None of our Shakespearian students has hitherto addressed himself to the special task of tracing to, their sources the few pieces of gossip about the poet, save, perhaps, the deer-stealing episode. The _Richard III. and William the Conqueror_ story, in which Burbage and Shakespear are made to figure, is recorded by Manningham in his Elizabethan Diary, and no earlier analogue has fallen in my way. The scandal about Davenant is another item of the same class, which we are almost ashamed to find ourselves cherishing, even though it be, as it were, _formâ pauperis_, from sheer lack of better matter. It seems lamentable that, while the anecdote-hunter was on the trail, he did not appropriate, for the benefit, instruction and delight of every intelligent individual coming after him, some particulars of Shakespear’s private and literary life, once so easy of access, now so irretrievably lost! How many thousand biographies of all kinds of nonentities might not be exchanged for an account of Shakespear by an educated contemporary! Malone refers to the foundation of the Literary Club and to a little episode about Garrick and Johnson in connection with that event:-- “Not very long after the institution of the Club,” he says, “Sir J. Reynolds was speaking of it to Garrick. ‘I like it much,’ says he; ‘I think I’ll be of you.’ When Sir J. Reynolds mentioned this to Dr. Johnson, he was much displeased at the actor’s conceit. ‘He’ll be of us!’ says Johnson; ‘how does he know we will permit him? The first duke in England has no right to hold such language.’ However, when Garrick was regularly proposed, some time afterwards, Johnson warmly supported him....” “On the former part of this story,” adds Malone, “it probably was that Sir John Hawkins grounded his account that Garrick never was of the Literary Club, and that Johnson said he never ought to be of it. And thus it is that this stupid biographer, and the more flippant and malicious Mrs. Piozzi, have miscoloured and misrepresented every anecdote that they have pretended to tell of Dr. Johnson.”