Lightly arrived at as it was, Waterland's 'guess' was adopted by Forshall and Madden in their fine edition of the two versions published in 1850, and as buttressed up by them with what seems to me a very weak additional argument, has ever since been repeated as an established fact.[8] The readiness with which the conjecture was accepted can only be accounted for by the desire to make the work of translation centre at Lutterworth instead of, as I believe to have been the case, at Oxford. It seems to be considered that we shall be robbing Wyclif of his due unless the translations are connected with him as closely as possible. Burdened as he was in his last years with age and infirmities, it is surely enough if he inspired others to work at this great task; we need not insist that he must have written at least part of the first translation with his own hands, and that the second must have begun under his immediate eye. I would submit, indeed, that the tone of the second translator's reference to 'the English Bible late translated' (p. 195) is quite incompatible with any such theory. We know from the manuscript note in the Bodleian MS. that Nicholas of Hereford began the translation of the Old Testament; and when his work was interrupted by the necessity for flight, it is far more likely that it was taken up by some other of Wyclif's numerous disciples at Oxford rather than by the master himself, while the fact that it was the work of his disciples, urged no doubt by his wish, would amply account for such references as may be found to it under Wyclif's name. For the second translation, it seems to me that the tone of the reference already quoted, and the detailed account (see p. 194) which the translator gives of the method in which he went to work, compel us to seek an independent origin, and to look for some other translator less immediately under Wyclif's influence. The freedom with which the Bible admittedly circulated for many years, and the well-known allusion by Sir Thomas More to an English translation untouched by any taint of heresy, point also in the same direction. That the second version is really only a revision of the first can hardly be adduced as a strong argument on the other side. The ethics of literary acknowledgment were not appreciated in Trevisa's days, and I believe that a very similar relation can be found on comparison of what is known as the 'Vulgate' text of Mandeville with that of the Cotton manuscript, which the second translator appears to have used freely, though in this case without improving on it. At any rate, William Caxton seems a better authority than an eighteenth-century divine as to the authorship of a translation made only a few years before he was born. We know that Trevisa was what we may call a professional translator, well equipped for his task; and we find him in the preface to the _Polychronicon_ discussing the translation of the