"'Your last suggestion,' said Mr. Lincoln, 'carries with it greater weight than anything Mr. Hackett suggested, but the first is no reason at all;' and after reading another passage, he said, 'This is not withheld, and where it passes current there can be no reason for withholding the other.'... And, as if feeling the impropriety of preferring the player to the parson, [there was a clergyman in the room] he turned to the chaplain and said: 'From your calling it is probable that you do not know that the acting plays which people crowd to hear are not always those planned by their reputed authors. Thus, take the stage edition of "Richard III." It opens with a passage from "Henry VI.," after which come portions of "Richard III.," then another scene from "Henry VI.," and the finest soliloquy in the play, if we may judge from the many quotations it furnishes, and the frequency with which it is heard in amateur exhibitions, was never seen by Shakespeare, but was written--was it not, Mr. McDonough?--after his death, by Colley Cibber." "Having disposed, for the present, of questions relating to the stage editions of the plays, he recurred to his standard copy, and, to the evident surprise of Mr. McDonough, read or repeated from memory extracts from several of the plays, some of which embraced a number of lines. "It must not be supposed that Mr. Lincoln's poetical studies had been confined to his plays. He interspersed his remarks with extracts striking from their similarity to, or contrast with, something of Shakespeare's, from Byron, Rogers, Campbell, Moore, and other English poets."[1] [Illustration: BERRY AND LINCOLN'S STORE IN 1895.