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bolt, and Harris F. Fletcher. In addition, Professor Fletcher has suffered a fool more or less gladly for many years as we discussed together our common background problems for Shakspere and Milton.
For two separate years on end and an enlarged summer, the British Museum was my dwelling place (even though during part of that time it searched me daily for bombs!), with intermissions at boarding house, bookshops, and Oxford, and Cambridge. The Bodleian has taken my oath of allegiance and has been a most beneficent master to me. Cambridge University Library has checked me through its turnstile with anylegitimate information I cared to take away. The American University Union (London) regularly procured access for me to various repositories of materials. For several summers I have encamped round about Huntington Library. I regret that circumstances prevented my doing the same at the Folger Shakespeare Memorial Library.
Nor am I to forget the booksellers of England, among whom I must single out my particular good friend, Francis Norman, Esquire, bookseller most extraordinary, for his personal and unremunerated aid on many a problem for more than a decade, amounting to a form of collaboration. By their scars he has recognized infallibly the veterans of schoolboy wars, frequently before I had located their service records, and together we have tried to give them an understanding sympathy and permanent protection. Himself a battle-scarred veteran, may he yet find many customers far more wealthy than I !
It hardly needs to be said that my family is the chief martyr in this cause. But what can a Professor's family expect!!!
It may now be well to state here as forcibly as I can that in this particular series I have in no sense whatever written or attempted to write a history of the Petty School and of the Grammar School in the Sixteenth Century. Such history as there is forms a purely necessary background and has been selected and shaped to that function only. I have in no sense whatever written or attempted to write a book or books on Shakspere's education. I have attempted merely to present in as orderly fashion as my own nature and that of the materials would permit all the facts so far as I now know them which appear to me to have a bearing upon the question of Shakspere's formal education, and to present my own conclusions upon those facts. I have in the present work attempted to discover exactly the what, how, and why of the grammar school curriculum of Shakspere's day, and to evaluate as exactly the reflections of that
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