gentleman has served to establish the singular but lamentable fact that many at least of the marks plainly photographed in the fac-simile have since disappeared. It appears that in order satisfactorily to photograph a book it must be completely unbound, and the photographs taken sheet by sheet. For the sake of improving the appearance of the volume, the binders frequently clean or "wash" the sheets with chemicals which do not affect the printing, but which obliterate marks of writing ink. Mr. Roberts thinks it probable that some of the leaves in his copy have been thus washed. The result is as curious as disappointing, and presents us with this paradox. The reduced fac-simile of the original, is now, in the true sense, the original copy, whilst the original copy is no longer absolutely like its own fac-simile.

By the pernicious operation described, this precious folio has been deprived of many of the very marks which are of priceless value, interesting beyond description to the cryptographer.

It is in the hope of saving from a similar fate other marked copies of "Shakespeare," and also all marked or scribbled volumes of merit whatsoever, published during the 16th and 17th centuries, that I write this letter, the contents of which I request you to be so good as to impart to any of your friends who possess valuable old books, or who are in any way connected with the care of libraries, or with the arts or trades relating to books. I shall be greatly obliged if any one who can give accurate information concerning marked copies, their owners, or their history, will communicate with me. It is in the highest degree improbable that the folio in question, hit upon by mere chance, and without any thought of ciphers or secret societies, should be the only marked and unwashed copy extant. We may fairly hope to discover others, especially in old private libraries, where books, even if they suffer from the damp or the weevils, escape a worse fate at the hands of restorers. It seems at present undesirable to publish a detailed account of the signs by which the ciphers have been worked, lest dishonest or unscrupulous persons should be tempted to tamper with other copies. Let us hope that public interest may soon be

sufficiently aroused to encourage the industrious experts who are quietly working at this subject, to publish their results, and to secure intelligent and ungrudging help in this newly revived branch of science.

Meanwhile I am glad of this opportunity for imparting to friends in distant countries this unexpected confirmation of Mr. Donnelly's statements. This fresh evidence is documentary, and admits of ocular demonstration, making assurance doubly sure as to the existence of a great and wonderful cipher system, running through the whole of the "Shakespeare Folio of 1623," and, I believe, through a still larger group of works of the 16th and 17th centuries.

Jan'y 30, 1889.

I am sir, faithfully yours,

CONSTANCE M. POTT.

The editors of SHAKESPEARIANA print this extraordinary circular simply out of personal respect and esteem for Mrs. Pott. They are perfectly aware-as are most of SHAKESPEARIANA'S readers that there is no "Cipher" in the First Folio Shakespeare, nor in any copy or impression thereof. But if Mrs. Pott will have it that there is-well, then, let there be a cipher there. Only, if Mrs. Pott will read her own " Promus of Formularies and Elegancies," she will learn that, whatever ciphers may exist in First Folio Shakespeares, the Donnelly "cipher narrative" is not one of them. Indeed, those two books, "The Promus " and "The Great Cryptogram," cannot exist side by side. One or the other of them must be a monstrous lie.

Reviews.

(1) The BACON-SHAKESPEARE QUESTION ANSWERED. By C. Stopes. Second Edition, corrected and enlarged. London: Trübner & Co. pp. 268, cloth.

(2) A REFUTATION OF THE HON. IGNATIUS DONNELLY'S GREAT CRYPTOGRAM. By the Rev. A. Nicholson, LL.D. London: T. Fisher Unwin. pp. 64, paper.

(3) BACON, SHAKESPEARE, AND THE ROSICRUCIANS. By W. F. C. Wigston, Author of "A New Study of Shakespeare; two plates. London: George Redway. pp. 284, cloth.

(4) THE BANKSIDE SHAKESPEARE. Vol. III. Romeo and Juliet. With Introduction by William Reynolds. A.M., LL.D. New York: The Shakespeare Society of New York: boards, pp. 205.

(5) PAPERS OF THE NEW YORK SHAKESPEARE SOCIETY. I.-VIII. Including the Digesta Shakespeariana. paper.

