In this treatise on Hunting we have the express statement at the end of the twenty-fourth page—“Explicit Dam Julyans Barnes.” This might certainly apply to the transcription only, but, when taken with Wynken de Worde’s version, the probability is, that the lady compiled as well as wrote it. In the reprint by Wynken de Worde, only ten years later than the original, he varies the colophon thus:—“¶ Explicit dame Julyans Bernes doctryne in her boke of huntynge,” the whole reprint ending “Enprynted at westmestre by Wynkyn the Worde the yere of thyncarnacōn of our lorde. M . CCCC . lxxxxvj.” So that he, a contemporary, evidently believed her to be the authoress. Later authorities attributed the whole book to her pen, but as they were in possession of no more evidence than we now are, and probably not so much, we should attach no weight to such statements, which were founded simply on a vivid imagination. But what is known of the lady who is admitted to have compiled the twenty-four pages on Hunting? Who was Dame Julians Barnes? Here, unless a sentimental and inventive sympathy be employed to throw an artificial light upon the darkness, we are in total ignorance. A biography of her has certainly been written, and all our Dictionaries and Encyclopædias devote a page or two to her history, which, in 1810, under Haslewood’s nurture, attained its full development. Even so far back as 1549, or nearly a century after her supposed death, the learned Bale, who wrote an account of all our English celebrities, allows his gallantry to bedeck her memory with garments fine. “Fœmina illustris!” he exclaims, “corporis et animi dotibus abundans ac forma elegantia spectabilis” (An illustrious lady! abundantly gifted, both in body and mind, and charming in the elegance of her mien). Considering that the name of the lady is the whole of the text upon which Bale had to build, this is by no means a bad specimen of imaginative biography, and became a good foundation for future commentators. The story, however, fared rather badly at first; for Holinshed, in 1577, while echoing Bale very exactly, is made, by a curious error of the printer, who mistook the letters _rn_ for _m_, to call the authoress Julyan Be_m_es; while Baker in his Chronicles, too careless even to refer to the original text, adds another blunder to the story, and, thinking that Julyan must be a man’s name, dubs the authoress “a gentleman of excellent gifts, who wrote certain treatises of Hawking and Hunting.”