an ancient waxed Table-book. 13 
their use, as portable memorandum-books, to the age of Queen Elizabeth. Thus 
in the second part of Henry IV., Act 1v., Scene 1, the Archbishop says : 
‘‘And therefore will he wipe his tables clean, 
And keep no tell-tale to his memory.” 
And again, in Hamlet (1. 5) : 
‘“ My tables, meet it is I set it down.” 
Again, in the same tragedy, Polonius says to the King: 
“What might you 
Or my dear Majesty, the Queen here, think, 
If I had played the deske or table-book.” 
We find also mention of a table-book in the following anecdote of the last 
moments of Lady Jane Grey, recorded by Nicholls, in his Progresses of Queen 
Elizabeth(a): «Sir John Gave, constable of the Tower, when he led her to 
execution, desired her to bestow on him some small present which he might keep 
as a memorial of her. She gave him her table-book, where she had just written 
three sentences on seeing her husband’s dead body, one in Greek, another in 
Latin, and a third in English.” 
These examples, however, it must be confessed, do not speak distinctly of 
waxed tablets, and therefore are so far inconclusive in proving the modern use 
of tablets of the kind now before us. Still, however, they prove that portable 
tablets, although of ivory or other materials, continued to be in use to a period 
much later than that to which we must assign the tablets we have described; and 
therefore no inference tending to determine their age can be drawn from their 
form and construction ; although we may perhaps infer that their being of wax is 
some evidence of antiquity, as ivory tablets were in use at least as early as the 
time of Chaucer. 
No trace now remains of the mode in which the leaves of the tablets before 
us were connected together. Montfaucon, in his Antiquité Expliquée(b), has 
figured tablets exactly similar to ours, in which the leaves are fastened together 
(4) Vol. iii. p. 15. (6) Tom. 111. part ii. planche exciy. p- 356, 
