of a Nicolaus Paulus has found in the silence or the positive testi-. mony of hostile contemporaries a refutation more convincing than could be furnished by the evidence of interested friends, it was the prompt energy of his friends which so long stifled or challenged the voice of slander. Yet it has puzzled me that, with all their promptness in appealing to the students not to believe or to spread a false report, there was no request for their aid in diffusing a true one. Despite this silence it could not be strange if a student felt impelled to write such a letter as ours; but is it not quite as possible that what we have here is rather a circular letter, drawn up (like so many others known to us in this age) to be sent out to more addresses than one ?11

But how in that case—how in any case—can this letter so long have evaded the notice of historians? I am by no means sure that it has evaded it. I can only say that I cannot find it in print. A few years ago (1907) so careful a student as Professor Kawerau, publishing in the Theologische Studien und Kritiken two more letters regarding the death of Luther as a supplement to the five he had already published there in 1881, appended a list of all the letters and accounts by contemporaries which had thus far found their way into print. Our own does not appear among them. That it should have escaped discovery is the more strange because the volume in which now I find it had earlier its home in a centre of Lutheran scholarship: the same hand which has reproduced the lost title-page has transcribed also, at the base of it, the name of an owner—the “Collegium Wengense” at Ulm. Could anything really of value to the history of the Reformation have escaped at Ulm the eyes of Veesenmeyer and of Keim? Yet one must remember that not three weeks had passed from Luther's death before there was in print that official account by the "three eye-witnesses” (Jonas, Coelius, and Aurifaber) which till the renewal of controversy in our own day has seemed to Protestants an all-sufficient source of knowledge.

And it must be confessed that for the details of Luther's end our little manuscript can have, at best, but slight historical value. 12 It

11 Such a circular letter, or what seems such, the library of Cornell itself possessesma contemporary manuscript copy (bought from the library of Knaake) of Luther's letter to the Elector Frederick, March 12, 1522, explaining his return from the Wartburg. Revised for the purpose at the Elector's wish, this letter is known to have been circulated widely.

12 No serious addition to our knowledge of the circumstances of Luther's death is made, indeed, by the manuscript found at Mt. Airy. This adds much to what is told by the letter of Jonas, but practically nothing to the account of the three eye-witnesses. So closely, in truth, does it coincide with this latter, not only in the facts related and in their order but in the very words employed, that I cannot believe the two independent; but it is the three eye-witnesses who seem to me the

must rest, of course, on the tidings received at Wittenberg from Jonas; and, though his letter to his colleagues has since been lost, that to the Elector has been preserved and in its author's own original. Where our account differs from this it must be presumed to be at fault; and yet more surely so if it conflict with the combined memories of the three eye-witnesses. Yet as a contribution to our knowledge of the diffusion of the tidings, and as a suggestion of what may

lie hidden in the scrawls on our old books, I have counted it worth reporting—and without even waiting to inquire whether Professor Nikolaus Müller has perhaps somewhere chanced on it in his gleaning of epistolary material for the great new supplement to the works of Melanchthon.

But whose was the hand that copied the letter into our old Bible ? His marginal notes, though mainly but commentary, offer here and there a clue. He was a scholar and doubtless a theologian, for he writes not only German and Latin with equal ease, but now and then a passage of Greek or Hebrew. He was a Swabian, for opposite the mention of the fleece wet with dew (Judges vi. 37, 38) he has written in the margin “ Die schwebischen Scheffer hayssen [s]olche Wolle ain Schepper", and opposite the simile of the children calling to their fellows“We have piped and ye have not danced” (Matthew xi. 16, 17) he tells us (if I may again guess at what the binder has cut away): “Unser kindlin [in] Schwaben singen [ei]n solch Liedlin: [E]s zannet ein [w]olff ins huttingen uff, man gab im [elin brot, es thet [i]m nitt nott, [m]an gab im ain [gla]ss, es war im zu [spa]ss.” He had been till January, 1545, at Wittenberg, and doubtless as a student; for he calls attention to the passage (John xii. 35, 36) which Dr. Luther wrote in his commonplace-book at his leaving there (“Disen sententz hat mir D. Luther in min buch geschriben anno 1545 "-adding later, in a differing ink, “im jener da ich weg zoch von Witenberg ") and likewise to the text (Philippians ii. 13) which Melanchthon penned for him at their leave-taking (" zur Letze zu Witenberg Anno 45 da ich weg zoch im jener"). These annotations he had begun to make at least as early as 1548; for, where Luther in his preface to the book of Daniel asserts that Christians should pray even for tyrants, there is a marginal comment: “Nota bene contra illos qui non volunt orare pro Imperatori nostro Carolo Quinto "—to which, in a different ink, is added “ qui etiam nunc papistis contra nos auxiliatur. 1548.” But such refer

