So improbable did this assertion appear to me, that I wrote to Mr. Gunton, the courteous secretary of the Marquis of Salisbury, requesting him to examine the handwriting of the date in question. He tells me that the confession itself is, as Father Gerard states, in Winter's hand, as is also the date '23 {9 ber} 1605.' Two changes have been made; in the first place 23 has been altered to 25, and there has been added at the head of the paper: "The voluntary declaration of Thomas Winter, of Hoodington, in the County of Worcester, gent. the 25 of November, 1605." "This heading," Mr. Gunton writes, "is so tucked in at the top, that it must, I think, have been written after the confession itself." He also assures me that the 5 of the substituted date and the 5 in the added heading 'are exactly alike, and both different from the 5' at the end of the date of the year, as written by Winter. "The heading," Mr. Gunton writes, "I believe to be in Coke's hand. It is more carefully written than he usually writes, and more carefully than his attestation at the end; but as far as my judgment goes, it is decidedly his hand." The alleged fact that lies at the basis of Father Gerard's argument is therefore finally disposed of. Why Coke, if Coke it was, changed the date can be no more than matter for conjecture. Yet an explanation, conjectural though it be, seems to me to be probable enough. We have seen that Fawkes's confession under torture bears two dates, the 9th, when it was taken before Coke and Waad the Lieutenant of the Tower, together with a magistrate, Edward Forsett; the second, on the 10th, when it was declared before the Commissioners. Why may not this confession of Winter's have been subjected to a similar process. Winter, I suppose, writes it on the 23rd, and it is then witnessed, as Father Gerard says, by Coke alone. Though no copy with the autograph signatures of the Commissioners exists it is reasonable to suppose that one was made, in which a passage about Monteagle--whom the Government did not wish to connect with the plot except as a discoverer--was omitted, and that this, still bearing the date of the 23rd, may have been brought before the Commissioners on the 25th. They would thus receive a statement from Winter that it was his own, and the signatures of the Commissioners would then be appended to it, together with those of Coke and Waad. This then would be the document from which copies would be taken for the use of individual Commissioners, and we can thus account for Salisbury's having appended to his own copy now in the Record Office, "Taken before us, Nottingham, Suffolk, &c." The recognition before the Commissioners would become the official date, and Coke, having access to the original, changes the date on which it was written to that on which it was signed by the Commissioners. This explanation is merely put forward as a possible one. The important point is that Father