Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/276

 words. Shirley and Arnold examined them more carefully, and weeded out a considerable number, of which it is possible to say definitely that, whoever may have written them, John Wyclif did not. Mr. F. D. Matthew, in 1880, edited for the Early English Text Society The English Works of Wyclif Hitherto Unprinted, including (for reasons which appeared sufficient to him) sundry tracts already rejected, or relegated to a "doubtful" class. The three books just mentioned may be said to have prepared the way for a thoroughly critical edition of the English writings of Wyclif. But it is questionable if in any case a canon of authenticity could be set up which would be universally accepted by those who are competent to form an opinion.

Mr. Arnold's reduced list of forty-one "probably genuine" English works includes a large collection of sermons on the Sunday Gospels and Epistles, and on the Gospels for saints' days, together with exegetical works on the Canticles and other items of the service-books; tracts on the heresies and errors of the Friars, on the Eucharist, on the Apostasy of the clergy, on the Schism of the Roman Pontiffs, on Church Temporalities and the condition of the clergy, with sundry letters, statements, and petitions such as will be found quoted or referred to in the present volume.

The manuscripts on which we have to rely in the last resort for the authenticity of Wyclif's works are fairly numerous, at any rate for the sermons. Eighteen or twenty, in the libraries of Oxford and Cambridge, or in public or private libraries elsewhere,