Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/43

 handed down to us. It would be strange indeed if we could trace back the origin of even one of these portraits from the nineteenth century into the fourteenth without a lingering doubt on the subject of its authenticity. Of the existing pictures, whether they are based on knowledge or on imagination, some half-dozen appear worthy of attention; and it is at any rate conceivable, as we look at them, that these should refer to the same original. Allowing for differences of age and aspect, there is a certain family likeness running through them all.

So far as the dates can now be ascertained, the oldest picture is a small half-length woodcut in Bale's Summary of the Famous Writers of Greater Britain, published in 1548, more than a hundred and sixty years after Wyclifs death. Bale was a converted monk, who, having been rewarded for his labours and sufferings with the bishopric of Ossory, tried in vain to effect a settlement amongst the "wild Irish" of that see. He was an indefatigable student and collector of manuscripts. It is to him that we owe the preservation of Netter's Tares of John Wyclif with Wheat, and it may well be that he had discovered in some old copy of the English Bible, or other manuscript of the fourteenth or fifteenth century, a sketch of the Reformer's face by a contemporary hand. When we remember that many a valuable parchment has disappeared from view since the antiquaries of the Tudor and Stuart periods had an opportunity of copying or quoting them, we cannot deny the possibility that such a sketch may have been lost to sight whilst the copy survives.