had become familiar with the printers, who, when in their cups, had boasted "that whether the king and cardinal of England would or not, all England would in a short time be Lutheran." He heard likewise from them that two Englishmen were working there, learned, skilful in languages, and fluent, whom, however, he never could see or converse with. So, plying the printers with wine, he drew from one the astounding intelligence that three thousand copies of the Lutheran New Testament, translated into English, were in the press, and advanced, in ordine quaternionum, as far as K.* This he communicated to an official, called Herrmann Rinke,

falling into the hands of the reformers, induced the abbot to give them to him for publication. I cannot find a reliable notice of his edition, although the works of Ruprecht were published, edited by Mylius, first at Cologne in 1602, at Mainz in 1631, at Paris in 1633, and at Venice 1748-52. Besides these, which treat of Exegesis, Dogmatics, and Ethics, he also wrote the History of the Monastery of St. Laurentius, at Liège, and the Lives of St. Heribert and St. Eliphius.

*The fragment of a copy of this first impression, discovered by Mr. Rodd, an an. tiquarian bookseller in London in 1836, is now in the Grenville Library, British Museum. It has been photo-lithographed by Mr. Arber. The printer was Peter Quentel, and the fragment has been identified as printed by him by an initial Y, and a woodcut originally used for Tyndale's Testament, which after the stoppage of the printing was adapted to fit Rupert's Commentary of St. Matthew. This fragment proves, by the by, as will be proved presently by other considerations, that Tyndale knew German, for fifty-one of the ninety-two marginal glosses are taken from Luther's New Testament. The prologue likewise contains about half, of Luther's preface. In the extract the old spelling is retained, but the contractions are supplied:

THE GOSPELL OF S. MATHEW, III.

"Then cam Jesus from galile into iordan to Ihon, for to be baptised of him. But Jhon forbade hym sayinge: Y ought to be baptised of the: and commest thou to me? Jesus answered and sayd to him, let ytt be so nowe. For thus hit becommeth vs, to fulfyll all rightwesnes. Then he suffred hym. And Jesus as soone as he was baptised, cam strayght out of the water: And lo heven was open vnto him: and he sawe the spirite of God descende lyke a dove, and lyght vppon him. And lo there cam a voice from heven, saying: thys ys my deare sonne, in whom is my delyte."

*"All Rightwesnes, ys fulfilled when we forsake all oure awne rightwesnes, that God only maye be counted he which is rightwes, and maketh righwes, rightwes throw feith. This doeth Jhon in that he putteth from hym hys àwne rightwesnes, and wold be wesshed of Christ and made rightwes. This also doeth Christe, in that he taketh nott rightwesnes and honour on hym: but suffreth hymsilfe to be baptised and killed, for baptism is none other thinge then deeth."

who, upon verifying the information, obtained an injunction against the printer restraining him from continuing the work. The Englishmen thereupon snatched away with them the quarto sheets printed, and fled by ship, up the Rhine, to Worms; while Cochlaeus and Rinke apprized by letter the king, the cardinal, and the bishop of Rochester of the discovery (see Annals, pp. 49-51).

At Worms, the printing of the quarto edition begun at Cologne, was completed, but as the book had been described, and was doubtless doomed to be seized and burned in England, to baffle his enemies Tyndale forthwith arranged for another edition of three thousand copies in octavo, without prologue and glosses, which found their way into England, and were widely circulated there early in 1526. Of the former, only a fragment, containing the prologue and twenty-one chapters of St. Matthew, is in the Grenville Library in the British Museum; of the latter a perfect copy* is preserved in the Baptist college at Bristol, and a defective one in the cathedral library of St. Paul's. The Prologue, considerably changed, under the title, A Pathway to the Scriptures, appears in Tyndale's works; in its original form, as printed at Cologne, it is here produced entire:

Y have here translated, brethren and sisters, most dear and tenderly beloved in Christ, the New Testament, for your spiritual edifying, consolation, and solace: Exhorting instantly, and beseeching those that are better seen in the tongues than Y, and that have higher gifts of grace to interpret the sense of the Scripture, and meaning of the Spirit than Y, to consider and ponder my labour, and that with the spirit of meekness. And if they perceive in any places that Y have not attained the very sense of the tongue, or meaning of the Scripture, or have not given the right English word, that they put to their hands to amend it, remembering that so is their duty to do. For we have not received the gifts of God for ourselves only, or for to hide them: but for to bestow them unto the honour

* The copy is perfect in everything but the title-page, which is wanting. A cor. rect and beautiful fac-simile edition of it has been published by Mr. Fry.

ing of God and Christ, and edifying of the congregation, which is the body of Christ.

The causes that moved me to translate, Y thought better that others should imagine, than that Y should rehearse them. Moreover Y supposed it superfluous; for who is so blind to ask, why light should be sowed to them that walk in darkness, where they cannot but stumble, and where to stumble is the danger of eternal damnation; either so despiteful that he would envy any man (Y speak not his brother) so necessary a thing; or so bedlam mad as to affirm that good is the natural cause of evil, and darkness to proceed out of light, and that lying should be grounded in truth and verity; and not rather clean contrary, that light destroyeth darkness, and verity reproveth all manner (of) lying.

After it had pleased God to put in my mind, and also to give me grace to translate this forerehearsed New Testament into our English tongue, howsoever we have done it, I supposed it very necessary to put you in remembrance of certain points.

Both the first quarto and octavo editions were published without a name, the reason whereof appears from his Preface to the Wicked Mammon:

The cause why I set my name before this little treatise, and have not rather done it in the New Testament, is, that then I followed the counsel of Christ, which exhorteth men to do their deeds secretly, and to be content with the conscience of well doing; and that God seeth us, and patiently to abide the reward of the last day, which Christ hath purchased for us; and now would I fain have done likewise, but am compelled other. wise to do.

The character of Tyndale's version has now to be considered, and I propose to show that while he made use of Luther's translation and the Vulgate, it was the legitimate use of a scholar, and that his translation is independent throughout, made direct from the Greek. It was doubtless Cochlaeus, who, in order to disparage the work of Tyndale and to ingratiate himself with the influential ecclesiastics in England, maliciously or ignorantly, circulated the slander that it was an English translation of Luther. Le Long actually describes the first edition as "the New Testament translated into Eng

lish from the German version of Luther." This statement is not true, and is contradicted by the express declaration of Tyndale that he translated from the Greek, and by the translation itself.

The matter for which he is clearly indebted to Luther relates: 1, to the order of the books, for he places the epistle of James next to that of Jude, and that to Hebrews next to the third epistle of John; he likewise follows Luther in making Heb. iv. 14 the commencement of chapter v.; 2, to the notes, many of which, as already stated, he took from Luther; 3, to the prologues, that to Matthew embodying his views on the comparative value of the books of the New Testament, and those to 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 2 Timothy, Titus and the Johannean Epistles resting mainly on those of Luther; but he omits what Luther says of the Epistle of James, many of his remarks in the prologue to 1 Corinthians, the allegory in that to Philemon, while the prologue to James, Hebrews, and Jude are in direct opposition to those of Luther. In the prologue to Romans he uses both the German and Latin text of Luther's prologue. The prologues to the Gospels, with the exception noted above, are entirely Tyndale's own.

Many of the Germanisms charged upon Tyndale's version are good Old English, characteristic of the period, and found even in the writings of Sir Thomas More. One of these, the verb followed by the personal pronoun, has been recognized as so strictly idiomatic English that the inversion is retained in the Authorized Version in the following places, and only abandoned in the Westminster Revision in those given in italics, Matth. xiii. 13; Luke ii. 29; 1 Cor. vii. 12, 17; ix. 22, 26; xii. 31; 2 Cor. vi. 13; xi. 24; 1 Thess. i. 13; Heb. v. 8; James i. 18; 1 Jno. i. 3.

The influence of Luther is unmistakable in Matth. i. I, "this is the boke"; ii. 18, "on the hilles was a voyce herde";

xviii. 19, "Jesus" omitted; Jno. xix. 17, "the place off deed mennes sculles"; Acts xxviii. 2, "the people off the countre"; 16, "vnder captayne, chefe captayne"; Rom. i. 14, "to the grekes, and to them which are no grekes "; ii. 5, "harde herte that cannot repent"; ix. 13, "I will magnify myn office"; 1 Cor. i. 25, "godly folysshnes"; ii. 14, "the natural man"; 2 Cor. v. II, "we fare fayre with men "; vi. 12, "ye uexe youre selues off a true meanynge"; Eph. iii. 15, "which is father ouer all thatt ys called father in heuen and in erth"; Col. iii. 16, "and spretuall songes which haue fauour with them"; 1 Tim. i. 7, "doctours in the scripture"; Rev. xi. 2, "the quyre which is within the temple"; xxii. 14, "their power may be in the tree off lyfe."

Just as unwarranted as the charge that Tyndale's version is the translation of Luther's is the other, that it is not made from the Greek, but from the Vulgate. Although all writers of the English Versions cannot be expected to be good German scholars, and their rash statements have to be credited to their ignorance of that tongue, those that know so little Latin and less Greek as to be unable to determine whether Tyndale translated direct from the Greek or from the Latin, have clearly no business to write on the subject, and their unsupported, bold assertions deserve only contempt. But that scholars like Hallam (Const. Hist. of England, i. 83, note) and Macknight (A New Literal Translation, etc., Lond., 1821) should make such assertions, and that they should be repeated in their worst form in Biblical Notes and Queries (p. 195; Edinb., 1871) seems almost incredible, and is certainly utterly unjustifiable.

That his translation is strictly independent, is clear from the following instances:

*Eadie, l. c., p. 146.