'seuls imprimeurs de cette ville." Dr. Falkenstein, in his history of early printing, published so recently as 1840, has nothing to offer against these statements, and acknowledges that the ancient city of Hamburgh, so celebrated in the history of German commerce, can boast of only one book printed in the fifteenth century.

One book, and only one book, and that by printers who are not known to have printed any other book, there or elsewhere, before or after. Surely this is very singular. Dr. Falkenstein gives us a list of 176 places in which printing had been carried on before this year 1491, and it is strange enough that Hamburgh should not be among them. But it is incomparably more strange that, when the art had penetrated that city in the year 1491-when a press had been set up and had produced one book-it should have disappeared and remained unheard of for forty-five years. And not only did the newly-arrived art disappear, but the artists also vanished, not from Hamburgh only, but from all human ken. The migrations of early printers are notorious, and nobody would have been surprised to learn that John and Thomas Brocard had been next heard of at the far end of Christendom; but I am not aware that their names are to be found connected with any other time, or place, or book, than that single one which they are said to have printed at Hamburgh in 1491, or that there is, or ever was anything else in the whole world to attest that such persons ever existed.

Now when we consider how easy it was for any one of the printers who really were hard at work in so many other places, to put a false name of place or printer in a book— how very possible it is that some one of them may have been led, by some reason or some caprice which we cannot fully understand, to do in this case, what we know to have been done in so many others—shall we not be led to suspect,

5 "Essai historique sur l'origine de l'Imprimerie, ainsi que sur l'histoire de son établissement dans les villes, bourgs, monastères et autres endroits de l'Europe."-p. 433.

6"Geschichte der Buchdruckerkunst in ihrer Entstehung und Ausbildung, &c. Ein Denkmal zur vierten Säcular-Feier der Typographie." He says, "Die alte Hansestadt Hamburg, die in der Geschichte des deutschen Handels eine so ausgezeichnete Rolle spielt, hat nur ein einzigen Druck aufzuweisen, welcher dem fünfzehnten Jahrhunderte angehört. Es ist 'Laudes,""&c. p. 198.

that the book of "Laudes" bearing the date of 1491 was not really a native of the city of Hamburgh? Especially because, though I have more particularly insisted on the fact that no book is known to have been printed therefore before that time, we must also bear in mind that there is no proof, so far as I know, of anything having been printed there for forty-five years after.

ESSAY XVIII.

GARDINER AND BONNER. No. II.

66 DE VERA OBEDIENTIA."

THE circumstances stated in the preceding Essay are, perhaps, sufficient to throw some degree of suspicion on the work which has been handed down to us as the joint production of those two well-known prelates, Gardiner and Bonner.

Briefly recapitulated, so far as is necessary for the purpose of carrying on our argument, the matter stands thus:We are told that in the year 1535, Bishop Gardiner published a treatise, "De vera Obedientia," in London. That in 1536 it was reprinted at Hamburgh, with a recommendatory preface by Dr. Bonner, then Archdeacon of Leicester, and afterwards Bishop of London.

This may naturally, for various reasons, appear to reflecting persons a very singular proceeding; but waiving, for the present, all other considerations, let us go to the particular point at which we arrived in the preceding Essay, and which was this-namely, that it was, to say the least, very strange that this new edition of the Bishop of Winchester's book, thus patronised and prefaced by the Archdeacon of Leicester, should have been printed at a place where there had previously been so very little printing of any kind. I stated that no bibliographer whose works I had the opportunity to consult, had mentioned any book whatever as having been printed there before the year 1491.

This, considering how many presses had by that time been

set up elsewhere, and how many years they had been in active operation, may be considered as not a little remarkable. Still more wonderful, however, it must appear to every considerate reader, that if one book was printed there in 1491, so little should have been done for so long a period after that time. True it is that things may have been done which were not recorded, and which are unknown merely because they had no chronicler. Books may have been printed at Hamburgh in the beginning of the sixteenth century which were unknown to Panzer, but certainly not enough to affect the argument; and with his Annals before me, I ventured to express an opinion that no book was printed there during the forty-five years which succeeded 1491-that is, until this very year 1536, when the joint production of Gardiner and Bonner is said to have been printed. In stating this opinion, however, I felt that whoever should look out my authorities might think that they did not fully support my statement, though I did not burthen the matter with details. Indeed those details would not be worth entering into at all, if it were not that beside their reference to the particular case before us, they have a more general, and an important, bearing on the subject with which we are engaged.

