8 Author fhip. 



The firft is on Hawking ; to this no name of the author is 

 attached, but it has a prologue which no one acquainted with the 

 other writings of the printer can doubt to be his. Of this we fhall 

 have more to fay anon. 



The fecond tractate is on Hunting : it is fpecially affociated 

 with the name of Dame Juliana Berners, and will require a more 

 extended elucidation than the others. 



Here the evidence of authorfhip is as good as for moft pieces 

 of fifteenth-century production a period at which literary rights 

 did not exift, and when the fcribe, if at all acquainted with the 

 fubjecl: upon which the book he was copying treated, did not fcruple 

 to interpolate his own ideas, and that without any egotiftical vanity, 

 but merely from a feeling that all books being written for the good 

 of men, and not from vanity in the author, it was a duty to 

 improve them where poffible. But as improvement moftly meant 

 the addition of fomething on the fame fubject taken from another 

 manufcript, we have the conftant occurrence of one MS. being a 

 compilation of two or three others, and yet appearing under the 

 name of the laft compiler. 



In this treatife on Hunting we have the exprefs ftatement at 

 the end of the twenty-fourth page " Explicit Dam Julyans Barnes." 

 This might certainly apply to the tranfcription only, but, when taken 

 with Wynken de Worde's verfion, the probability is, that the lady 

 compiled as well as wrote it. In the reprint by Wynken de Worde, 

 only ten years later than the original, he varies the colophon thus : 

 " L Explicit dame Julyans Bernes doctryne in her boke of huntynge," 

 the whole reprint ending " Enprynted at weftmeftre by Wynkyn the 

 Worde the yere of thyncarnacon of our lorde . M . CCCC . Ixxxxvj." 

 So that he, a contemporary, evidently believed her to be the authorefs. 

 Later authorities attributed the whole book to her pen, but as 

 they were in poffeffion of no more evidence than we now are, and 

 probably not fo much, we Ihould attach no weight to fuch ftate- 

 ments, which were founded fimply on a vivid imagination. 



