: sign. a-C; 1, 1, 4, 5, 8; 2, 1, 4, 5; 3, 2; 4, 1; 27, 3; [28*,2];
44, 7; 50-55. The lacking parts comprise the first twenty leaves
(Prohemye and alphabetical index), the last forty leaves (Caxton's
eighth book), and twelve intermediate leaves. Of these the Proheyme is
supplied in facsimile and sign. 4, 1 in manuscript. What is possibly an
original impression of Caxton's large device is placed at the end of the
volume. This was used by Caxton only during his last years, 1487-91, and
by Wynkyn de Worde, into whose hands the original block passed, in his
folios for thirty years longer. From one of the latter this may have
been taken, possibly from the Polychronicon of 1495, where the other
side of the leaf it occupied was blank, as is the case here also.
Trevisa's translation of Higden was completed, according to the best
MSS., in 1387, not in 1357 as stated on fol. 389^b. (In 1357 the 18th of
April fell on Tuesday, not Thursday, and Thomas Lord Berkeley was then
in the fifth, not the thirty-fifth year of his age.) Caxton was himself
the translator of twenty-two of the one hundred books which he printed
and it was therefore not strange that Trevisa's English should have been
in his hands, as the proem states, "a lytel embelysshed fro tholde
makyng.
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