INTRODUCTION.

work. It may even not be without some significance that a splendid copy of this edition, printed on vellum (and as complete in this state, according to Dibdin, of the highest rarity), once belonged to Linacre, and is now, bearing his autograph, in the library of New College, Oxford. In the dedication prefixed to the second volume of this work, Aldus boasts of the pains he had taken to secure a correct text,

"As for the seeking out of the best and most ancient books, and in that same task, the multiple comparing and correcting of exemplars which were to be torn apart and handed to the printers, so that they might perish like a birthing viper, so that they might come into the hands of men most emended. Whether this be so or not, I have the most weighty witnesses in almost all of Italy, and especially in Venice, Thomas the Englishman, a man most expert in both Greek and Latin, and excelling in the disciplines of all the sciences." original: "Ut tum querendis optimis et antiquis libris atque eâdem in re multiplicibus tum conferendis castigandisque exemplaribus quæ dilaceranda impressoribus traderentur, perirentque ut pariens vipera, in manus hominum venirent emendatissima. Id ita sit necne sunt mihi gravissimi testes in totâ fere Italiâ, et præcipue in Venetiis Thomas Anglicus, homo et græce et latine peritissimus præcellensque in doctrinarum omnium disciplinis."

This volume is dated February, 1497, the first volume 1495, dates which are quite reconcilable with the time when Linacre is believed to have been at Venice.

On leaving Venice, Linacre went to Padua and probably made some stay there: since it was here that he graduated as Doctor of Medicine, and here he must have acquired the greatest part of his medical knowledge. Padua was at that time one of the chief seats of medical knowledge in Europe, and became shortly afterwards one of the first schools of anatomy. Its reputation in both departments was long preserved under the enlightened patronage of the Venetian Senate. Many students from Northern Europe naturally flocked thither, and among them a few from England and Scotland. Linacre was not the first eminent English scholar who graduated in medicine at Padua; the once celebrated Phreas Wells, who left Balliol for Italy, and died at Rome, having preceded him by half a century or more; but he was