ences to contemporary affairs are few. Where Zechariah prophesies the curse of the flying roll he comments, “ Hie wirtt klarlich weisgesagt von dem schnöden Interims buch, so ans liecht kom[men) ist Anno 1548”; and where, in the first book of the Maccabees, it is related how Tryphon led the young king Antiochus deceitfully up and down the land until he could secretly slay him, he exclaims, “Also haben die falschen Engellender dem from[men] König Eduardo getha[n] Anno domini 1553. Der teuffel holl sie.” But in the main he holds himself to exegesis, quoting often the words of Luther and Melanchthon, and sometimes (if "M. L. d." means “Martinus Lutherus dixit") from their oral teaching.

These, then, are the data. Who will guess the riddle? Vany a young Swabian seems to have left Wittenberg in 1545-among them David Chytraeus, Johann Baptist Heinzel, Johann Marbach, Victorin Strigel—but whether any one of these in January I have not yet learned, and there is no reason to suppose our annotator a man of such moment.

13

When last spring there was sold at Leipzig the rich Reformation collection of the Paris pastor, William Jackson, the library of Cornell was so fortunate as to secure a work long sought in vain—the rare original edition (1536) of the letters of Zwingli and Oecolampadius. The Jackson copy was not the less tempting because the catalogue described it as containing within the same old covers the Gospel commentary of Bucer (1530) and on the blank leaves between the two works two or three pages of manuscript in the autograph of Bucer himself. On the arrival of the volume it needed but a glance to discern that the neat handwriting of this manuscript had nothing in common with the blind script of Bucer; and a little study showed it to be but a contemporary transcript of a “Confession as to the Holy Eucharist " which was long ago printed in his Scripta Anglicana (1577). Yet with a difference: though the text seems the same and ends with the same solemn asseveration and date (“I, Martin Bucer, thus opine in the Lord, and in this opinion I wish to come to the tribunal of the Lord. By my own hand, 5 June, 1544.") the title runs, not “Confession of Dr. Martin Bucer as to the Holy Eucharist, publicly delivered in the school at Strassburg", but “Resolution of the faith. M. Bucer to Dr. Joseph Macarius, Hungarian " (Resolutio fidei. M. Bucerus ad D. Josephum Macarium Ungarum).

But before looking into the identity of Joseph Macarius a something hauntingly familiar in the neat turn of the script led me to glance instead into the Chronicon of that most lovable old scholar,

