the beard and moustache in the celebrated portrait of Charles I. and Vandyke, in which a full view and a profile and a three-quarter face are given. The collar is no longer a plain lawn collar or a ruff, but one of the time of Charles I.; whilst the ample cloak thrown over the shoulders has a Vandyke air and boldness, and in its treatment urges one to suppose that Sir Antony, or it may be Sir Peter Paul, had something to do with the designs from which these two excellent heads were modelled. The whole history of this bust is a curiosity; its strange preservation, by being "bricked in," and its rescue, whilst its less worthy fellow was destroyed, are happy incidents which must add to the interest with which we regard it.

It is now, perhaps, fourteen or fifteen years ago that Mr. Abraham Wivell, an industrious and very zealous inquirer into the subject of this book, died. To his last he never ceased to carry on his search, and in 1847-8 had a mezzotinto engraving of a Shakspeare executed, which has many claims to our sympathetic regard. It represents the poet standing near a table, on which is a skull, upon which his right arm rests. In the hand is a book, the forefinger apparently inserted between the leaves, the book not clasped, but with ribbons in the place of clasps, so that it can be tied. The figure is in a rich lowpeaked dress of the Tudor period, with a ruff around the neck, and two laced ruffs at the wrists. His left hand, the thumb of which is adorned with a ring, holds gloves. A richly worked but slight sword-belt is round the waist;

the breeches are puffed and bombasted out as was the fashion in the days of James I.

The face is benevolent and earnest, and the look very steadfast; the beard, which connects itself with the lower whiskers, is peaked, but scanty; the upper lip not long, the nose slightly aquiline, the eyebrows arched, the forehead ample and bald. The portrait more closely resembles the Somerset portrait, painted by Jansen, than any other, yet the two pictures are so different that it is impossible to believe that they are from the same original.

This picture was, in March, 1847, in the hands of Mr. Clement Kington, of Ashbourne, Derbyshire. Hearing of Mr. Wivell's labours, he wrote to him asking him to call and see this portrait, and it was finally engraved. Mr. Kington's account, which is given with unquestioned bona fides, is, that he bought the picture of a family who had long had it in their possession, and who believed it to be a genuine and contemporary portrait. In the upper left-hand corner is an inscription which is an exact copy, in form, of that of the Somerset picture, save that the age and date differ by one year, as if one of the pictures was one year older than the other. On another part of the picture, as the owner related, was a crest of Shakspeare, with a comic and a tragic mask, which facts induced Mr. Kington to believe that the picture was genuine.*

There is also a fine portrait, with many marks of genuineness about it, at present in possession of the

* Mr. Samuel Timmins, of Birmingham, communicated these facts to the writer, who has only seen a photograph of this portrait.

Bishop of Ely. The Bishop's illness has prevented an examination of this picture, but connoisseurs declare that it has many claims to be considered a genuine one.

There is also another portrait, called the "Clopton " portrait, from its owners claiming it to have been for a long time in the family of Sir Hugh Clopton, and to have descended to the wife of its exhibitor, a Mr. W. Warner. The wife was of course a Stratford woman, the portrait a highly-prized one; but the whole story seems to us very doubtful. Clopton" is a name which immediately suggests itself in connexion with any portrait of Shakspeare which is wanting in documentary evidence, and has only slender merits to stand upon. This portrait has not been examined on the present occasion.

Finally, we have in Paris, as a pendant to the celebrated bellows portrait discovered at Caen, an "original" picture which is thus described, and its history given :

Some few years ago a Mr. Joy emigrated from London to Boston, carrying with him some few old pictures and various relics collected by his father, a great antiquarian and connoisseur in objects of art and curiosity. The greatest and most esteemed by this latter gentleman of all the curiosities he had collected, consisted of a few articles bought of an amateur to whom they had descended as relics of the Globe Tavern (?) where Shakespeare and the wits of Elizabeth's time were wont to congregate, and where the portraits of many of them were well preserved even so late as the beginning of the last century. One of the pictures was sold with the assurance that it had always been considered as a likeness of Shakespeare, and it was so black and begrimed that the lineaments were scarcely visible, and after having served as subject of laughter and raillery amongst his friends on his arrival at Boston, Mr. Joy, half ashamed of his own credulity, had the picture stowed away in a lumber room, and forbade the subject ever to be mentioned. At Mr. Joy's death, a year or two ago, his sister, a maiden lady of large fortune and great

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taste, drew forth the curiosities brought by her brother from the old world, and caused the picture in particular to be cleaned and newly framed. What was the astonishment experienced when on removing the coating of smoke and dirt with which the soi-disant Shakspeare was coated an inch thick, to find the name of Gueckers in the corner, and unquestionable evidence of the portrait being that of the great poet himself! There certainly is a greater conviction of identity conveyed in this picture than in any other of the portraits now existing-a reality of life which none of the others possess. The American sculptor, Greenough, to whom the portrait has been confided by Miss Joy, has modelled from it a bust, which combines all the reality of this self-evident likeness with the ideality furnished by his own poetical imagination. The fire in the eye, the marvellous play of the lips, the arched forehead and high flowing hair, are admirable, and the bust is thought by French artists to be a realization of what Shakespeare must have been.*

This picture I have not yet seen, but have been assured that it possesses great merit. Walpole does not mention the name of Gueckers, and we are left in the dark as to the "unquestionable evidence" of the portrait being one of Shakspeare. The whole story seems too full of question. We do not know of any Globe Tavern, although there was a Globe Theatre; we have heard of the net combats at the Sun, the Dogge or triple Tun,” and in connexion with Shakspeare we also know Bell Yard, Great Carter Lane, Doctor's Commons, where stood the Bell, whence on October 25, 1598, Richard Quiney addressed a letter to his "loveing friend and countryman, Mr. William Schackespere, living at Southwark, near the Bear Garden,” requesting a loan of thirty pounds. This letter supposed to be the only one existing of the very many which must have been addressed to Shakspeare, still exists at Stratford-on-Avon.

* Birmingham Journal," December 12th, 1863—Letter from Paris.

XI.

OF FORGERIES, PRINTS OF SHAKSPEARE, AND MISCELLANEA.

WHEN the furore concerning Shakspeare portraits was at its height, many gentlemen, with more ingenuity than principle, set to work to supply the demand. Amongst them were a picture-dealer and a picture-restorer, whose faults may be dealt with lightly, since they have sons yet living, carrying on their businesses and reaping some part of the reward of their fathers' virtues. The first, was Mr. Hilder, in Gray's Inn Lane, whom in our boyish and his patriarchal days we have often seen and talked with; "he furnished," says Wivell, "whole families of Shakspeares." Happening to buy a capital portrait of an alderman and his wife, he cruelly separated the pair, and had the alderman turned into Cromwell and the wife into a most magnificent Shakspeare. This reminds us of the transformation effected by Mrs. Jarley in her wax-works, who, as Dickens tells us, would, when about to be visited by a ladies' school, dress up Mary Queen of Scots as Lord Byron, putting her in a Greek dress, and on her a curly black wig,