and some others after him, had their own good and profitable reasons for crying up the works of this poet.  When I was a very little boy, there was a jubilee in honour of SHAKSPEARE, and as he was said to have planted a Mulberry tree, boxes, and other little ornamental things in wood, were sold all over the country, as having been made out of the trunk or limbs of this ancient and sacred tree.  We Protestants laugh at the relics so highly prized by Catholics; but never was a Catholic people half so much duped by the relics of saints, as this nation was by the mulberry tree, of which, probably, more wood was sold than would have been sufficient in quantity to build a ship of war, or a large house.  This madness abated for some years; but, towards the end of the last century it broke out again with more fury than ever.  SHAKSPEARE’S works were published by BOYDELL, an Alderman of London, at a subscription of five hundred pounds for each copy, accompanied by plates, each forming a large picture.  Amongst the mad men of the day was a MR. IRELAND, who seemed to be more mad than any of the rest.  His adoration of the poet led him to perform a pilgrimage to an old farm-house, near Stratford-upon-Avon, said to have been the birth-place of the poet.  Arrived at the spot, he requested the farmer and his wife to let him search the house for papers, first going upon his knees, and praying, in the poetic style, the gods to aid him in his quest.  He found no papers; but he found that the farmer’s wife, in clearing out a garret some years before, had found some rubbishy old papers which she had burnt, and which had probably been papers used in the wrapping up of pigs’ cheeks to keep them from the bats.  ‘O, wretched woman!’ exclaimed he; ‘do you know what you have done?’ ‘O dear, no!’ said the woman, half frightened out of her wits:  ’no harm, I hope; for the papers were very old; I dare say as old as the house itself.’  This threw him into an additional degree of excitement, as it is now fashionably called:  he raved, he stamped, he foamed, and at last quitted the house, covering the poor woman with very term of reproach; and hastening back to Stratford, took post-chaise for London, to relate to his brother madmen the horrible sacrilege of this heathenish woman.  Unfortunately for MR. IRELAND, unfortunately for his learned brothers in the metropolis, and unfortunately for the reputation of SHAKSPEARE, MR. IRELAND took with him to the scene of his adoration a son, about sixteen years of age, who was articled to an attorney in London.  The son was by no means so sharply bitten as the father; and, upon returning to town, he conceived the idea of supplying the place of the invaluable papers which the farm-house heathen had destroyed.  He thought, and he thought rightly, that he should have little difficulty in writing plays just like those of Shakspeare!  To get paper that should seem to have been made in the reign of