[In the autumn of last year a communication was made to his eminence the late Cardinal Wiseman by H. Bence Jones, Esq., M.D., as Secretary of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, requesting him to deliver a lecture before that society. The cardinal, with the prompt kindness usual to him, at once assented. The Shakespeare Tercentenary seemed to prescribe the subject, which his eminence therefore selected. The following pages were dictated by him in the last weeks of his life. The latter part was taken down in the beginning of January; the earlier part was dictated on Saturday the fourteenth of that month. It was his last intellectual exertion, and it overtaxed his failing strength. The Rev. Dr. Clifford, chaplain to the Hospital of St. John and St. Elizabeth, who acted as his amanuensis, states, from the lips of his eminence, that the matter contained in these pages is the beginning and the ending of what he intended to deliver. We have, therefore, only a fragment of a whole which was never completed except in the author's mind.]

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