the asking of riddles, and such trifling pleasantries were freely indulged in close upon two thousand years ago.

So far as is recorded there appears to have been no collection of anecdotes in English to which the name of jest-book can be given before the invention of printing, yet within half a century of William Caxton setting up his first press at Westminster the earliest English jest-book was printed in the City of London. Of this work there have come down to us but two copies, and those of two distinct editions; one (undated) incompletely made up from an assortment of mutilated leaves,' the other, a perfect copy (small folio, black letter), is in the Royal Library of the University of Göttingen, and is very explicitly described by its printer as Emprynted at London at the sygne of the Merymayd at Powlys gate next to chepe syde. The yere of our Lorde .M.v.C.xxvi. The .xxii. day of Novēber.' Which of these two editions was the earlier it is impossible to determine, and though Hazlitt claimed that the faulty copy preserved in England and Oesterly that the perfect copy at Göttingen was the earlier, and thoughhow useful is the non-committal judgment of Landlord Tunley-there is much to be said on both sides, on neither are the arguments adduced wholly convincing. The balance of probabilities are, I think, in favour of the Göttingen copy representing the original issue of the work. Four stories (Nos. 2, 9, 91, 98) in the 1526 volume are omitted from the undated text, and the three used to replace them are all placed at the end; the title of the undated edition may indeed be regarded as a misnomer, for it includes no story numbered 98. It would seem more likely, too, that the absence of the date on the one copy should be an omission than that the elaborate dating of the other should be an addition.

During the four centuries that have elapsed since the issue of that modest volume-in the matter of size, for in regard to content the adjective would be inappropriate -our jest-book literature has grown to an extent that would probably astound most people. A chronological bibliographical list which I began some years ago, and have been adding to from time to time, has already reached the respectable total of five hundred titles. Finality in such a list has, of course, become impossible;

so many jest-books in the ephemeral form of pamphlet and chap-book have had their day and ceased to be, leaving no traceable copies. Without overstretching the meaning of the term jest-book, I think it probable that not far short of a thousand different works of this character-including new editions, which in the majority of cases are found to be something more than reissueshave been published since the enterprising John Rastell put forth 'A C. Mery Talys' from 'the sygne of the Merymayd.' I should like to think that it was a facetious compositor who was responsible for the appropriately unusual spelling of Mermaid.*

Seeing the age and extent of our jest-book literature it is indeed strange that this literary byway has been so little explored. There have been blazers of the trail, most notable among them being W. Carew Hazlitt, though long before he made his inquiries into the growth of the jest-book there had been a pioneer who had shown the way. There appeared in 'The London Magazine (Elia's 'London') of 1823-24 articles, nine in number, which dealt with as many jest-books, taken more or less at random from those published between 1607 and 1679. The anonymous writer gave a fairly full bibliographical description of each of the books treated and accompanied it with representative jests. That anonymous author may, I think, with some assurance be identified as the humorous George Daniel, who declared that he lived for old books, old wines, old customs, and old friends,' and who a few years earlier had given nineteen guineas for one of the only two known copies of that collection of 'Merry Tales and Quicke Answers' which ranks as the second of our English jest-books. In a brief paragraph prefatory to his Facetia Bibliographicæ; or, The Old English Jesters,' the writer forestalled Hazlitt when he said of the old jest-books

contained, as they are, in pamphlets of very rare occurrence and exorbitant price, the merriments of our ancestors have

*It is not unreasonable to suppose that Rastell's 'Mermaid' may have been the same building as that which became the Mermaid Tavern where Shakespeare, Jonson, Raleigh, Beaumont, and others gathered, and to which they gave immortality by their merry tales. If this were so it is possible that in the pictorial 'mark' of the printer we have the original sign of the famous inn.

H

been accessible to a few collectors only, whose perseverance and pockets have been equally taxed in the acquisition. Strange, however, as it may appear, they are entitled to a much more general attention; for their contents are always curious, and information, on many minute points of literary history and the manners of the times, may frequently be gleaned from these fugitive collections, which would be sought for in vain in works of a higher character.'

