I was informed not long after the Dean’s death, that a gentleman in Kent had in his possession what was said to be Oliver Cromwell’s skull. A friend of mine procured from that gentleman an invitation to see the relic. A large, handsome box was placed on a table, and out of it was taken, wrapped up in silk, a man’s skull. The lower part of the face was gone, leaving the upper jawbone entire, or nearly so; and within the mouth we saw the shrivelled remains of a tongue, while some of the skin on the upper part of the face was still preserved. What astonished me was the quantity of hair adhering to the scalp; and also the following circumstances pertaining to the relic. The inside, carefully examined by a medical companion, plainly appeared to have been embalmed; signs of this were attached to the surface. Moreover, part of a spike penetrated the upper bone, showing that once the skull must have been exposed in a way common enough, when men, put to death for political crimes, had their heads set up in conspicuous places. Finally the head had been severed from the body, not by a sharp axe, but by a knife which had hacked and torn the skin. These peculiarities pointed to one who, having received honourable burial, was afterwards beheaded with a blunt instrument, and then treated as a traitor, by having his head exhibited like those fixed on the top of Temple Bar. These peculiarities pertained to Oliver Cromwell; and to no one else. Documents are preserved together with the relic. They state that the relic remained publicly exposed for a long time, till one night a gale of wind blew it down; that a soldier on sentry picked it up and took it home, and then became alarmed at finding there was search made after it by public authorities. He concealed it down to the time of his death; and when danger was over, the secret was divulged. The skull was afterwards exhibited as a source of profit, and an account of the exhibition appears among papers preserved in the box. After being withdrawn from public view, it was privately sold to an ancestor of the gentleman possessing it at the time of my visit. There is a story afloat, that Cromwell was not buried in Westminster, another corpse being substituted for public interment, and, therefore, that the body hanged at Tyburn was not his! This story is not to be trusted. In the August following Dean Stanley’s death, I made, with my friend Harrison and some of my family, a tour in Germany. We were delighted with the Bavarian Highlands and the Bader See.