Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 9.djvu/378

 308 NOTES AND QUERIES. [128.1x0^.15,1921. GEORGE DANIEL'S FIRST FOLIO SHAKE- SPEARE. The Press generally discuss the impending sale of the house No. 81, Picca- dilly, and the dispersal of its contents, which includes in its valuable library this important volume. At the memorable sale of George Daniel's library, July, 1864, this, as lot 1416, was purchased by Mr. Radclyffe, acting on behalf of Miss Angela Burdett- Coutts, and it is well known that the price paid was 716 2s. Qd., a sensational figure that gave world-wide publicity to the inci- dent. The existence and ownership of the volume were matters of knowledge many years previously, for Daniel had few treasures he failed to write or speak of, and Dibden had extolled it in his ' Library Companion.' The late H. B. Wheatley (' Prices of Books, 1898,' p. 225) in citing this says : " In the first class he placed three copies, belonging respectively to Mr. Cracherode, the Right Hon. Thomas Grenville, and Mr. Daniel Moore. The first two are now in the British Museum and the third is the Daniel copy." Collier, who catalogued Daniel's library for the epoch-making Sale, extols Daniel's judgment in claiming this to be " the first folio." " This copy will to all future time possess a world- wide reputation." Rodd the bookseller is said to have con- curred in Daniel's opinion of its perfection. Of course Collier, throughout the catalogue, indulges in hyperbole. The account of the provenance of the volume which he partly provides is to the effect that : It was bequeathed by Daniel Moore, F.B.S., to William Henry Booth, Esq., who left it by will to John Gage Bokewode, Esq., from whom it passed to William Pickering of 27, Chancery Lane, either by purchase at a sale or by exchange. Here Daniel, calling by chance one evening, purchased it for 100 guineas, insisting on taking it away at once. When the bookseller proceeded to parcel it in ordinary brown paper, Daniel insisted on borrowing a large silk handkerchief, and in this it was wrapped and taken home to 18, Canonbury Square. The fact that Joseph Lilly, another bookseller, later offered Daniel 300 for it, is evidence of its then owner's astuteness in having purchased it promptly from Pickering, and we are left wondering at what price that bookseller- publisher secured it from its previous owner, and if George Daniel's fortunate call and purchase was really chance or skillfully pre-arranged. Whatever its destination at the forth- coming sale, the volume will continue to be known as the Daniel copy. ALECK ABRAHAMS. MULBERRIES. A correspondent writing in a late issue of The Times discourses pleasantly about an old mulberry-tree growing in his walled cathedral garden how I envy him his old walled garden ! and he hazards an opinion that mulberry- trees were grown in England long before the time of Shakespeare. And he is right. The ' N.E.D. ' has frequent men- tion of mulberries, the earliest in Eng- land there given being one in Wyclif's Bible, where his rendering of part of 2 Chron. i. 15 reads " cedres long as mul- berries " long, I suppose, as to their limbs. I have in my possession, however, a contemporaneous copy in abstract of a Staffordshire deed mentioning mulberries half a century earlier. It runs as follows : Botterton boscum. Thomas de Stuche ven- didit Willielmo de Bromeley totum boscum crescentem in dominio suo de Botterton, videlicet, in Jackefeld, in le Furlonge, in le Holt, et in Hikholm, et cum quidem summa* fructus mororum in pomario suo die Mercurii proximo ante festum Pasche anno regni Begis Edwardi tertii post Conquestum viimo. (1333.) Carrando dictum boscum infra xviii amios a data predicta. (Vide ' Hist. Coll. Staffordshire ' of 1913, p. 249, where I give this abstract in English.) Thomas de Stuche did not reside in Butterton but at Stuche (Styche) in Salop, of which manor he was also lord. CHARLES SWYNNERTON, F.S.A. PERFORMANCE OF ' KING LEAR,' 1772. It has recently been stated that performances of ' King Lear ' rarely occurred, so a note from The Leeds Intelligencer of Oct. 20, 1772, may be of interest : We hear from Carlisle, that on Friday evening last, as Buck's Company of Comedians were per- forming the tragedy of King Lear, for the benefit of Mr. and Mrs. Milles, to a crowded audience, the Upper or Six-penny Gallery, which covered that of the Shilling Gallery and hung partly over the Pit, on a sudden gave way, and buried a great part of the people below for some time in the ruins. G. D. LUMB. 31, Lyddon Terrace, Leeds. PREDECESSORS OF ' N. & Q.' (c/. ' The Monthly Miscellany,' ante, p. 229). Another predecessor of ' N. & Q.' in the early part of the eighteenth century was ' The British Apollo,' 1708, published weekly and issued afterwards as second and third editions summa, in which case it should refer to a fixed amount or quantity JJexactly specified in the original charter.
 * This phrase may possibly be cum quadam