'A C. Mery Talys' of 1526, the volume with which our dated and separate jest-book literature begins, is a small folio of twenty-eight leaves (that is, 56 pages) printed in black letter. The first two leaves give the title, set amid crude and disconnected decorative woodblocks, obviously not designed for the purpose, and the 'Kalender' or contents list, affording descriptive titles of the tales, though such titles do not accompany the text of the tales themselves. A couple of entries in this Kalender' will illustrate the method:

¶ of the mylner that sayd he harde never but of .ii. commañdemens and .ii. dowtys.

folio .i. I of hym that playd the deuyll and came thorow the wären & mayd theym that stale the connys to roune away. fo .i.'*

The tales themselves are of varied character, though for the greater part of a kind to appeal to the broad basic sense of humour. Lewdness and impropriety, as such are judged to-day, were perhaps not more extensively, but were assuredly more frankly, indulged in when Henry VIII reigned, and thus it is that about onefourth of the hundred stories printed by Rastell would need to be excised to bring the collection within the standards of modern taste. After such the most numerous of the tales are those in which priests and friars are exposed for their lewdness, their ignorance, and their greed, and by these we are afforded an interesting sidelight on the growth of public opinion. The forcefulness

* Hazlitt, who but reprinted in 1864 Singer's reprint of half a century earlier of the incomplete undated copy, and Oesterley, who in 1866 printed in modern type the text of the 1526 volume, both give numbers and titles to the separate stories without indicating whether they appear in the originals ; in the latter case they do not.

of the great reformers, Erasmus, More, and Colet, in emphasising or satirising the abuses in the Church, reached but the comparatively small scholarly class; the 'ragged, tattered, and jagged' rhyme of Skelton, conveyed much the same ideas to a somewhat wider circle; the compiler of the 'Hundred Merry Tales' put these matters into brief anecdotes which, read and repeated, probably went on echoing through all classes, and so may have played no unimportant part in preparing the ground for the Reformation in England. In trying to keep his country Catholic, and yet to establish it as not Pope-Catholic, Henry VIII attempted the impossible, and stories such as many of those told here may well have helped to make the people acquiesce more readily in the suppression of religious houses, the occupants of which were shown in current tales in such unfavourable light. Ridicule is a solvent more rapid than reason.

Before discussing the problem of the authorship of this volume two or three of the shorter stories may be cited to illustrate the generally simple and direct method of the telling. I have modernised the spelling.

'A woman there was which had had four husbands. It fortuned also that this fourth husband died and was brought to church upon the bier, whom this woman followed, and made great moan and waxed very sorry. In so much that her neighbours thought she would swoon and die for sorrow, wherefore one of her gossips came to her and spake to her in her ear and bade her for God's sake to comfort herself and refrain that lamentation, or else it would hurt her greatly and peradventure put her in jeopardy of her life. To whom this woman answered and said, I wis good gossip I have great cause to mourn if ye knew all, for I have buried three husbands beside this man, but I was never in the case that I am now, for there was not one of them but when that I followed the corpse to church yet I was sure alway of an other husband before that the corpse came out of my house, and now I am sure of no nother husband and therefore ye may be sure I have great cause to be sad and heavy.

'By this tale ye may see that the old proverb is true that it is as great pity to see a woman weep as a goose to go barefoot.'

Woman's inconstancy was a favourite theme, and this tale is immediately followed by another account of a woman at the funeral of her husband who on being

spoken to by a young man said: 'Sir, by my troth I am sorry that ye come so late for I am sped all ready, for I was made sure yester day to a nother man.' The following story indicates the persistence with which we find something ludicrous in associating sermonising with somnolence.

'A merchant's wife there was in Bow parish in London somewhat stept in age to whom her maid came on a Sunday in Lent after dinner and said, Mistress, quoth she, they ring at Saint Thomas of Acres for there shall be a sermon preached anon, to whom the mistress answered and said Marry, God's blessing on thy heart for warning me thereof and because I slept not well all this night I pray thee bring my stole with me for I will go thither to look whether I can take a nap there while the priest is preaching.

'By this ye may see that many one goeth to church as much for other things as devotion.'

In marriage mankind appears ever to have found a theme of amusement-and there is an extraordinary similarity of note between the oldest and the newest jests devised against the institution; it is as though the natural man had never got over the surprise with which he passed from the tip and run of promiscuity to the long innings of monogamous matrimony. This one of the Hundred Tales might come from the latest comic paper instead of from our earliest jest-book:

'A man asked his neighbour which was bút late married to a widow how he agreed with his wife, for he said that her first husband and she could never agree. By God, quoth the other, we agree marvellous well. I pray thee how so? Marry, quoth the other, I shall tell ye, when I am merry she is merry and when I am sad she is sad, for when I go out of my doors I am merry to go from her and so is she, and when I come in again I am sad and so is she.'

This is one of the tales to which no moral' is appended. In the stories cited, and in most of the others, it is humour in its simplest and most naïve aspects that is represented; in the practical joke, the quick turning of the tables by one person on another, the belittling of pretentiousness, our forefathers found fun as do our sons, and echoes of or close parallels to these earliest stories are found again and again throughout the jest-books of four centuries.