original Shakespeare quartos acquired for the Memorial library at the sale of the literary property of J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps. Those quartos are the _Merchant of Venice_, the _Merry Wives of Windsor_, and a first edition of _Pericles_. A copy of _Roger of Faversham_ was also bought, together with two of the plays of Aphra Behn. Charles Edward Flower purchased, at that sale, a copy of the first folio of Shakespeare, and the four Shakespeare Folios, 1623, 1632, 1663, 1685, stand side by side in his private library at Avonbank. Mr. Flower intimated the intention of giving them to the Memorial library. [His death did not defeat that purpose. Those precious books are now in the Memorial collection.] A large collection of old writings was found in a room of the Grammar School, adjacent to the Guild chapel, in 1887. About five thousand separate papers were discovered, the old commingled with the new; many of them indentures of apprenticeship; many of them receipts for money; no one of them especially important, as bearing on the Shakespeare story. Several of them are in Latin. The earliest date is 1560,--four years before the poet was born. One document is a memorandum "presenting" a couple of the wives of Stratford for slander of certain other women, and quoting their bad language with startling fidelity. Another is a letter from a citizen of London, named Smart, establishing and endowing a free school in Stratford for teaching English,--the writer quaintly remarking that schools for the teaching of Latin are numerous, while no school for teaching English exists, that he can discover. Those papers have been classified and arranged by Richard Savage, but nothing directly pertinent to Shakespeare has been found in them. I saw a deed that bore the "mark" of Joan, sister of Mary Arden, Shakespeare's mother, but this may not be a recent discovery. All those papers are written in that "cramped penmanship" which baffled Tony Lumpkin, and which baffles wiser people than he was. Richard Savage, however, is skilful in reading this crooked and queer calligraphy; and the materials and the duty of exploring them are in the right hands. When the researches and conclusions of that scholar are published they will augment the mass of evidence already extant,--much of it well presented by J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps,--that the writer of Shakespeare's plays was a man familiar with the neighbourhood, the names, and the everyday life of Stratford-upon-Avon; a fact which is not without its admonitory suggestiveness to those credulous persons who incline to heed the ignorant and idle theories and conjectures of Mr. Ignatius Donnelly. That mistaken and somewhat mischievous writer visited Shakespeare's town in the summer of 1888, and surveyed the scenes that are usually viewed. "He did not address himself to me," said Miss Chattaway, who was then at the Birthplace, as its custodian; "had he done so I should have informed him that, in Stratford, Bacon is