The deed to Shakspere and two other trustees is dated March 10 and signed Henry Walker. The mortgage from Shakspere and the other trustees is dated March 11. But for some unaccountable reason a duplicate verbatim copy of the deed from Henry Walker is signed by William Shakspere. This duplicate is in the Library of the city of London; the mortgage is in the British Museum. The duplicate deed we suspect was signed after the mortgage. Hence the improvement in the autograph; it was probably Shakspere’s second attempt to write. Compare it with the third. [6] The fourth time he seems to have tried to disguise the termination with awkward flourishes, making the letters totally illegible: Finally, he omits the flourishes and comes nearer legibility, but still it is impossible to tell whether he meant to write _ear, ere, or eare_: And now let the reader mark, that notwithstanding the orthodox spelling of the name from 1593 to 1616, and indeed up to the present time, was and is Shakespeare, there is no e in the first syllable and no a in the last, although some have imagined the letter a to exist in the last part of the final autograph. We have said that these signatures are all that. Shakspere is known to have written; we ought to add that he prefixed to the last one the following scrawl: For a long time we puzzled over this. Could it be an attempt to write “25th of March,” the day of the execution of the will? At last we read the following in Hallowell-Phillipps’s Shakspere: “It may be observed that the words By me, which, the autograph excepted, are the only ones in the poet’s handwriting known to exist, appear to have been penned with ordinary firmness.” Presuming that the signatures were made in a sick bed, the author concedes that the words “By me” were penned with ordinary firmness. Very good; but could not almost any five-year-old boy do as well the first time? [7] In 1775 certain papers and legal instruments were published, attributed to Shakspere, Queen Elizabeth, and Southampton. In 1796 Edmund Malone proved them to be forgeries. Here is one of the forged autographs of Shakspere: This is superior to any of the genuine ones, which in some degree it resembles. The letter a is pretty clearly written in the last syllable, as if the forger meant to establish the proper spelling of that part of the name. Malone, who at first pronounced the genuine orthography to be Shakspeare, subsequently declared Shakspere to be the poet’s own mode of spelling his name beyond all doubt. But others do not accede to this decision, because they think there is an a in the last of the five genuine signatures. The solution of the whole mystery is in the fact that Shakspere was unable to write or even to spell his own name. In 1598 Richard Quiney addressed a letter to him asking for a loan of £30, and the name was written Shackesper: In the same year among thirteen names of holders of corn in Stratford the last but one is Shakesper: