years after publication. There is a note in a
contemporary hand which says it was bought for 3 pounds 15s., a somewhat
extravagant price. The entry further says that it cost three score
pounds of silver, words that I cannot explain. The Sheldon family arms
are on the sides of the volume, and there are many manuscript notes in
the margin, interpreting difficult words, correcting misprints, or
suggesting new readings.

{309c} It has been mutilated by a former owner, and the signature of the
leaf is missing, but it was presumably G G 3.

{310} Correspondents inform me that two copies of the First Folio, one
formerly belonging to Leonard Hartley and the other to Bishop Virtue of
Portsmouth, showed a somewhat similar irregularity. Both copies were
bought by American booksellers, and I have not been able to trace them.

{311} Cf. _Notes and Queries_, 1st ser., vii. 47.

{312a} Arber, _Stationers' Registers_, iii. 242-3.

{312b} On January 31, 1852, Collier announced in the _Athenaeum_, that
this copy, which had been purchased by him for thirty shillings, and bore
on the outer cover the words '_Tho. Perkins his Booke_,' was annotated
throughout by a former owner in the middle of the seventeenth century.
Shortly afterwards Collier published all the 'essential' manuscript
readings in a volume entitled _Notes and Emendations to the Plays of
Shakespeare_. Next year he presented the folio to the Duke of
Devonshire. A warm controversy as to the date and genuineness of the
corrections followed, but in 1859 all doubt as to their origin was set at
rest by Mr. N. E. S. A. Hamilton of the manuscript department of the
British Museum, who in letters to the _Times_ of July 2 and 16 pronounced
all the manuscript notes to be recent fabrications in a simulated
seventeenth-century hand.

{314} The best account of eighteenth-century criticism of Shakespeare is
to be found in the preface to the Cambridge edition by Mr. Aldis Wright.
The memoirs of the various editors in the _Dictionary of National
Biography_ supply useful information. I have made liberal use of these
sources in the sketch given in the following pages.

{317a} Mr. Churton Collins's admirable essay on Theobald's textua
criticism of Shakespeare, entitled 'The Porson of Shakespearean Critics,'
is reprinted from the _Quarterly Review_ in his _Essays and Studies_,
1895, pp. 263 et seq.

{317b} Collier doubtless followed Theobald's hint when he pretended to
have