A notice of the history of this once popular Dialogue, its ever recurring disappearance, and ever recurring "discovery" by some fortunate antiquary, would form an interesting chapter in a new "History of the transmission of ancient books to modern times." Its chances of preservation and record were unusually favourable. It must have been disseminated over the length and breadth of the land in its day, having run through four editions in little more than a dozen years. Maunsell's Catalogue (1595) records the edition of 1578. Antony Wood (1721), and Bishop Tanner (1748) both duly give it a place in their notices of the productions of its author, without any special remark. But the Biographia Brittanica (1748) in a long article upon Bulleyn, in which his various works are noticed in great detail, introduces the Dialogue as "_this long neglected and unknown treatise_," and gives an elaborate account of it extending to about five columns of small print. The now famous passage, descriptive of the early poets, is quoted at length, and special notice of its bearing on Barclay's nationality taken, the writer (Oldys) announcing that the dispute must now be settled in favour of Scotland, "Seeing our author (Bulleyn), a contemporary who lived in, and long upon the borders of Scotland, says, as above, he was born in that kingdom: and as much indeed might have been in great measure gathered from an attentive perusal of this poet himself." The next biographer of Bulleyn, Aikin (Biog. Memoirs of Medicine, 1780), makes no discovery, but contents himself with giving a brief account of the Dialogue (in 1½ pages), in which the description of Chaucer, &c., is duly noticed. Three years later, in spite of this, and the appearance of a second edition of the Biographia Brittanica (1778), another really learned and able antiquary, Waldron, in his edition of Jonson's Sad Shepherd (1783), comes forth triumphantly announcing his discovery of the Dialogue as that of a hitherto totally unknown treasure; and in an appendix favours the curious with a series of extracts from it, extending to more than thirty pages, prefacing them thus: "Having, among the various Mysteries and Moralities, whether original impressions, reprinted, or described only by those writers who have given any account of these Embrios of the English Drama, _never met with or read of any other copy of the Dialogue, or Morality, by Bulleyn, than the one_, [which I have used], an account of and some extracts from it may not be unpleasing." The passage regarding the poets is of course given _ad longum_.