orks
appearing in print." This aversion, which continued in France till the end
of the seventeenth century, if not later, had been somewhat broken down in
England by the middle of the sixteenth, though vestiges of it long
survived, and in the form of a reluctance to be known to write for money,
may be found even within the confines of the nineteenth. The humbler means
and lesser public of the English booksellers have saved English literature
from the bewildering multitude of pirated editions, printed from private
and not always faithful manuscript copies, which were for so long the
despair of the editors of many French classics. But the manuscript copies
themselves survive to a certain extent, and in the more sumptuous and
elaborate editions of our poets (such as, for instance, Dr. Grosart's
_Donne_) what they have yielded may be studied with some interest.
Moreover, they have occasionally preserved for us work nowhere else to be
obtained, as, for instance, in the remarkable folio which has supplied Mr.
Bullen with so much of his invaluable collection of Old Plays. At the early
period of Tottel's _Miscellany_ it would appear that the very idea of
publication in print had hardly occurred to many writers' minds. When the
book appeared, both its main contributors, Surrey and Wyatt, had been long
dead, as well as others (Sir Francis Bryan and Anne Boleyn's unlucky
brother, George Lord Rochford) who are supposed to be represented. The
short Printer's Address to the Reader gives absolutely no intelligence as
to the circumstances of the publication, the person responsible for the
editing, or the authority which the editor and printer may have had for
their inclusion of different authors' work. It is only a theory, though a
sufficiently plausible one, that the editor was Nicholas Grimald, chaplain
to Bishop Thirlby of Ely, a Cambridge man who some ten years before had
been incorporated at Oxford and had been elected to a Fellowship at Merton
College. In Grimald's or Grimoald's connection with the book there was
certainly something peculiar, for the first edition contains forty poems
contributed by him and signed with his name, while in the second the full
name is replaced by "N. G.," and a considerable number of his poems give
way to others. More than one construction might, no doubt, be placed on
this curious fact; but hardly any construction can be placed on it which
does not in some way connect Grimald with the publication. It