the priests who governed Louis XIV. Upon looking back at this period of agitation and alarm, it startles the mind to observe in the catalogue of dates this one: "Shakspeare died 1616." It shows us, what the ordinary records do not show, that there are people who retain their sanity and serenity in the maddest times. The rapid succession of the plays--an average of nearly two per annum--proves that there was a _public_ for Shakspeare when all the world seemed absorbed in subjects least akin to art and humor. And how little trace we find of all those thrilling events in the plays! He was a London actor when the Armada came; and during the year of the Gunpowder Plot he was probably meditating the grandest of all his themes, "King Lear!" The picture entitled "Spayne and Rome Defeated"[16] was one of the most noted and influential broadsheets published during the Puritan period. It may properly be termed a broadsheet, since the copy of the original in the British Museum measures 20-2/3 inches by 13. The Puritans of England saw with dismay the growing cordiality between James I. and the Spanish court, and watched with just apprehension the visit of Prince Charles to Spain, and the prospect of a marriage between the heir-apparent and a Spanish princess. At this alarming crisis, 1621, the sheet was composed in England, and sent over to Holland to be engraved and printed, Holland being then, and for a hundred and fifty years after, the printing-house and type-foundry of Northern Europe. Some of the Pilgrim Fathers of Massachusetts, then residing at Leyden, and still waiting to hear the first news of the _Mayflower_ company, who had sailed the year before, may have borne a hand in the work. Pastor Robinson, we know, gained part of his livelihood by co-operating with brethren in England in the preparation of works designed for distribution at home. [Footnote 16: From Malcolm, who copied it from the original in the British Museum. See Malcolm's "Caricaturing," plate 22.] Besides being one of the most characteristic specimens of Puritan caricature which have been preserved, it presents to us a _résumé_ of history, as Protestants interpreted it, from the time of the Spanish Armada to that of Guy Fawkes--1588 to 1605. It appears to have been designed for circulation in Holland and Germany as well as in England, as the words and verses upon it are in English, Dutch, and Latin. The English lines are these: