once saw a copy of it with a fourth verse which was shown to him by the then organist of Chichester.  The poem is not included in Mr. Collier’s edition of Shakspere, nor in the Aldine edition of Shakspere’s Poems, edited by the Rev. A. Dyce.  Perhaps if you will be good enough to insert the song and the present communication in the “NOTES AND QUERIES,” some of your readers may be enabled to fix the authorship and to furnish the additional stanza to which I have referred.

PEDLAR’S SONG.

  From the far Lavinian shore,
  I your markets come to store;
  Muse not, though so far I dwell,
  And my wares come here to sell;
  Such is the sacred hunger for gold. 
        Then come to my pack,
          While I cry
        “What d’ye lack,
          What d’ye buy? 
  For here it is to be sold.”

  I have beauty, honour, grace,
  Fortune, favour, time, and place,
  And what else thou would’st request,
  E’en the thing thou likest best;
  First, let me have but a touch of your gold. 
        Then, come to me, lad,
          Thou shalt have
        What thy dad
          Never gave;
  For here it is to be sold.

  Madam, come, see what you lack,
  I’ve complexions in my pack;
  White and red you may have in this place,
  To hide your old and wrinkled face. 
  First, let me have but a touch of your gold,
        Then you shall seem
        Like a girl of fifteen,
  Although you be threescore and ten years old.

While on this subject, perhaps I may be permitted to ask whether any reader of the “NOTES AND QUERIES” can throw light on the following questionable statement made by a correspondent of the Morning Herald, of the 16th September, 1822.

“Looking over and old volume the other day, printed in 1771, I find it remarked that it was known as a tradition, that Shakspeare shut himself up all night in Westminster Abbey when he wrote the ghost scene in Hamlet.”

I do not find in Wilson’s Shakspeariana the title of a single “old” book printed in 1771, on the subject of Shakspere.

T.

* * * * *

SIR WILLIAM SKIPWYTH, KING’S JUSTICE IN IRELAND.

Mr. Editor,—­I am encouraged by the eminent names which illustrate the first Number of your new experiment—­a most happy thought—­to inquire whether they, or any other correspondent, can inform me who was the William de Skypwith, the patent of whose appointment as Chief Justice of the King’s Bench in Ireland, dated February 15. 1370, 44 Edward III., is to be found in the New Faedera vol. iii. p.877.?  In the entry on the Issue Roll of that year, p. 458., of the payment of “his expences and equipment” in going there, he is called “Sir William Skipwyth, Knight, and the King’s Justice in Ireland.” {24}