was made is unknown to us. It differs widely, both in the matter of additions and of omissions, from all the texts in the British Museum, and represents a distinctly inferior recension of the work. A mangled rendering of the sublime Epistle of Privy Counsel is prefixed to it. Throughout, the pithy sayings of the original are either misquoted, or expanded into conventional and flavourless sentences. Numerous explanatory phrases for which our manuscripts give no authority have been incorporated into the text. All the quaint and humorous turns of speech are omitted or toned down. The responsibility for these crimes against scholarship cannot now be determined; but it seems likely that the text from which Father Collins' edition was—in his own words—"mostly taken" was a 17th-century paraphrase, made rather in the interests of edification than of accuracy; and that it represents the form in which the work was known and used
