Among the relics once religiously preserved in the Kesselstadt collection at Mayence was a plaster mask, having at the back the year of Shakespeare’s death. This relic had been in that collection time out of mind, and seems always to have been received as a cast from the “flying-mould” of Shakespeare’s dead face. With this was a small oil-painting of a man crowned with bays, lying on a state bier; of which, by the kindness of Mr. J. Parker Norris of Philadelphia, I am able to give the admirable engraving which forms the frontispiece to this little volume. On the death of Count and Canon Francis von Kesselstadt, at Mayence, in 1843, the family museum was broken up, and its contents dispersed. No more was seen or heard of either of the two relics described, till 1847, when the painting was purchased by an artist named Ludwig Becker; and after some months of unremitting search he discovered the Death-Mask in a broker’s shop, and this he bought in 1849. The purchaser is dead: but both these relics are in the Grand Ducal Museum at Darmstadt, and belong to its curator, Dr. Ernst Becker, Ludwig’s brother. I have inspected both with the keenest interest; and I am of opinion that the painting is not after the mask. The date, 1637, which it bears, led Dr. Schaafhausen to think that it was intended for Ben Jonson; a view to some extent borne out by the portrait of Ben in the Dulwich Gallery. {35} By others, however, it is believed to be a fancy portrait of Shakespeare, based upon the Death-Mask. Now the Bust was believed to have been sculptured after a death-mask. Is the Becker Mask that from which Gerard Johnson worked? If so, there must have been a fatal accident indeed to the nose; for the nose of the mask is a long and finely arched one: the upper lip is shorter than that of the bust, and the forehead is more receding. Of the many alleged portraits of Shakespeare there are but two whose pedigree stretches back into the seventeenth century, and is lost in obscurity there. The origin of the vast majority of the claimants is only too well known, or shrewdly suspected: these are (1) copies, more or less unfaithful, of older pictures; (2) idealised portraits, based upon such older ones, or upon the Bust; (3) genuine portraits of unknown persons, valued for some slight or imaginary resemblance to the Bust, or to such older portraits, or for having passed as Shakespeare’s, and thus offering the means of selling dear what had been bought cheap; (4) impostures. As I am not writing an essay upon the portraits, I will merely mention in the order of their importance the few claimants whose title merits the least consideration. I.—The Droeshout engraving, prefixed to the first collective edition of the Poet’s works, published in 1623: _i.e._, the print in its early state.