(6) THE PENTAMERON. Citation and Examination of William Shakespeare-Minor Prose Pieces-Criticisms. cloth, pp. 419.

(7) PEN AND INK. Papers on subjects of more or less importance. By Brander Matthews. pp. 228, cloth.

(8) THE HUMAN MYSTERY IN HAMLET.

An attempt to say an unsaid

word. By Martin W. Cooke, A.M. pp. 135, cloth.

(9) SHAKESPEARE'S HENRY THE FIFTH. With an Introduction and Notes. By K. Deighton, M.A. London and New York: Macmillan & Co. pp. 233. cloth.

(10) SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD THE THIRD. With an Introduction and Notes. By C. H. Tawney, A.M. London and New York: Macmillan & Co. pp. 255. cloth.

(11) STRAY LEAVES OF LITERATURE. By Frederick Saunders. New York: Whittaker & Co. pp. 200, cloth.

(12) SHAKESPEARIANA. Vol. V. New York: The Leonard Scott Publication Co. pp. 581, cloth.

(13) ELEMENTS OF ENGLISH. A preparation for the study of English Literature. By M. W. Smith A.M., Teacher of English Literature in Hughes High School, Cincinnati. Cincinnati: Van Antwerp, Bragg & Co. cloth.

(1) We are charmed with the concentration of this volume. Of course the fields are well worn, but much that is worn in usage may be lightened and freshened by so deft a handling. The scope of the work is best indicated by the terse preface to the First Edition: "The great Shakespearean scholars have considered it beneath their dignity to answer the assertions of the Baconians. 'Silence may be golden' in regard to the character of the living, but in defence of the dead, I should think speech is golden when it answers speech, and proof when it contests proof." And accordingly the author believes that the volume here presented "may help to turn the balance in some wavering minds, or to aid Shakespeareans too busy to go to work on their own account to give a reason for the faith that is in them." A seriatim and categorical answer to the Baconians, that cannot but be of great value to collectors of BacoShakespearean literature. Mrs. Stopes' especial care, and it has never been set out so rigidly and vividly, is that, whereas Shakespeare treated

men and motives from the purely psychological, Bacon considered them from the absolutely scientific, point of view: one painted from a palette, the other graved with a steel point; one used color, the other produced only line drawings. Mrs. Stopes in this opposed treatment is absolutely studious and careful-as exact as Bacon himself. A very pointed observation, but only akin to hundreds of others, is the difference in the way each of her subjects would handle the matter of intoxicants. The one moralized over their effect upon the moral sense, the actions, the deeds of men ; the other wrote of the processes by which they were manufactured and the best methods of concentrating or mitigating their attributes. Mrs. Stopes is a Scotch woman, who seems to be quite as alert as her English countrywoman, Mrs. Pott, in detecting root matters in the habitudes and personalities of these two men.

(2) The Rev. Dr. Nicholson also has been at pains to refute Mr. Donnelly once more by an array of figures quite equal to the great Cryptogram itself. Meanwhile Mr. Donnelly himself announces that the failure of his cipher is not due to its examination, but to the railway companies of the United States, who employed a certain railroad attorney (whom he specifies by name) to bribe the press of England and America. This would seem to throw the whole cipher business into the hands of the Interstate Commerce Commission to inquire by what right the railway companies proceeded so ultra vires of their charters, unless indeed a commission de lunatico should take prior jurisdiction in the premises.

(3) Bacon, Shakespeare, and the Rosicrucians is a most remarkable book. Like its predecessor, "A New Study of Shakespeare," one cannot open it without learning something. True, this something he learns is not always important. It may only be that the shape of Francis Bacon's tomb had a mystical connection with the name of Shakespeare; that Christopher Sly was the real type of the alleged bard of Avon; that Hermia and Helena were a dual unity; that the central myth of Eleusis is incorporated in The Winter's Tale; that there was a lodge of Freemasons at St. Albans, etc., etc. But all the same the book is a curiosity and no Shakespeare-Bacon library should be without it. A certain John Heydon, who rewrote Bacon's "New Atlantis," under the title Voyage to the Land of the Rosicrucians," is largely particularized, and his plagiarism used as proof that Bacon was a Rosicrucian. Well, he was almost everything else, and probably was that also. But it will not do to ask what any one item of Mr. Wigston's information has to do with any other. It is much less laborious to simply admit that it all tends to prove Bacon to have written Shakespeare.

