28, 1699:--"Mr. Pepys was just finishing a
letter to you last night when I gave him yours. I hear he has printed
some letters lately about the abuses of Christ's Hospital; they are
only privately handed about. A gentleman that has a very great respect
for Mr. Pepys, saw one of them in one of the Aldermen's hands, but
wishes there had been some angry expressions left out; which he fears
the Papists and other enemies of the Church of England will make ill
use of." Is anything known of this "privately printed" volume? In the
Life of Pepys (4th edit., p. xxxi.), mention is made of his having
preserved from ruin the mathematical foundation at Christ's Hospital,
which had been originally designed by him.--ED.]

"_Retainers to Seven Shares and a Half._"--Can any reader of "N. & Q.,"
conversant with the literature of the seventeenth century, furnish an
explanation of this phrase? It occurs in the preface to _Steps to the
Temple, &c._, of Richard Crashaw (the 2nd edit., in the Savoy, 1670),
addressed by "the author's friend" to "the learned reader," and is used in
disparagement of pretenders to poetry. The passage runs thus:

"It were prophane but to mention here in the preface those under-headed
poets, retainers to seven shares and a half; madrigal fellows, whose
only business in verse is to rime a poor sixpenny soul, a subburb
sinner into hell," &c.

H. L.

[The performers at our earlier theatres were distinguished into whole
shares, three-quarter sharers, half sharers, seven-and-a-half sharers,
hired men, &c. In one scene of the _Histriomastic_, 1610, the dissolute
performers having been arrested by soldiers, one of the latter
exclaims, "Come on, players! now we are the sharers, and you the hired
men;" and in another scene, Clout, one of the characters, rejects with
some indignation the offer of "half a share." Gamaliel Ratsey, in that
rare tract, _Ratseis Ghost_, 1606, knights the principal performer of a
company by the title of "Sir Three Shares and a Half;" and Tucca, in
Ben Jonson's _Poetaster_, addressing Histrio, observes, "Commend me to
Seven shares and a half," as if some individual at that period had
engrossed as large a proportion. Shakspeare, in _Hamlet_, speaks of "a
whole share" as a source of no contemptible emolument, and of the owner
of it as a person filling no inferior station in "a cry of payers