelate would, doubtless, have done his duty, and English readers would have been amused with further Gammer Gurtons. "Gammer Gurton's Needle," acted at Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1566, "has," writes Mr Collier, "this peculiarity belonging to it, that it is the first existing play acted at either university; and it is a singular coincidence, that the author of the comedy so represented should be the very person who, many years afterwards, when he had become Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, was called upon to remonstrate with the Ministers of Queen Elizabeth against having an English play performed before her at that university, as unbefitting its learning, dignity, and character."[182] Of the play itself Hazlitt writes: "It is a regular comedy in five acts, built on the circumstance of an old woman having lost her needle, which throws the whole village into confusion, till it is at last providentially found sticking in an unlucky part of Hodge's dress. This must evidently have happened at a time when the manufacturers of Sheffield and Birmingham had not reached the height of perfection which they have at present done. Suppose that there is only one sewing-needle in a parish, that the owner, a diligent, notable old dame, loses it; that a mischief-making wag sets it about that another old woman has stolen this valuable instrument of household industry; that strict search is made in-doors for it in vain, and that then the incensed parties sally forth to scold it out in the open air, till words end in blows, and the affair is referred over to higher authorities; and we shall have an exact idea (though perhaps not so lively a one) of what