(4) When the New York Shakespeare Society announced, in 1885, that it had determined to commence the publication of an edition of Shakespeare in twenty volumes, which should devote to the text of the great work a loving and minute care such as it had never received before-which should parallel its very earliest and very latest form, reproducing all the antique and pedantic ornaments of the Quartos and Folios, should number consecutively every line, whether speech, stage direction, exit or entrance; which should exactly copy every typographical slip, misplaced punctuation, error in orthography, or inverted letter in both texts (in order that readers might judge for themselves as to the value of conjectural readings or corrections based upon these inaccuracies)—when we say the Society resolved upon this work, it first of all determined that the work was not worth attempting unless it could be done with absolute accuracy-that anything less would make the edition merely one more

added to the hundreds of excellent reading editions, but not specific enough to engage the resources of the Society in lieu of less absorbing but still valuable labor. We think subscribers to The Bankside Shakespeare are satisfied so far with the Society's performance of its unique, laborious, and ambitious project. Any temptation to relax editorial industry, and to expect the sumptuous simplicity of the typography which the RiversidePress has lavished on this edition to commend it to favor, certainly has not prevailed. It is proposed that nothing in this edition should fall short of the purpose of the membership of a society which prints in every volume issued under its seal the statement that "In order that the papers printed by this Society may always be of the highest character, and of value from all standpoints, the Society does not stand pledged as responsible except in so far as it certifies by its imprimatur that it considers them as original contributions to Shakespearean study." As for typography, nothing purer or more richly elaborate has ever appeared from an American press than these Banksides, with their rubricated titles, laid paper, clear-cut letter-press, and brilliant ink. Certainly, no such loving care has ever been bestowed upon Shakespeare before. Every line, or exit, entrance or stage direction of less than a line, is numbered twice, and at intervals three times, that the reader's eye may at onceidentify each word and phrase in either edition, as well as trace the manipulations or variations given it by their author. That a work like the Bankside edition should have emanated from American scholars, and its critical and careful typography from an American press, are matters to be proud of. But, while the texts here thrice collated-twice by consecutive notation, and once tabulated (each Bankside line being referred to a Quarto "signature" (the quartos being unpaged) and to the Folio. line, column and page)-the Introductions are intended to be the results. of the personal and special (if they so elect) study of each play, and for which each member is particularly and personally responsible, the responsibility of the Society as a unit extending only to the scrupulous ac-. curacy of the reproduced texts. Accordingly, in Volume I. Mr. Morgan confined himself to his theory that the 1623 text of The Merry Wives of Windsor was the result of the twenty-one years' growth of the play by interpolations, "gags," and variants introduced by the various actors. who in a generation of stage life had pronounced it. In Volume II. Mr. Frey devoted himself to a re-examination of Capell's old claim that The Taming of a Shrew and The Taming of the Shrew had an identical authorship; and in Volume III. The Merchant of Venice, now before us, Mr. Reynolds has not feared-even in the face of the childish claims of the cipherists--to grapple boldly with the Baconian Theory, and (as we think) to considerably worst it. In conclusion we have only to say that this immense work has met with nothing but encomium, and there is nothing to interfere with its splendid success: there is not an original Folio or Quarto not accessible to its editors. Its proof-reading is entrusted not only to its editors finally, but to a corps of the best professional proof-readers in the world, on the staff of the great Riverside Press, and the work will be to their credit as well as to the credit of the New York Shakespeare Society, as well as in perpetual memory of the fidelity and patience of all concerned.

(5) The first eight numbers of the publications of the New York Shakepeare Society reasonably group themselves into two volumes. Numbers 4 and 7, being the Digesta Shakespeariana, of course should be bound as Volume II. (and it would be convenient, we should think, to bind them in