collection began to appear sporadically in the second-hand catalogues, I
found in that of a well-known London bookseller an entry plainly
describing this one, and proclaiming that it came "from the celebrated
collection of Mr. Standly, of St. Neots." Unfortunately, the scrap of
paper connecting it with Mrs. Hogarth's present to Ireland had been
destroyed. Nevertheless, I secured my prize, had it fittingly bound up
with the original number which accompanied it; and here and there, in
writing about Hogarth, bragged consequentially about my fortunate
acquisition. Then came a day--a day to be marked with a black
stone!--when in the British Museum Print Room, and looking through the
"--Collection," for the moment deposited there, I came upon _another_
copy of the _North Briton_, bearing in Samuel Ireland's writing a
notification to the effect that it was the Identical No. 17, etc., etc.
Now which is the right one? Is either the right one? I inspect mine
distrustfully. It is soiled, and has evidently been folded; it is
scribbled with calculations; it has all the aspect of a _venerable
vetuste_. That it came from the Standly collection, I am convinced. But
that other pretender in the (now dispersed) "--Collection"? And was
not Samuel Ireland (_nomen invisum_!) the, if not fraudulent, at least
too-credulous father of one William Henry Ireland, who, at eighteen,
wrote _Vortigern and Rowena_, and palmed it off as genuine Shakespeare?
I fear me--I much fear me--that, in the words of the American showman,
I have been "weeping over the wrong grave."

To prolong these vagrant adversaria would not be difficult. Here, for
example, dated 1779, are the _Coplas_ of the poet Don Jorge Manrique,
which, having no Spanish, I am constrained to study in the renderings of
Longfellow. Don Jorge was a Spaniard of the Spaniards, Commendador of
Montizon, Knight of the Order of Santiago, Captain of a company in the
Guards of Castile, and withal a valiant _soldado_, who died of a wound