Judge Webb, in his ‘Proem,’ refers to Mr. Holmes and Mr. Donnelly as ‘distinguished writers,’ who ‘have received but scant consideration from the accredited organs of opinion on this side of the Atlantic.’ Their theories have not been more favourably considered by Shakespearean scholars on the other side of the Atlantic, and how much consideration they deserve we have tried to show. The Irish Judge opens his case by noting an essential distinction between ‘Shakspere,’ the actor, and ‘Shakespeare,’ the playwright. The name, referring to the man who was both actor and author, is spelled both ‘Shakspeare’ and ‘Shakespeare’ in the ‘Returne from Parnassus’ (1602).* The ‘school of critics’ which divides the substance of Shakespeare on the strength of the spelling of a proper name, in the casual times of great Elizabeth, need not detain the inquirer. *The Returne from Parnassus, pp. 56,57,138. Oxford, 1886. As to Shakespeare’s education, Judge Webb admits that ‘there was a grammar school in the place.’ As its registers of pupils have not survived, we cannot prove that Shakespeare went to the school. Mr. Collins shows that the Headmaster was a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and describes the nature of the education, mainly in Latin, as, according to the standard of the period, it ought to have been.* There is no doubt that if Shakespeare attended the school (the age of entry was eight), minded his book, and had ‘a good sprag memory,’ he might have learned Latin. Mr. Collins commends the Latin of two Stratford contemporaries and friends of Shakespeare, Sturley and Quiney, who probably were educated at the Grammar School. Judge Webb disparages their lore, and, on the evidence of the epistles, says that Sturley and Quiney ‘were not men of education.’ If Judge Webb had compared the original letters of distinguished Elizabethan officials and diplomatists--say, Sir William Drury, the Commandant of Berwick--he would have found that Sturley and Quiney were at least on the ordinary level of education in the upper classes. But the whole method of the Baconians rests on neglecting such comparisons. *Fortnightly Review, April 1903. In a letter of Sturley’s, eximiae is spelled eximie, without the digraph, a thing then most usual, and no disproof of Sturley’s Latinity.* The Shakspearean hypothesis is that Shakespeare was rather a cleverer man than Quiney and Sturley, and, consequently, that, if he went to school, he probably learned more by a great deal than they did. There was no reason why he should not acquire Latin enough to astonish modern reviewers, who have often none at all. *Webb, p. 14. Phillipps’s Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, i. p. 150, ii. p. 57.