Before closing this communication, I would suggest to A SUBSCRIBER, and to all others propounding genealogical Queries, the absolute necessity of affixing _dates_ to their inquiries in every possible instance; as nothing is easier than to go astray, sometimes for half-a-dozen generations, in fixing the identity of a solitary individual. T. HUGHES. Chester. * * * * * ROBERT DUDLEY, EARL OF LEICESTER. (Vol. ix., pp. 105. 160.) That this infamous man _did_ die of poison, is, I believe, the general opinion. The late Dr. Cooke Taylor has the following passage upon the subject, in his _Romantic Biography of the Age of Elizabeth_, vol. i. p. 115.: "Nearly all the cotemporary writers assert that Leicester fell a victim to poison; Naunton declares that he, by mistake, swallowed the potion he had prepared for another person; and, as there can be no doubt that the Earl was a poisoner of great eminence and success, the story is far from being improbable. The Privy Council must have believed that his death was not natural, for they minutely investigated a report that he had been poisoned by the son of Sir James Crofts, in revenge for the imprisonment of his father. Some suspicious circumstances were elicited during the examination; but the matter was suddenly dropped, probably because an inquiry into any one of the complicated intrigues of Elizabeth's court would have involved too many persons of honour and consequence." Drummond of Hawthornden, in his _Notes of Conversations with Ben Jonson_, has the following curious note: "The Earl of Leicester gave a bottle of liquor to his lady, which he willed her to use in any faintness; which she, after his returne from Court, not knowing it was poison, gave him, and so he died." This is a strong confirmation of the statement given by Sir Robert Naunton. In one of the many valuable notes appended by Dr. Bliss to the _Athenae Oxonienses_, is the following cotemporary narrative, copied from a MS. memoranda on a copy of _Leicester's Ghost_: