present houses of Sutherland and Ellesmere. The question is not, however, finally decided, and we have reason to believe that all the Gowers of Great Britain are descended from the same family of Guers still flourishing in Brittany. Early coat-armours are not much to be depended on, and Thynne as a Herald may lean a little too much towards them. The question is, however, in good hands, and I hope that before long some fresh light may be thrown upon it.

The old story of Chaucer’s having been fined for beating a Franciscan friar in Fleet Street is doubted by Thynne, though hardly, I think, on sufficient grounds. Tradition (when it agrees with our own views) is not lightly to be disturbed, and remembering with what more than feminine powers of invective “spiritual” men seem to be not unfrequently endowed, and also how atrociously insolent a Franciscan friar would be likely to be (of course from the best motives) to a man like Chaucer, who had burnt into the very soul of monasticism with the caustic of his wit, I shall continue to believe the legend for the present. If the mediæval Italians are to be believed, the cudgelling of a friar was occasionally thought necessary even by the most faithful, and I see no reason why hale Dan Chaucer should not have lost his temper on sufficient provocation. Old men have hot blood sometimes, and Dickens does not outrage probability when he makes Martin Chuzzelwit the elder, fell Mr Pecksniff to the ground.

Much of the tract is taken up by corrections of etymologies, and the explanation of obscure and obsolete words. It is a little curious that the word “orfrayes,” which had gone so far out of date as to be unintel­ligible to Master Speight, should, thanks to the new rage for church and clergy decoration, have become reasonably common again. The note on the “Vernacle” is another bit of close and accurate antiquarian knowledge worth noting. It is most tantalizing that after all he says about that mysterious question of “The Lords son of Windsor,” a question as mysterious as that demanding why Falstalf likened Prince Henry’s father to a “singing man” of the same place, we should be left as wise as we were before. We have here and there, too, hints as to what we have lost from Thynne’s great storehouse of information; how valuable would have been “that long and no common discourse” which he tells us he might have composed on that most curious form of judicial knavery, the ordeal; and possibly much more so is that of his “collections” for his edition of Chaucer! This last may, however, be still recovered by some fortunate literary mole.

The notice, by no means clear, but certainly not complimentary, of “the second editione to one inferior personne, than my father’s editione was,” may refer to any of the editions of Chaucer which, according to Lowndes, were printed more or less from William Thynne’s edition in 1542, 1546, and 1555; but from another passage hinting that Speight followed “a late English corrector whom I forbear to name,” I suspect that the “inferior personne” was poor John Stowe, and the edition to have been that edited by him in 1561, the nearest in point of date to that of Speight.

The manuscript from which this tract is reprinted is, like most of the treasures of the Bridgewater Library, wonderfully clean and in good order. It is entirely in the Autograph of Francis Thynne, and was evidently written purposely for the great Lord Chancellor Egerton, and bears his arms emblazoned on the title-page. Master Speight most probably got his copy of Animad­versions in a more humble form.

In conclusion may I remark that, as usual, the green silk ribands, originally attached to the vellum and gold cover, are closely