extended to 700 pages, the third, in 1883, to 786 pages. In 1884 it reappeared in two quarto volumes, and the latest edition (1887) issued in his lifetime had grown to 848 pages. In this book, which in its final forms is lavishly illustrated, and was sold at a price below its cost, Halliwell incorporated all the facts and documents likely to throw any light on Shakespeare's biography or the history of the playhouses with which he was connected. Until his death he continued to work on the subject. One of his latest publications was an account of the visits paid by Elizabethan actors to country towns, the result of personal explorations in the muniment-rooms of nearly seventy English towns.
In 1872 Halliwell's wife met with an accident while riding, which ultimately led to softening of the brain. He thereupon assumed by royal letters patent the additional surname of Phillipps, and took the management of her Worcestershire property. He improved the estates, although he soon sold the greater part of them. His wife died on 25 March 1879, and he married soon afterwards Mary Rice, daughter of James William Hobbs, esq., solicitor, of Stratford-on-Avon. In 1877–8 he purchased a plot of ground (about fourteen acres), known as Hollingbury Copse, on the Downs near Brighton, on which he intended to erect a large dwelling-house. But while the plans were unsettled he set up a wooden bungalow, and, finally abandoning his notion of a more ambitious building, added from time to time a number of rooms, galleries, and outhouses, all of wood with an outer casing of sheet-iron. Thither he removed from his London house at Brompton his chief collections, the greater part of which he had acquired since 1872, and to which he was adding year by year. In 1887 he printed a calendar of the most valuable contents, which included a copy of Droeshout's portrait of Shakespeare in its original proof state before altered to the form in which it was published in 1623, and the original conveyance of Shakespeare's Blackfriars estate in 1613, besides a valuable series of sketches of Stratford and its neighbourhood, made at Halliwell's expense by J. T. Blight, F.S.A., of Penzance, between 1862 and 1868. At Hollingbury for the last ten years of his life he dispensed a lavish and genial hospitality, warmly welcoming any one who sympathised with his tastes at any point, but working hard each morning from five o'clock till noon. Many notes on Shakespeare and his works he printed ‘for presents only’ up to his death. In one pamphlet (1880), entitled ‘New Lamps or Old,’ he strenuously argued that manuscript evidence favoured the spelling of the dramatist's name as ‘Shakespeare’ and not ‘Shakspere.’ His last literary work was to prepare for private circulation ‘A Letter to Professor Karl Elze,’ politely deprecating some of the criticisms which Elze had bestowed on his own views in a newly published translation of the professor's biography of Shakespeare. The letter is dated 19 Dec. 1888. Halliwell was taken ill on the following Christmas day, and died on 3 Jan. 1889, aged 69, being buried on the 9th in Patcham churchyard, near his residence. His second wife, with three daughters by his first wife, survived him.
As the biographer of Shakespeare Halliwell deserves well of his country, and his results may for the most part be regarded as final. The few errors detected in his transcription of documents do not detract from the value of his labours. The testing of traditions about Shakespeare and his works, the accumulation of every kind of evidence—legal documents, books, manuscripts, drawings—likely to throw light on the most remote corners of his subject, became the passion of his later years, and as he advanced in life his methods grew more thorough and exhaustive. His interest in æsthetic or textual criticism of Shakespeare gradually declined, until he abandoned both with something like contempt. Halliwell's earlier labours as a lexicographer and editor prove that he attempted too much to do all well. Richard Garnett [q. v.], in the ‘Quarterly Review’ for March 1848, in an article on ‘Antiquarian Club-books,’ showed that his linguistic attainments and his skill in deciphering manuscripts were often at fault. Mr. J. R. Lowell (cf. My Study Windows) pointed out the defective scholarship displayed in Halliwell's edition of Marston (1856). But little of the enormous mass of his publications is useless to the students whose interests he wished to serve. He gave his privately printed volumes freely to any one to whom he believed they would be serviceable; offered to all able to profit by it the readiest access to his library, and liberally encouraged the work of younger men in his own subject. For the declining days of his fellow-worker, Thomas Wright, who died in 1877 after some years of mental failure, he helped to make provision. Nor was he less generous to public institutions. As early as 1851, when his private resources were small, he presented 3,100 proclamations, broadsides, ballads, and poems to the Chetham Library, Manchester. In October 1852 he gave to the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, ‘a collection of several thousand bills, accounts, and inventories illustrating the history of prices between 1650 and 1750.’ Of both of these gifts he printed a
