Yet numerous as they must once have been, the heads of English pastoral staffs are now among the rarest of ivory carvings. It is true that no. 298 at South Kensington can, with some kind of probability, be attributed to an English artist and may have been used in England; but no other in that collection can be referred to. The almost complete destruction in England of all ecclesiastical ornaments—books, vestments, reliquaries, and the like—in the middle of the sixteenth century will account for the extreme rarity of them in this country. But it is very difficult to explain the reason why so few should still be found in France, or Germany, or Italy. The bishop’s pastoral staff, again, has not dropped out of use like the pax or the flabellum. There are examples of the pax in the South Kensington collection, nos. 246 and 247. It was used in the middle ages at high mass and sometimes at low mass also, for sending the kiss of peace from the celebrant, first to the deacon and subdeacon or to the acolyte, afterwards to the people. With regard to the custom in England, provincial and diocesan statutes repeat again and again the obligation upon parishes to provide the pax, “osculatorium” or “asser ad pacem,” equally with the proper vestments or books or other furniture of the altar. The rubrics of the Sarum missal—the use most largely observed in England before the reign of queen Elizabeth—direct the priest, immediately after the _Agnus Dei_, to kiss the outside rim of the chalice in which was the Sacred Blood, and then to give the pax to the deacon who delivered it in regular order to the ministers and choristers in the sanctuary. Everything connected with the correct text of the plays of Shakespeare is of the highest interest to every Englishman; and will serve, it is hoped, as some excuse for a few words by way of remark upon a passage where he alludes to a pax. The unfortunate Bardolph came to an untimely end on account of it: “Fortune is Bardolph’s foe, and frowns on him: For he hath stolen a pax: and hang’d must’a be. ——Exeter hath given the doom of death, For pax of little price.” HENRY V., _act_ iii., _sc._ 5. Until lately the editors of Shakspeare printed _pyx_ on the emendation (so-called) of Theobald. Johnson, who approved the new reading, informs us in his note upon the place that the two words “signified the same thing.” As far as Bardolph was concerned it mattered not; he had “conveyed” a sacred thing and, as Holinshed tells us, the king would not move on till the thief was hanged.