488 . LEAVES THEY HAVE TOUCHED. 



Opinion "with. Mr. Jeans on tliis point, and so the book was not 

 Secured for the British Miisenm, the Bodleian, the University Library 

 at Cambridge, or some one or other of the remaining national collec- 

 tions. I possessed myself of the volume and brought it away with 

 me. Whether the inscription which it contains were really penned 

 by the hand of Shakspeare, as Jeans contended, or not, tlie book I 

 thought would serve as a kind of vehicle to the other side of the 

 Water of the Shakspeare autograph traditions, and be a visible sug- 

 gester, when far away from Stratford, of pleasant talk on that topic. 

 Mr. Jeans may not, after all, have been wrong in his persuasion. 

 He was just the man to divine shrewdly on such a, point. The relic, 

 then, which I have now to speak of is a copy, somewhat mutilated, of 

 Grervaise Babington's C ovifortahle Notes on the Booh of Genesis. The 

 title-page is wanting, but the close of the Dedication is to be seen, 

 bearing the date of Feb. 1st, 1596. The book was thus, we -see, 

 certainly in existence twenty years before the decease of Shakspeare. 

 Now the evidence that led Mr. Jeans to the belief that the vokime 

 had once been the property of Shakspeare is the following : Length- 

 ways, on the margin of the seventh page of the Table of Contents, is 

 written in an old style, rather carelessly however, the name of a former 

 owner, which looks like " William Shakspeare," but abbreAdated. 

 (From other signatures which are held to be genuine, it is known 

 that the poet was accustomed to Write his name short.) To this 

 signature is added in the same old hand-— "his booke, given him by 

 Mr. Warner." It would seem as if the book had been bereft of its 

 title-page at the time of the gift, and that the recipient had hurriedly 

 A\'ritten the memorandum on the margin of a page of the contents, as 

 a means of reclaiming the volume should it be lent or mislaid. Mr. 

 Warner, author of "Albion's England," and known to be a friend of 

 Shakspeare's, died May 9th, 1609. Li the wear and tear of thirteen 

 years the book, which was well adapted to popular family reading, 

 probably lost its title-page. Mr. Jeans has made a number of. 

 memoranda on blank pages in the book, and on separate slips placed 

 between its leaves. He copies from the preface to Staunton's Shaks- 

 peare the following : " What is strange, too, of a writer so remark- 

 a.ble, and of compositions so admired, not a poem, a play, or fragment 

 of either, in his manuscript, has come down to us. What is still more 

 surprising, with the exception of five or six signatures, not a loord in 

 his handwriting is known to exist." To the first part of this.Mr. 



