Perhaps this difficulty may be resolved on the supposition that, while the body of the Tract was first published without the “Epistle to the Reader,” and More’s reply directed against it under this form, it might soon afterwards have reached a second edition, to which the name of the author was appended.  It is certain that More’s copy consisted of 32 leaves only (p. 1039, G.), which corresponds with that now before me, excluding the “Epistle to the Reader.”  Still, it is difficult to conceive that the paragraph in which the author speaks of himself as anonymous should have remained uncancelled in a second edition after he had drawn off what More calls “his visour of dissimulacion.”  There is, indeed, another supposition which would account for the discrepancy in question, viz. that the epistle and a fresh title-page were prefixed to some copies of the original edition; but the pagination of the Tract seems to preclude this conjecture, for B.i. stands upon the third leaf from what must have been the commencement if we subtract the “Epistle to the Reader.”

Wood does not appear to have perceived either this difficulty, or a second which this treatise is calculated to excite.  He places the Supper of the Lorde at the head of the numerous productions of Robert Crowley, as if its authorship was perfectly ascertained.  But Crowley must have been a precocious polemic if he wrote a theological treatise, like that answered by More, at least a year previously to his entering the university.  The date of his admission at Oxford was 1534; he was elected Fellow of Magdalene in 1542; he printed the first edition of Piers Plowman in 1550; and was still Parson of St. Giles’s, near Cripplegate, in 1588, i.e. fifty-five years after the publication of the Tract we are considering. (See Heylin’s Hist. of the Reformation, ii. 186., E.H.S. ed.) Were there two writers named Robert Crowley? or was the Crowley a pupil or protege of some early reformer, who caused his name to be affixed to a treatise for which he is not wholly responsible?  I leave these queries for the elucidation of your bibliographical contributors.

If I have not already exceeded the limits allowable for such communications, I would also ask your readers to explain the allusion in the following passage from Crowley’s tract: 

“And know right well, that the more they steare thys sacramente the broder shal theyr lyes be spreade, the more shall theyr falsehoode appeare, and the more gloriously shall the truthe triumph:  as it is to se thys daye by longe contencion in thys same and other like articles, which the papists have so long abused, and howe more his lyes utter the truthe every day more and more.  For had he not come begynge for the clergy from purgatory, wyth his ’supplicacion of soules,’ and Rastal and Rochester had they not so wyselye played theyr partes, purgatory paradventure had served them