of such an estate.  I shall wait, therefore, with considerable anxiety till it may suit the pleasure or convenience {410} of Mr. Collier to communicate to the world the proofs he has obtained of the poet’s identification with the Norton monument.  I would, however, further add, that so late as 1606, the Dedication to the Praise of Vertuous Ladies is dated “From my Chamber in the Blacke-Fryers,” and that not one of his later productions is dated from Norton, which probably would have been the case had he been resident there.

I regret that I am unable to afford Mr. Collier any information respecting the “Crossing of Proverbs,” beyond the fact of the late Mr. Rodd being the purchaser of Mr. Heber’s fragment, but whether on commission or not, I cannot say, nor where it now is.  The same kind of proverbs are given in Wit’s Private Wealth, 1603, and in some other of his works.

Nicholas Breton, besides being a pleasing and polished writer of lyric and pastoral poetry, appears to have been a close and attentive observer of nature and manners,—­abounding in wit and humour,—­and a pious and religious man.  He was also a soldier, a good fisherman, and a warm admirer of Queen Elizabeth, of whom he gives a beautiful character in “A Dialogue full of pithe and pleasure, upon the Dignitie or Indignitie of Man,” 4to., 1603, on the reverse of Sig. c. iii.

As it is sometimes desirable to know where copies of the rarer productions of a writer are to be met with, I may state, that among some five or six-and-twenty of this author’s pieces, besides the Auspicante Jehova Maries Exercise, 8vo. 1597, already mentioned, of which I know of no other copy than my own, I possess also the only one of A small handfull of Fragrant Flowers, 8vo. 1575, and A Floorish upon Fancie, 4to. 1582, both reprinted in the Heliconia; Marie Magdalen’s Loue, with A Solemne Passion of the Soules Loue, 8vo. 1595, the first part in prose, the latter in six-line stanzas, and very rare; Fantastics:  seruing for a Perpetual Prognostication, 4to. 1626; and Wit’s Trenchmour, In a conference had betwixt a Scholler and an Angler.  Written by Nich.  Breton, Gentleman, 4to. bl. lett. 1597, the only copy known and not included in Lowndes’s list, which, from the style of its composition and the similarity of some of the remarks, is supposed to have been the original work from which Izaac Walton first took the idea of his Complete Angler.

THOMAS CORSER. 
Stand Rectory, April 16. 1850.

* * * * *

NOTES UPON CUNNINGHAM’S HANDBOOK FOR LONDON.

Baldwin’s Gardens.—­A passage upon the east side of Gray’s Inn Lane, leading into Leather Lane.  Tom Brown dates some introductory verses, prefixed to Playford’s Pleasant Musical Companion, 1698, “from Mr. Steward’s, at the Hole-in-the-Wall, in Baldwin’s Gardens.”  There is extant a single sheet with an engraved head, published by J. Applebee, 1707, and called,—­