"The third Part of Henry the Sixt, with the death of the Duke of Yorke," was first printed in the folio of 1623, where it occupies twenty-six pages, in the division of "Histories," viz. from p. 147 to p. 172, inclusive, pages 165 and 166 being misprinted 167 and 168, so that these numbers are twice inserted. The error is corrected in the folio, 1682. The play is also contained in the folios of 1664 and 1685.

great dramatist:-"Yes, trust them not; for there is an upstart crow beautified with our feathers, that with his tiger's heart, wrapp'd in a player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shakescene in a country.' (Dyce's Edit. of Greene's Works, I. lxxxi.) In this extract, although Greene talks of 66 an upstart crow beautified with our feathers," he seems to have referred principally to his own works, and to the manner in which Shakespeare had availed himself of them. This opinion is somewhat confirmed by two lines in a tract called "Greene's Funerals," by R. B., 1594, where the writer is adverting to the obligations of other authors to Greene :

"Nay more, the men that so eclips'd his fame

Purloin'd his plumes-can they deny the same?"

Here R. B. nearly adopts Greene's words, "beautified with our feathers," and applies to him individually what Greene, perhaps to avoid the charge of egotism and vanity, had stated more generally. It may be mentioned, also, as a confirmatory circumstance, that the words "tiger's heart, wrapp'd in a player's hide," in our extract from the "Groatsworth of Wit," are a repetition, with the omission of an interjection and the change of a word, of a line in "The True Tragedy," 1595, "O! tiger's heart, wrapp'd in a woman's hide."

Thus Greene, when charging Shakespeare with having appropriated his plays, parodies a line of his own, as if to show the particular productions to which he alluded".

Another fact tends to the same conclusion: it is a striking coincidence between a passage in "The True Tragedy" and some lines in one of Greene's acknowledged dramas, “Alphonsus, King of Arragon," printed, in 1599, by Thomas Creed, the same printer who, in 1594, had produced from his press an edition of "The First Part of the Contention." In "Alphonsus" the hero kills Flaminius, his enemy, and thus addresses the dying man :

"Go, pack thee hence unto the Stygian lake,
And make report unto thy traitorous sire,
How well thou hast enjoy'd the diadem,"
Which he by treason set upon thy head:
And if he ask thee who did send thee down,
Alphonsus say, who now must wear thy crown."

In "The True Tragedy," 1595, Richard, while stabbing Henry VI. a second time, exclaims,

2 There is a trifling fact connected with "Henry VI." part i, a notice of which ought not to be omitted, when considering the question of the authorship of some yet undiscovered original, upon which that play might be founded. In Act v. sc. 3, these two lines occur :"She's beautiful, and therefore to be woo'd; She is a woman, therefore to be won."

The last of these lines is inserted in Greene's "Planetomachia," printed as early as 1585. In "The First Part of the Contention" a pirate is mentioned, who is introduced into another of Greene's productions.