There have been several attempts to procure the return of the manuscript to this country. Mr. Winthrop, in 1860, through the venerable John Sinclair, archdeacon, urged the Bishop of London to give it up, and proposed that the Prince of Wales, then just coming to this country, should take it across the Atlantic and present it to the people of Massachusetts. The Attorney-General, Sir Fitzroy Kelley, approved the plan, and said it would be an exceptional act of grace, a most interesting action, and that he heartily wished the success of the application. But the bishop refused. Again, in 1869, John Lothrop Motley, then minister to England, who had a great and deserved influence there, repeated the proposition, at the suggestion of that most accomplished scholar, Justin Winsor. But his appeal had the same fate. The bishop gave no encouragement, and said, as had been said nine years before, that the property could not be alienated without an act of Parliament. Mr. Winsor planned to repeat the attempt on his visit to England in 1877. When he was at Fulham the bishop was absent, and he was obliged to come home without seeing him in person. In 1881, at the time of the death of President Garfield, Benjamin Scott, chamberlain of London, proposed again in the newspapers that the restitution should be made. But nothing came of it. Dec. 21, 1895, I delivered an address at Plymouth, on the occasion of the two hundred and seventy-fifth anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims upon the rock. In preparing for that duty, I read again, with renewed enthusiasm and delight, the noble and touching story, as told by Governor Bradford. I felt that this precious history of the Pilgrims ought to be in no other custody than that of their children. But the case seemed hopeless. I found myself compelled by a serious physical infirmity to take a vacation, and to get a rest from public cares and duties, which was impossible while I stayed at home. When I went abroad I determined to visit the locality, on the borders of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, from which Bradford and Brewster and Robinson, the three leaders of the Pilgrims, came, and where their first church was formed, and the places in Amsterdam and Leyden where the emigrants spent thirteen years. But I longed especially to see the manuscript of Bradford at Fulham, which then seemed to me, as it now seems to me, the most precious manuscript on earth, unless we could recover one of the four gospels as it came in the beginning from the pen of the Evangelist.