There are no less than nine persons for whom the honor of the authorship of the _Dies Irae_ has been claimed. Two of these are excluded as having lived too early to have written a poem of its structure and metrical character; they are Gregory the Great and Bernard of Clairvaux. Two others, Augustinus Bugellensis (ob. 1490) and Felix Hammerlein (ob. 1457) are excluded by the fact that the hymn is mentioned in a work written in 1285. This leaves four rivals to Thomas of Celano in his own century, viz., John Bonaventura (ob. 1274), his brother Cardinal, Latino Frangipani, a Dominican (ob. 1294), Humbert, a French Franciscan, who became the fifth general of his order (ob. 1277), and Matthew of Acqua-Sparta in Umbria, a Franciscan, who became Bishop of Albano and cardinal (ob. 1302). But it is to be noticed that for not one of these is there a witness earlier than the sixteenth century. The first and last are named as having had the authorship ascribed to them by Luke Wadding, the historian of the Franciscans in 1625; but he ascribes it to Thomas of Celano. The other two are named by the Jesuit, Antonio Possevino (1534-1611) and the Dominican, Leandro Alberti (1479-1552), the latter, of course, claiming the hymn for the Dominican cardinal, as to whom there is not the smallest evidence that he ever wrote any poetry whatever. Besides this, the _Dies Irae_ is a Franciscan, not a Dominican poem. It deals with the practical and the devotional, not the doctrinal elements in religion. Had a Dominican written it, he would have been anxious only for correct doctrinal statement.