A Common-place book of the fifteenth century, containing a religious play and poetry, legal forms and local accounts. Printed from the original ms. at Brome Hall, Suffolk, by Lady Caroline Kerrison. Edited with notes by Lucy Toulmin Smith.

to enforce the argument, as in one of the versions of the Debate between the Body and the Soul, [This version agrees with that in the Saltair na Rann, in describing only seven signs.] Harl. MS. 2253, fol. 57, ll. 49—86, printed in the Latin poems of W. Mapes, edited by Thomas Wright, Camden Society, 1841, p. 346, and in the play called Ezechiel, foretelling Anti|Christ and the End of the World, in the Chester Plays, ed. T. Wright, Shakespeare Soc., 1847, vol. ii. p. 147; or it is a short detached piece confined to the subject alone. Examples of these have been printed from eight manuscripts. [Mätzner, as before, i. p. 120; Furnivall's Adam Davy, &c., p. 92, from Laud MS. 622; Furnivall's Hymns to the Virgin and Christ, E. E. T. Soc., 1867, p. 118, from a MS. at Trin. Coll., Cambridge, B. xi. 24; J. Small's English Metrical Homilies of the Fourteenth Century, Edinburgh, 1862, p. 25; Chester Plays, ed. for Shakespeare Soc. by T. Wright, 1847, vol. ii. p. 219, from Harl. 913, fol. 20, and Harl. 2255, fol. 117; Varnhagen, in Anglia, vol. iii. 1880, pp. 533, 543, from Cambridge University, Ff. ii. 38, fo. 42, and Cotton Caligula, A. ii. fol. 89.] Our Brome example is another copy of that found in the Cambridge Trinity College manuscript mentioned in the note. It contains sixteen lines at the beginning (ll. 3—18) not found in that copy, and several other variations; but on the whole follows it pretty closely. The last thirty|two lines are, however, wanting at the hand of the Brome scribe. As the two are nearly contemporary, the Cambridge MS. being dated by Mr. Furnivall at about 1450 A.D., I have numbered the lines of the Brome copy independently. The version printed by Varnhagen from the Cotton MS. (see note below) is a third copy of the same. It contains fifty-six lines of preamble before the line "Kyng of blysse, blyssyd þou be!" with which the Trinity College and Brome copies begin, and wants a few lines in other places, otherwise it bears a close resemblance to these.