Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/275

 recent students, after repeated siftings, have still associated with his name, we may be well content to cling for the present to every one, so long as no conclusive proof is brought forward on behalf of another author.

It was in 1865 that Dr. Shirley, then Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford, printed his Catalogue of the Original Works of John Wyclif—of which he enumerated ninety-six in Latin and sixty-five in English. In the following year he proposed to the Delegates of the University Press "to prepare for publication selected English works of Wyclif in three volumes," and with the sanction of the Delegates he engaged Mr. Thomas Arnold to edit the selection. Dr. Shirley died soon after this arrangement had been made, and he was therefore unable to mature his views with regard to the authenticity and chronology of the writings which had been assigned to Wyclif. The Catalogue of 1865, whilst it very largely reduced the lists of Bale and Lewis, and showed an advance upon the knowledge of Vaughan, Todd, and others, was confessedly tentative, and there are several numbers in respect of which the compiler was more than doubtful. Acting on Dr. Shirley's hints Mr. Arnold, in the introduction to his Select English Works of John Wyclif (1869-1871) reduced the list of authentic works to forty-one, whereof he printed the greater number.

The tendency of this selection and restriction was evidently on the right lines. Many manuscripts had been dealt with by earlier writers on hearsay only, or with a knowledge of no more than the first few