As we have seen what Panzer gives as occurring at Hamburgh before the year 1500, (which is only the single volume of 1491, said to have been printed by artists otherwise altogether unknown,) let us turn to the second part of his Annals', and see what he states respecting the period immediately following-that is, up to the year 1536, being the forty-fifth after the flight of the Brocards from Hamburgh.

In the first place, and I grant in contradiction of the opinion which I have stated, he gives under the year 1527 (only the thirty-sixth of the Brocardian Hegira) one single book which he found to have been supposed by some persons to be a production of the Hamburgh press. At the same time, neither he, nor anybody else, has ever pretended that it bore upon it any name of place or printer. Indeed, I do not know that it is thought to exhibit anything in type, or workmanship, or any internal evidence whatever, by which

1 Vol. vii. p. 117.

the place of its origin might be decided. But there is, I grant, one circumstance (forming, however, I submit, an obviously insufficient ground for this opinion) which has led some persons to think that this book was secretly and clandestinely printed in the particularly non-printing city of Hamburgh. So strange it is that at every step of this inquiry we meet with some petty mystery. The first book which we come to after thirty-six years of total barrenness, is only supposed to have been printed there, if indeed the mere supposition is still entertained by anybody. And of all the books in the world, what book does the reader suppose it was that broke the long slumber of the Hamburgh press? Not a new edition of the "Laudes" in Latin-the Proconsuls and Consuls had changed all that,-but Tyndal's New Testament in the English tongue. All that Panzer has to say of the year is this:

"MDXXVII.

"1. PENTATEUCHUS et NOVUM TESTAMENTUM anglice ex versione Gulielmi Tyndal. 1527. "Maitt. II. p. 685."

It is hardly worth while to trace the authorities for this, because it is probable that those who suggested, or accepted, Hamburgh as the place where that work was printed, were not aware of any improbability, and only took it for granted that, as Tyndal was said to have got away from England to Hamburgh, and also said to have printed his testament soon after that time, he had, as a matter of course, printed it at that place. To those who were probably not aware of any thing to suggest a reason why a book might not as probably be printed there as anywhere else, this was quite natural; but after what we have just seen, and considering how much more easy, and how much less expensive, it would be to send a manuscript to some one of the many places where there certainly were printers and presses at work, than to introduce secretly into a town in which there seems to have been no printing, (or, to say the least, none for six-andthirty years,) all the materials and persons requisite for the clandestine printing of a book in a foreign language, which, after all, for anything that appears, might just as well have been printed elsewhere-considering, I say, all this, we may, perhaps, very reasonably doubt whether Tyndal's Testament

XVIII.] ÆPINUS DE ECCL. ROM. IMPOSTURIS. 295 should stand where Panzer has placed it. If, however, this book was really printed at Hamburgh in 1527, it must stand by itself, an isolated fact, a sort of little Eddystone in the barren sea of time; for three years elapse before we come to a notice of another supposed book. The next article

in Panzer is

"MDXXX.

"2. JOANNES HEPINUS de Romanae ecclesiae imposturis. Epis tola data est Hamburgi MDXXX. octavo Cal. Jun. 8.

66

"Maitt. Ind. I. p. 477."

Why surely we might as well put down Dr. Brown's Fasciculus, which we have been talking of, as printed at Sundridge, in Kent, because the doctor's Epistola data est Sundrigiæ nonis Octobr. MDCLXXXIX." Dr. Brown was Rector of Sundridge, and Dr. Hück (who chose to call himself pinus) was pastor at Hamburgh. If either of these divines thought fit to write a letter, it is probable that he would write it at, and date it from, the place where he lived; and it is highly probable, that if anybody saw fit, for any reason, to forge a letter from either of them, he might be deep enough to think of this. But to put down a book as printed at a place, merely because the prefatory epistle is dated from it, is so monstrous, that it would not be worth while to say another word about the matter, were it not that the mystery of Hamburgh hangs over this book also, and involves a point or two which are worth our notice, because the genuineness of the literature of that period and the good faith of the men concerned in it, (especially of those belonging to the party of the Reformation,) is a very important matter with reference to our inquiry.

(1.) In the first place, did this author ever write any such book? He was a very well known man, and his works

2 Maittaire, thus quoted as his only authority by Panzer, refers us only to Le Long's Bibliotheca Sacra; and Le Long (vol. ii. p. 337) quotes only "Hollandus in Heroologia Anglicana," which I have not at present opportunity to consult. Of course this matter has been more fully investigated since the days of Panzer; and whoever studies the information respecting the history of Tyndal's translation and editions of the New Testament, which has been zealously and ably collected by Mr. Offor, Mr. Anderson, and Mr. Lea Wilson, will need very little argument to persuade him of the probability that this work of Tyndal's was not printed at Hamburgh.