150 NOTICE OF JOHN DE TREVISA. 



" Wicklife and Trevisa agreeing so well in their judgments, it was 

 " mucli he would make a re-translation. Such consider not that 

 " in that age it was almost the same pains for a scholar to translate 

 " as to transcribe the Bible ; secondly, the time betwixt Wicklife 

 " and Trevisa was the crisis of the English tongue, which began 

 " to be improved in fifty, more then "' in three hundred years 

 " formerly. Many course t words (to say no more) used before, 

 "are refined by Trevisa, whose translation is as much better than 

 " Wicklife's, as worse than Tyndal's." ^ After so circumstantial a 

 statement of his belief as this of Fuller's, it is certainly surprizing 

 that no portion of Trevisa's English Bible is known to have been 

 printed, nor is the MS. known to exist in any library. 



The Rev. J. Hughes, indeed, in a letter, dated Berkeley Castle, 

 November 7th, 1805, cited by Dibdin in his edition of "Ames' 

 Typogr. Antiq.," || speaks thus of the then Lord Berkeley's belief in 

 the existence of the MS. : — " Lord Berkeley has informed me 

 " that the book given by his ancestor is at present (as he has reason to 

 "believe) in the Vatican at Rome; when he was there, several 

 "persons had mentioned their seeing such a book written by 

 "Trevisa, but he had not an opportunity to go and examine it 

 " himself, therefore [I] cannot ascertain that it teas the Bible." Mr. 

 Hughes was Chaplain at Berkeley Castle. The belief, however, 

 in Trevisa's translation, which Dibdin traces up to Caxton, is 

 found to be shared by Bale and Pits [who, as Dibdin thinks, 

 derived it from Caxton], by Sir Robert Atkyns, in his " History of 

 Gloucestershire," Berkeley, A.D. 1712, and by our OAvn learned 

 historian of Cornwall, Carew ; the latter author, indeed, speaks of 

 it critically, as Fuller does. 



On the other side of the question the authorities are less 

 numerous, but they are of more recent date, not so easily satisfied 

 of facts without evidence to support them as writers of earlier 

 periods have sometimes been, and so long as the MS. remains 

 hidden from view, they certainly have the best of the argument. 



* Sic. 



f Sic. 



+ Fuller's Worthies, ed. 4to, 1811, vol, i, 217. — " Corn-n-all." See also 

 Carevj's Cornwall, ed. 1811, p. 269. 



11 Vol. i, 142—3. 



