All trace of editions by Walley, Awdley, or Charlwood, has disappeared, although doubtless all three printed the work. Of the MERY TALES AND QUICKE ANSWERES, which forms the second portion of the present volume, only two impressions are known. One of these, supposed to be the original, was printed by Thomas Berthelet, without date (about 1535), in 4to.; it contains 114 anecdotes. The other, from the press of Henry Wykes, bears the date 1567, and is in the duodecimo form; it produces with tolerable exactness the text of Berthelet, and has twenty-six new stories. Besides these, at least one other impression formerly existed: for, in 1576-7, Henry Bynneman paid to the Stationers' Company fourpence "and a copie" for "a booke entituled mery tales, wittye questions, and quycke answers."[2] No copy of Bynneman's edition has hitherto been discovered; a copy of that of 1567 was in the Harleian library. At the sale of the White-Knights collection in 1819, Mr. George Daniel of Canonbury gave nineteen guineas for the exemplar of Berthelet's undated 4to, which had previously been in the Roxburghe library, and which at the dispersion of the latter in 1812, had fetched the moderate sum of 5_l._ 15_s._ 6_d._ The reader who is conversant with this class of literature will easily recognise in the following pages many stories familiar to him either in the same, or in very slightly different, shapes; a few, which form part of the _Mery Tales and Quick Answers_, were included in a collection published many years since under the title of _Tales of the Minstrels_. No. 42 of the _Mery Tales and Quick Answers_ was perhaps at one time rather popular as a theme for a joke. There is an Elizabethan ballad commencing, "ty the mare, tom-boy, ty the mare," by William Keth, which the editor thought, before he had had an opportunity of examining it, might be on the same subject; but he finds that it has nothing whatever to do with the matter.[3] It may also be noticed that the story related of the king who, to revenge himself on God, forbade His name to be mentioned, or His worship to be celebrated throughout his dominions, is said by Montaigne, in one of his essays, to have been current in his part of France, when he was a boy. The king was Alfonso xi of Castile. No. 68 of _A C. Mery Talys_, "Of the Friar that stole the Pudding," is merely an abridgment of the same story, which occurs in _Tarltons Newes out of Purgatorie_, where it is told of the "Vickar of Bergamo." Many of the jests in these two pamphlets are also to be found in _Scoggins Jests_, licensed in 1565; a few occur in the _Philosopher's Banquet_, 1614; and one--that where the lady ties a string to her toe as a signal to her lover--is repeated at greater length in the "Cobler of Canterbury," edit. 1608, where it is called "the old wives' tale." It would be a curious point to ascertain whether the anecdotes common to these collections and to "_Scoggin's Jests_," do not refer to the same