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of whose refined beauty Mr Fry’s reproduction on stone (Plate 34) gives but a poor idea. Here Moses stands cornutus on the left of the letter-press title, Aaron on the right, the Apostles and Evangelists above and below in attitude and form quite different from the conventional manner of artists; above, the Incommunicable Name, the Dove, the Lamb Triumphant; below, the Pelican and her young; at the foot of this masterpiece the subscription C. Boel fecit in Richmont, Cornelius Boel of Antwerp then working at Richmond in Surrey. Now the point to be noted is this. It is admitted by Mr Fry and by every one else that in no copy of what he calls the second issue is there an engraved title, whereas some copies of his first issue have the engraved plate, others the woodcut, a few possibly, though not certainly, both, prefixed to the Old Testament. The inference seems a natural one that Boel’s plate not being ready when the earliest copies of our Authorized Version were published, the old woodcut was made to serve in its place for a while, and that those copies of Mr Fry’s first and our second issue which contain Boel’s copper-plate, are in all probability the latest of any. If there be any more simple solution of the matter, it would be well to state it.

But that which is most dwelt upon by such as would invert what internal evidence points out as the true order of the two issues insist on facts relative to the reprinted leaves which Mr Fry has demonstrated with great pains and ingenuity. Out of 25 copies of his first issue which he examined, 23 were leaf for leaf alike, agreeing entirely with each other: in one copy two leaves, in another six, were of the rival issue. Forty-five copies of this latter issue were then collated, of which the large number of 41 were found to vary from each other in some of the reprinted leaves supplied (see p. xi. note 2), and only two pairs were entirely identical. “I have now shewn” he proceeds to sum up “from the actual comparison of a very large number of the Bibles of 1611, as many as seventy, that one issue is unmixed (with the exception of eight leaves in two copies out of 25 examined), and that the other issue is made up in a very remarkable manner, not only with reprints, but that it is often mixed with the other issue, with the preliminary leaves of 1613, 1617, and 1634. Is not this conclusive evidence that the Bibles No. 1 and No. 2 before alluded to1 are respectively of the 1st issue and of the 2nd issue2” (Description, &c. p. 25)? Certainly not, if we understand what is meant by conclusive evidence. The facts established by Mr Fry (and we can confirm many of them from our own experience) are sufficient to raise a strong presumption that not very many copies of the earliest printed issue were bound up at once and sent out to Parish Churches, for which reservation their shameful inaccuracy will abundantly account: after the great and immediate demand was satisfied by that better edition which the Oxford reprint exhibits, and after the Translators were dispersed and had ceased to have any control over their work, the printer seems to have gradually put forth the unused sheets that had been first printed and deliberately laid aside, supplemented by reprinted leaves and other portions of later books.

“Why these 244 leaves were required to be printed a second time we can only conjecture” (ibid. p. 24). In truth the difficulty presses equally upon every possible hypothesis that can be maintained. The only real information available which bears even remotely on the matter is Dr Anthony Walker’s Life of John Bois3 [1560–1643], who was a