A.D. 1864.
The chief acquisitions in manuscript books were various Hebrew volumes (for £159), and a series of letters to Malone from Dr. Johnson, Mrs. Siddons, and others; and in printed books, a perfect copy of Cromwell's Great Bible, printed by Grafton in 1539, which was bought of Mr. Fry, the well-known collector, for £100.
A sixth part of the general catalogue of MSS. was issued, containing the Syriac, Carshunic and Mendean MSS., in number 205, which had been drawn up by Rev. R. Payne Smith, M.A., and to which several facsimiles were appended. And the eighth part, containing the Sanscrit MSS., in number 854, appeared under the editorship of Theodore Aufrecht, M.A., now Professor of Sanscrit in the University of Edinburgh. A first fasciculus of this had been issued in 1859.
A.D. 1865.
At the beginning of January, a sale was held in London by Messrs. Sotheby and Wilkinson, of the stock of the late Mr. William Henry Elkins, a bookseller, of 41, Lombard Street. At this sale, the Library was the fortunate purchaser of what appears to be a genuine Shakespeare Autograph. The book is Ovid's Metamorphoses, printed by Aldus, at Venice, in October, 1502, in octavo; and on the title is the signature 'Wm. Shr.' in a hand bearing no resemblance whatever to that of the Ireland forgeries, but not unlike that of the signature attached to Shakespeare's will. Opposite to the title, on a leaf pasted down on the original binding of the book, is the note, most certainly a genuine memorandum of the date to which it professedly belongs, of which a faithful facsimile is given with that of the autograph
itself, in the accompanying [lithograph][362]. That the note itself is no forgery is admitted by all who have examined it; the volume, therefore, is certainly, by tradition, one which belonged to the poet. The only question is, whether the name may not have been forged in consequence of the existence of this note. To this, which is the opinion of some, it may fairly be replied, that, seeing no contracted form of Shakespeare's signature is known to exist, a forger would hardly have invented one for the occasion, but would have given the name in full; while, on the other hand, if the signature be real, what more natural than that a subsequent owner should record the tradition that the indefinite 'Shr.' of this unimportant title-page was no other than the very definite 'Shakspere' himself? The names mentioned in the note are names, as every one knows, connected with the poet's history. Hall was the marriage name of his daughter Susannah, to whom he left his house in Henley Street; and one William Hall, a glover, appears from the Stratford Records printed by Mr. Halliwell, to have had a house in that street in 1660. He, doubtless, was the donor of the volume. Susannah Hall's daughter, Elizabeth, was married to a Thomas Nash, who died in 1647; but though he died without issue, the initials 'T. N.' may well stand for some member of the family who bore the same names. That, therefore, a Hall should possess the book, and subsequently give it to (most probably) a Nash, goes far to establish its genuineness as a Shakespeare relic. In a full account of the volume, supporting its pretensions, which appeared in the Athenæum for Jan. 28, 1865 (p. 126), it was pointed out that the two references to the story of Baucis and Philemon, which are found in Shakespeare's Plays, show that he was not unacquainted with the Metamorphoses. To this may be added a better proof of his knowledge of Ovid's writings in the fact
that two lines from the Amores (I. xv. 35, 36) form the motto to the Venus and Adonis. As the volume is somewhat dirty, and has a well-worn air, it may possibly have been used by Shakespeare during those school-keeping experiences of which Aubrey tells us; possibly, however, the wear and tear may be due to an older owner, who has plentifully interspersed his MS. notes in, apparently, a foreign hand, on many of the pages. Owing to a generally-entertained suspicion throughout the auction-room on the occasion of the sale of the volume, that the autograph must be a forgery, the Library became its possessor for the small sum of £9[363]!
