Understanding that some five-and-thirty or forty years since it was asserted by the then occupier of North Newton mill, near Banbury, in Oxfordshire, which at that time was the property of Lord Saye and Sele, that such was the first erected in this country for the manufacture of paper, and also that it was to that mill Shakspeare referred in the passage just quoted, I recently communicated with Lord Saye and Sele as to the plausibility of the supposition; remarking at the same time as I would now, that although it was of course quite impossible to award the immortal bard great credit for chronological accuracy, it must, I thought, be admitted, that so marvellous an invention, unless really in existence, could not by any possibility of conception have been conjured up even to supply the unlimited necessities of the poet’s strain. His Lordship, however, at once terminated the probability of this mill taking the precedence, even of Sir John Spielman’s, by informing me that the first nobleman succeeding to that title who had property in Oxfordshire, which he acquired by marriage, was the _son_ of the first Lord Saye, to whom Shakspeare makes reference. The earliest trace of the manufacture in this country occurs in a book printed by Caxton, about the year 1490, in which it is said of John Tate— “Which late hathe in England doo make thys paper thynne, That now in our Englyssh thys booke is prynted inne.” His mill was situate at or near Stevenage, in Hertfordshire, and that it was considered worthy of especial notice is evident from an entry made in Henry the Seventh’s Household Book, on the 25th of May, 1498—“For a rewarde geven at the paper-mylne, 16s. 8d.” And again in 1499—“Geven in rewarde to Tate of the mylne, 6s. 8d.” Still, it appears to me far less probable that Shakspeare alluded to this mill, although established at a period corresponding in many respects with that of occurrences referred to in connection, than to that of Sir John Spielman’s, which, standing as it did in the immediate neighbourhood of Jack Cade’s rebellion, and being esteemed so important at the time, as to call forth the marked patronage of Queen Elizabeth; while the extent of the operations carried on there, if we may judge from the remarks of a poet of the time, were equally calculated to arouse undivided national interest; one can hardly help thinking, that the prominence to which Shakspeare assigns the existence of a paper mill, coupled as such allusion is with an acknowledged liberty, inherent in him, of transposing events, to add force to his style, as also with very considerable doubt as to the exact year in which he wrote the play, that the reference made was to none other than that of Sir John Spielman’s establishment of 1588, concerning which we find it said—