"Bartholomew de Grandval, a murderer, bribed by the money of Louis, convicted of parricide, and suffered the most severe punishment for having attempted to assassinate William III., King of Great Britain; his head and quarters exposed to be a frightful monument of his sacrilege, and of the perfidy of the French." Exergue: "XIII. Aug'st 1692." No. II.--Bust to the right; flowing hair: legend, "WILHELMUS III., D. G. MAG. BRIT. FRANC. ET HIB. REX;" the breast and shoulders covered by half of a shield, on which is written in Hebrew characters the name "Jehovah," and round it, in Latin, thus "He whom I shield is safe." Reverse: Six women, emblematical of Conspiracy, armed with daggers, snakes, and torches, in dancing attitudes, ready to attempt the king's life, and are withheld by cords issuing from a cloud, held by an invisible hand, which encircle their necks and faces. The legend is to this effect: "An invisible hand withholds them." Exergue: "1696, Boskam F." W. D. HAGGARD. Bullion Office, Bank of England. READINGS IN SHAKSPEARE, NO. I. "In the most high and palmy state of Rome, A little ere the mightiest Julius fell, The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets; As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood, Disasters in the sun; and the moist star, Upon whose influence Neptune's empire stands, Was pale almost to dooms-day with eclipse." _Hamlet_, Act I. Sc. 1. Such is the present state of the text; and notwithstanding its evident corruption, it has been judiciously preferred by modern editors to the various emendations and additions which, even to the manufacture of a complete line alleged to be deficient, had been unscrupulously made in it. But the slight change I now wish to propose, in the substance of one word, and in the received sense of another, carries such entire conviction to my own mind of accordance with the genuine intention of Shakspeare, that I may perhaps be pardoned if I speak of it with less hesitation than generally ought to accompany such suggestions, particularly as I do not arrogate to myself its sole merit, but freely relinquish to Malone so much of it as is his due. With Malone however the suggestion, such as it was, appears to have been but a random guess, abandoned as soon as formed, and avowedly prompted by very different considerations from those that have actuated me. That he should have been on the very brink, as it were, of the true reading, and yet fail to discover it, is only to be accounted for by his subjection to that besetting sin of the day which denied to Shakspeare all philological knowledge except what he might derive through his own language. In order to give Malone strict justice, I shall transcribe his suggestion, together with the comment by which Steevens appears to have stifled it in the birth:--