piness of the diction, and the freedom with which it moves, give it,
until the Dutch text is examined, the tone of an original work, and the
translator must have been a man of no small ability to achieve such a
success. It should be said that the oldest Dutch edition now extant
appears to have been printed about 1495; but the play may have been
written some years before this, though hardly as early as 'about 1477,'
the date Professor Logeman proposes, if the author was only born in
1454, for it does not read like the work of a very young man. Professor
Logeman was, perhaps, influenced in proposing this date by a desire to
get in front of the critics of English literature (including ten Brink),
who have assigned the English play to the reign of Edward IV., _i.e._
not later than 1483. As in the Miracle Plays, so in the Moralities, an
original purely didactic purpose was gradually influenced by a desire to
render the didacticism more palatable to a popular audience by the
introduction of humorous incidents. The complete absence of these from
_Everyman_ naturally caused critics to assign it the earliest possible
date, so long as it was regarded as an original work. But there is
nothing in the language which precludes it from having been written
immediately after 1495, when we know that a Dutch edition was in print,
and in judging it as a translation we may be content to assign it to the
end of the fifteenth century. It is worth noting that at that date there
must already have been considerable literary intercourse between England
and Holland, and that several popular English books had already been
printed at Antwerp for the English market.

It would have been pleasant to me, as a lover of these forerunners of
the Elizabethan drama, to have advanced from the Miracle Play and
Morality, and have given examples of the Moral-Interlude and Farce; but
these belong emphatically to the sixteenth century, and come too near
the drama itself for inclusion in a non-dramatic 'Garner.' But as a
counterpart to Professor Arber's Trial of William Thorpe for Heresy, I
have ventured to reprint here from the Transactions of the Bibliographical
Society some pleadings in a theatrical lawsuit of the reign of Henry
VIII., one of the many interesting discoveries published by Mr. Henry
Plomer. Mr. Plomer's own interest in the pleadings, and the reason which
made them suitable for publication by a Society in no wise concerned
with the history of the dr