The chief acquisitions in manuscript books were various Hebrew volumes (for £159), and a series of letters to Malone from Dr. Johnson, Mrs. Siddons, and others; and in printed books, a perfect copy of Cromwell's Great Bible, printed by Grafton in 1539, which was bought of Mr. Fry, the well-known collector, for £100. A sixth part of the general catalogue of MSS. was issued, containing the Syriac, Carshunic and Mendean MSS., in number 205, which had been drawn up by Rev. R. Payne Smith, M.A., and to which several facsimiles were appended. And the eighth part, containing the Sanscrit MSS., in number 854, appeared under the editorship of Theodore Aufrecht, M.A., now Professor of Sanscrit in the University of Edinburgh. A first _fasciculus_ of this had been issued in 1859. A.D. 1865. At the beginning of January, a sale was held in London by Messrs. Sotheby and Wilkinson, of the stock of the late Mr. William Henry Elkins, a bookseller, of 41, Lombard Street. At this sale, the Library was the fortunate purchaser of what appears to be a genuine _Shakespeare Autograph_. The book is Ovid's _Metamorphoses_, printed by Aldus, at Venice, in October, 1502, in octavo; and on the title is the signature 'W^m. Sh^r.' in a hand bearing no resemblance whatever to that of the Ireland forgeries, but not unlike that of the signature attached to Shakespeare's will. Opposite to the title, on a leaf pasted down on the original binding of the book, is the note, most certainly a genuine memorandum of the date to which it professedly belongs, of which a faithful facsimile is given with that of the autograph itself, in the accompanying lithograph[362]. That the note itself is no forgery is admitted by all who have examined it; the volume, therefore, is certainly, by tradition, one which belonged to the poet. The only question is, whether the name may not have been forged in consequence of the existence of this note. To this, which is the opinion of some, it may fairly be replied, that, seeing no contracted form of Shakespeare's signature is known to exist, a forger would hardly have invented one for the occasion, but would have given the name in full; while, on the other hand, if the signature be real, what more natural than that a subsequent owner should record the tradition that the indefinite 'Sh^r.' of this unimportant title-page was no other than the very definite 'Shakspere' himself? The names mentioned in the note are names, as every one knows, connected with the poet's history. _Hall_ was the marriage name of his daughter Susannah, to whom he left his house in Henley Street; and one William Hall, a glover, appears from the Stratford Records printed by Mr. Halliwell, to have had a house in that street in 1660. He, doubtless, was the donor of the volume. Susannah Hall's daughter, Elizabeth, was married to a Thomas Nash, who died in 1647; but though he died without issue, the initials 'T. N.' may well stand for some member of the family who bore the same names.