Beyond question, after the Bust and the Droeshout engraving, the Janssen portrait has the greatest value. Unfortunately the Chandos, even if its history be as stated, is of very little real value: for it has been so often repaired or “restored,” and is at present in such a dilapidated condition, that it cannot be relied upon as a portrait. Moreover it bears but little resemblance to the admirable drawing from it in its former state, made by Ozias Humphreys in the year 1783. This drawing is an exceedingly fine work of art, to which even Scriven’s print, good as it is, scarcely does justice. To compare Humphreys’ drawing, which hangs in the Birthplace, and is its most valuable portrait, with Samuel Cousin’s fine mezzotint of the Chandos, engraved forty years ago, is to be convinced that the existing picture no longer represents the man—whosoever he may have been—from whom it was painted. How many questions, affecting the Bust, the Death-Mask, and these portraits, would be set at rest by the production of Shakespeare’s skull! The late Mr. William Page, the American sculptor, whose interest in testing the identity of the Kesselstadt Death-Mask, by comparing it with Shakespeare’s skull, was in 1874–5 incomparably greater than that of any other interested person, comes _very near_ the expression of a wish for the exhumation of the skull. {39} But he had not the courage to express that wish, and after the passage which I am about to quote, abruptly changes the subject. He says, “The man who wrote the four lines [of epitaph] which have thus far secured his bones that rest which his epitaph demands, omitted nothing likely to carry the whole plan into effect. The authorship of the epitaph cannot be doubted, unless another man in England had the wit and wisdom to divine the loyal heart’s core of its people, and touch it in the single appeal ‘for Jesus sake.’ Nothing else has kept him out of Westminster [Abbey]. The style of the command and curse are Shakespearian, and triumphant as any art of forethought in his plays.” Then follows on—without even the break of a paragraph—not what naturally should have followed, and _must_ have been in Mr. Page’s mind, but a citation of Chantrey and John Bell, as to the model from which the Bust was made. Possibly it is due to the omission of a sentence, which once intervened between the remarks on the remains and those which concern the Bust of Shakespeare, that we have now two totally different matters in juxtaposition, and in the same paragraph. In this Death-Mask Mr. Page saw the reconciliation of the Bust, the Droeshout print (in its best state), and the Chandos portrait. I do not meddle with that opinion, or the evidences upon which it rests. But I have inspected all the four: I have also seen Mr. Page’s life-size bronze bust, and wish I had never seen it, or even a photograph of it, for it destroyed for me a pleasant dream.