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III
Finally, Steevens' St. James's Chronicle letter on The Second Maiden's Tragedy raises the interesting possibility of the direct passage of the (present) Lansdowne 807 volume from Warburton's possession to that of William Petty, Earl of Shelburne, first Marquis of Lansdowne.[48] Freehafer states (p. 161) that "Shelburne did not purchase this volume at the Warburton sale"; he logically points out that in 1759 Shelburne was doing military service abroad, and that Shelburne was not known as a serious collector of MSS until the mid 1760's. He suggests that the MS volume of list and plays passed from Warburton to Shelburne via the collector James West (d. 1772). Steevens' 1780 letter refers, however, to Warburton as The Second Maiden's Tragedy's "last Purchaser but one." If Shelburne, who owned the MS by 1782 (as Biographia Dramatica tells us), acquired it from Warburton's successor (as its owner) only between May 1780 and 1782, he cannot have done so from West, who had died some ten years earlier; and if, as is likely, he already owned it in May 1780, he is the purchaser referred to by Steevens as the one following Warburton. Steevens may have been wrong; but his statement obliges us to consider at least the possibility that Shelburne began collecting MSS, perhaps through an agent, as early as 1759, or that the Warburton volume passed almost directly from Warburton to Shelburne, with merely a short, intermediate sojourn in the hands of some professional bookseller. Certainly Freehafer's suggestion that the MS volume passed from Warburton to West to Shelburne is unfounded speculation only.[49]
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