I will transcribe only the commencement of the preface, whoseever it may be:--"The affection mine all waies towarde the hartlie ernest, louing reader, being cōtinuallie commaunded of the dutie of mi profession, mai not but dailie go about to satisfie the in this, withe thow desirest and lookest for in mi vacation, the withe, to mai please the, I wolde it were to mi minde so free and licentiouse streched at large, as it is be the mishappe of the time restrained." The discovery of Moses by Pharaoh's daughter is thus poetically set forth:-- "The kinges daughter fonde him in great pitie The russhes amonge, withe to him fauourable, As god did please, him to saue thought worthie, His owne mother giuing him for noorce able." Once more, the fall of Abimelech in _Judges_ ix. is portrayed after the ensuing fashion:-- "Hauing killed his bretherne on a stone, Abimelech was forced ielde the ghoast: For besieging with for warre Thebes, anon A strocke he had, of a woman with lost." The spelling and the syntax in these examples are equally outrageous; yet they are possibly not more so than might be expected from persons unversed in the intricacies and anomalies of our language. But the point is, that the undertaking was executed for the special behoof, not alone of English residents abroad, but also of English students of sacred history at home; for there was nothing of the class at that time in our literature or our art. It is almost incomprehensible on what ground English was selected, as French would have been as serviceable to the educated reader here, while the Anglo-Gallic _patois_ must have proved a puzzle to all alike. The early English educational books produced by foreign printers were not quite invariably so wide of the mark in an idiomatic respect. Some of them were doubtless read in proof by the English author or editor; and such may have been the case with a version of the _Short Catechisme_ of Cardinal Bellarmine published in 1614 at Augsburgh, where the slips do not exceed an ordinary Table of Errata. Now and then, too, the writer himself was alone responsible for the eccentricities which presented themselves in his book, as where Stanyhurst, in his version of the _Æneid_, published at Leyden in 1582, renders the opening lines of Book the Second thus:-- "With tentive list'ning each wight was setled in harckning; Then father Æneas chronicled from loftie bed hautie. You me bid, O Princesse, too scarrifie a festered old soare, How that the Troians wear prest by Grecian armie." Here it was the idiosyncrasy of the Briton which reduced a translation to a burlesque, and disregarded the canons of his own language, as well as taste and propriety in diction. For the entire work is cast in a similar mould, and is heterodox in almost every particular; some passages are too grossly absurd even for an Irishman who had spent most of his life in Belgium or Holland. XX.