Conrad Pellican, the friend of Reuchlin and of Erasmus, of Oecolampadius and of Zwingli—for it was of his hand (familiar to me through study of his manuscripts at Zürich) that I seemed reminded. Opening, then, his chronicle in search of some clue, I was almost startled to find him relate, under the year 1544, how" on June the 13th I had as a guest that high-born and learned man Joseph the Hungarian, of Buda, . . . who for five years had studied at Wittenberg, and wished before his return to his parents to visit the churches of Germany and listen to the scholars; and, coming by way of Spires, where the Emperor was holding the Diet, to Strassburg, he conversed for several days with the brethren at Strassburg, but especially with Bucer as to the matter of the Sacrament, and from him he asked and obtained in writing an opinion regarding the Lord's supper, which I have copied into a volume of Bucer's commentaries on the four Gospels." This, then, was indeed Pellican's handwriting, and this his copy of Bucer and of the letters of his old friends the Swiss reformers. It was doubtless from this copy that, as Pellican tells us, Macarius read with interest these letters.14 Nay, but a few months earlier Pellican had recorded in his chronicle his own reading of them: “On the 5th of February I began to read the Epistolare of Oecolampadius and Zwingli . . . together with the most accurate and learned introduction of our Theodore" (i. e., of Bibliander). Had he perhaps annotated the volume? Yes, here on the margins everywhere, but especially on the prefatory pages, were the notes of that same neat hand. Mostly, indeed, they were only a running index, such as his chronicle tells us he was wont to make in all his books; but some are comment or addition. Thus, where Myconius in his prefaced life of Zwingli narrates the events of the fatal encounter at Cappel, Pellican corrects his estimate of “less than 4500" for the number of the Zürichers to “not even 2000” (“Numero erratur. Imo ne 2000 quidem ”), qualifies his mention of the soldiers' prayers, “non sine precibus", by an "admodum modicis ", inserts the precise hour of the morning when the fight began (“ad horam decimam"), and adds to his account of Zwingli's dying words: “Aliter alii dicunt."

These notes, too, may be already familiar to scholars, for the volume has not been lost all these years. The names of its owners,

on title-page and fore-cover, tell of a notable career. They show it to have belonged to Archdeacon Rudolf Wonlich (d. 1596), son-inlaw of Leo Jud, to the great Swiss philologist Suicerus (1620-1684), who has enriched it by a note or two, to Johann Conrad Heidegger, the Zürich statesman, to Jacob Hess (1741–1828), theologian, historian, and head of the Zürich church, and to his nephew, Johann Heinrich Hess, before it became Pastor Jackson's.

This is not the only book at Cornell which once was Conrad Pellican's. A quarter-century ago I bought from a second-hand

. dealer at Zürich a set of the now rare original edition of the works of Zwingli. The last of its four volumes differed slightly from the rest in binding and, as I saw, did not strictly belong to the set; for it was the first impression (1539) of his commentary on the Gospels instead of the reprint of this made to complete his works, and after it, in the same covers, was bound Bullinger's commentary (1535) on the Acts of the Apostles. But that there were annotations in the volume I do not remember to have noticed until, a few years ago, when reading with a class the chronicle of Pellican, his mention of his indexing for the printer these volumes led me to fetch the books. Opening at the index this the earliest printed, my eye fell for the first time on his own name—“Con. Pell. R.” (Conradus Pellicanus Rubiacensis). Turning then to the volume's second index—that to Bullinger's work-I found again, at the end of the title, written in the same hand, the initials “C. P. R." That the hand was his own I already suspected, for I knew his habit of thus writing his name, and I had soon opportunity to verify the suspicion. The book itself, indeed, offered a slight confirmation : at the foot of the title-page a hand very different from Pellican's has written Ch" and there has stopped. As I look at it there rises before me the figure of Froschauer the printer (for whom the indexing was done) about to inscribe this copy to "suo Chuonrado” when the thrifty old scholar stay's his hand. Is it a wild guess ? Pellican wished perhaps to donate or to sell it; and that may explain why his annotations are so few. Most interesting of them, perhaps, are those pointing out (pp. 282, 283—Luke xvi) the texts of Zwingli's last sermons: "Antepenultimus sermo Zwinglii 6. octobris, feria sexta", “ Penultimus sermo Z. 7. octobris Sabbato”, “Ultimus sermo Zwinglii dominica die, 8. octobris 1531, qui fuit occisus 11. octobris."

Yet I must again confess that on the title-page of the first volume of the set I find the name of an owner who (if this fourth volume too was his) was little likely to overlook such treasure-trove—the Swiss church historian Kirchhofer (“M. Kirchhofer, theol. cand., 1797 ").

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