and they pressed me much to visit them there. So has their neighbour, Mrs. Damer, of great Strawberry Hill. But I am a wretched visitor.”
Frequent remonstrances came from friends upon the undue labours given to his eyes. Lord Charlemont, who suffered from similar infirmity, often remonstrated with him. “Five hours a day employed in transcribing from obscure manuscripts! How in the name of wonder do your eyes hold out?” His sisters often ask the same question, intermingled with sisterly exhortations to amend; but the species of recreation given them seems pretty much akin to work. “I have not pressed them hard these three weeks, for I have been almost daily at a book auction, the library of Mr. Reed, the last Shakspearian except myself, where my purse has been drained as usual. But what I have purchased are chiefly books of my own trade. There is hardly a library of this kind now left, except my own and Mr. Bindley’s, neither of us having the least desire to succeed the other in his peculiar species of literary wealth.”
While in search of the publications of the age of Elizabeth, he discovered some tracts connected with the settlement of the colony of Virginia. These on further consideration led to the belief of their bearing upon a curious Shakspearian question—the origin of the play of The Tempest—in the shipwreck of Sir George Somers and Sir Thomas Gates on the Bermuda Islands in a violent storm. This impression became at length conviction. A paper was drawn up embodying the circumstances, with extracts from one of the pamphlets alluded to, which were shown at the
