Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/280

218 other doctors, as he could obtain them, and especially Lire (Nicolas de Lyra) on the Old Testament, who gave him great help in his work. Again he had to take counsel with old grammarians and divines, concerning hard words and hard sentences, how they might best be understood and translated; and again, to translate as clearly as he could according to the sentence (meaning), and to have many good and skilful companions at the correcting of the translation."

The difficulty of assigning this Prologue to John Purvey, as some have done, is almost as great as that of assigning it to Wyclif. It certainly affords a good instance of the facility with which early manuscripts have at different times been attributed to the Evangelical Doctor.