HAMILTON SCIPWriFIC ASSOCIATION 91 



William Tj'udale : " It is enough for good Christian men 

 that know these things for heresies, to abhor and burn up his 

 books, and the likers of them with them." Still, in his quiet 

 moments More too had misgivings, for in a letter to his son 

 he wrote : "I beseech our lyord that some of us, as high as 

 we seem to sit upon the mountains treading heretics under 

 our feet like ants, live not the day to be at league and 

 composition with them." 



Destruction of the two early versions of Tyndale's 

 translation was almost complete, for of the quarto edition 

 Quentel began to print at Cologne, all that remains is the 

 unique fragment of thirty-one folios in the Grenville 

 collection, British Museum. That was photo-lithographed 

 under supervision of Mr. E. Arber, in 1871, and an admirable 

 preface was supplied by him. Of the octavo edition printed 

 by Schoeffer at Worms, there is one perfect specimen extant, 

 the copy in the Baptist College, Bristol. It is well preserved, 

 and has initials and cuts illuminated as if for presentation to 

 some person of distinction. The paragraphs are also marked 

 by the illuminator after the manner of books printed in the 

 fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In the library of St. 

 Paul's, lyondon, there is an imperfect copy, forty-eight leaves 

 having been supplied from a modern reprint. No other copy 

 or fragment of a copy of the Schoeffer edition is known to be 

 extant. 



The ownership of the Bristol copy is interesting to 

 follow. It was bought by John Murray for Harley, Earl of 

 Oxford, who thought so much of the book that he rewarded 

 Murray for buying it with an annuity of forty pounds for 

 life. After Harley's death his manuscript collection was 

 bought by the nation for $50,000, as a nucleus for the British 

 Museum, and after some delay his printed books, part of 

 which had cost for binding $50,000, were sold to Thomas 

 Osborne, the bookseller, for $65,000 Osborne privately sold 

 the Tyndale Testament to Ames, the book collector, for 

 fifteen shillings; at whose death in 1760 it was bought for 

 fourteen guineas and a half by John Whyte, who kept it 



