In the course of the same year he edited the _Conference of Pleasure_, written by Bacon for some masque or festive occasion, and printed from a MS. belonging to the Duke of Northumberland which had been slightly injured by fire. FitzGerald, in a letter to me, says of it: Spedding's Introduction to his grilled Bacon, I call it really a beautiful little _Idyll_, the mechanical Job done so perfectly and so elegantly. But while he was engaged in the great labour of his life he found time to write beautiful pieces of criticism on Shakespeare to which FitzGerald would willingly have had him devote his whole attention. "I never heard him read a page," he writes to Sir Frederick Pollock, "but he threw some new light upon it." In the _Gentleman's Magazine_ for August 1850 he contributed a paper on "Who wrote Shakespeare's _Henry VIII._?" which he discussed with characteristic thoroughness. His conclusion was that it was the work of two authors, one of whom was Fletcher, and this was confirmed by the investigations of another enquirer, who independently arrived at substantially the same result. The division of the Acts in _Much Ado_, _Twelfth Night_, _Richard II._, and _King Lear_ formed the subject of other discussions, and these he considered his most valuable contribution to the restoration of Shakespeare. A criticism of Miss Kate Terry's acting in Viola gave him the opportunity of pointing out the corruptions by which the fine comedy, _Twelfth Night_, has been degraded into farce. "Spedding says," FitzGerald writes in 1875 to Fanny Kemble, "that Irving's Hamlet is simply--_hideous_--a strong expression for Spedding to use. But--(lest I should think his condemnation was only the Old Man's fault of depreciating all that is new) he extols Miss Ellen Terry's Portia as simply _a perfect Performance_: remembering (he says) all the while how fine was Fanny Kemble's." Again to the same correspondent early in 1880 he says: By far the chief incident in my life for the last month has been the reading of dear old Spedding's Paper on the _Merchant of Venice_, there, at any rate, is one Question settled, and in such a beautiful way as only he commands. I could not help writing a few lines to tell him what I thought, but even very sincere praise is not the way to conciliate him. About Christmas I wrote him, relying on it that I should be most likely to secure an answer if I expressed dissent from some other work of his, and my expectation was justified by one of the fullest answers he had written to me for many a day and year. The paper referred to was "The Story of the _Merchant of Venice_" in the _Cornhill Magazine_ for March 1880. In sending a copy to Frederick Tennyson he says: I now post you a paper by old Spedding--a very beautiful one, I think; _settling_ one point, however unimportant, and in a graceful, as well as logical, way such as he is Master of.