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 £9363!
A small volume, containing several papers in the handwriting of Luther, was bought for £45. The first edition of Coverdale’s New Testament, printed at Antwerp, by Matthew Crom, in 1538, was added to the Biblical collection. Two interesting and important series of newspapers were obtained; the one, a set (not quite perfect) of the London Gazette, from 1669 to 1859, bought for £200364; and the other, a collection of London newspapers, from 1672 to 1737, arranged in chronological order in ninety-six volumes, obtained also for £200. This very curious collection had been formed by Mr. John Nichols; its escape from destruction by the disastrous fire at his printing-office in 1808, is mentioned at p. 99 of the Gentleman’s Magazine for that year. It is accompanied by a MS. index, drawn up by Mr. Nichols himself. Many unknown contributions by Defoe to the journals of his time, have recently been traced in this series by a gentleman who has made a special study of the Defoe literature, Mr. W. Lee.
Considerable assistance in completing the Library sets of the Public and Private Acts of Parliament was afforded, in this year, by the late Mr. W. Salt.
Specimens of the first books printed in the Dyak language, which were issued at Singapore in 1862, were given by Rev. J. Rigaud, B.D., of Magdalene College.
On the appointment of Dr. Jacobson to the See of Chester, Mr. R. Payne Smith became his successor in the office of Regius Professor of Divinity. Professor Max Müller, M.A., was thereupon nominated to take Mr. Smith’s place as the Sub-librarian in special charge of the Oriental department, and the nomination was confirmed in Convocation on Nov. 7.
Notes
362 The lithograph represents the lower half of the title-page.
[363] The purchase of it, as of a relic ‘which there is little doubt is genuine,’ is noticed in an article on Books and Book-collecting in the Cornhill Magazine for Oct. 1867, p. 496.
364 The only portions of the London Gazette previously to be found in the Library, were of the reign of Charles II; and these only came by the transfer of the Ashmolean Library.