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THOMAS JOHNES, ESQ.
Memoirs of the life of Sir John Froissart
page 137
The principal notices of the few printed editions of Froiflart's Chronicles are fo contrived, that if we attempt to collate them without Clement's Bibliothèque, t. viii. 1759, p. 471, 477, we truft to a broken reed. They are all rare, extremely rare, efpecially the more ancient before that of Sauvage, fo that almoft nothing of thefe occurs in the notices and catalogues of books : a careful examination, therefore, of the principal notices will be here in its right place.
1. Sauvage aflerts that the work has been mutilated ; that his edition is according to that of 1530, printed by Anthony Couteau, but that for the amelioration of the text he has made ufe of both the older ones of 1505, by Michael le Noir, and of one (till older, without date, by Anthony Verard, alfo of a fragment, but that each of thefe three editions is only a modem copy of the more ancient, and that all muft be accounted as one copy ; that with thefe the third volume of the Mer des Hiftoires is to be reckoned, in which Froiflart's words have been retained in many places, as far as volume i. c. clxxvii. of his edition ; alfo that he had made ufe of fome abridgments in manufcript, which had been very uleful to him. The reft in his advertifement concerns the orthography and his own notes in the margin, and thofe he has added more, amply at the end of each volume.
2. Jac. le Long in his Bibliothèque hiftorique de la France, Paris 1719, £ m. p. 368. which Fabricius, in Bibliotheca med. et inf. Latinitatis,
vol. ii. p. 632. fq. and Struvius in Bibliotheca Hiftor. ed. 1740, p. 356.
fq. have followed, gives the following editions, with an anonymous
continuation up to 1498, Paris, by Verard, folio, four volumes ; 1503, 1505, folio, three volumes, with the continuation up to 1513, folio, three
volumes; Sauvage'6, 1559, 1561, and Paris 1574, Fol. Lenglet, befides the
reft cited, t. n. p. 504. t. iv. p. 59.
3. In the Remarques Critiques on Bayle's Diâionn. t. ii; p. 513, are noticed an edition of Froiflart, Paris, by John Petit, without date, another by Anthony Verard, without date, Sauvage's, 1559, and Paris 1574, folio.
4. Mr de la Curne enumerates five editions, in the Mem. de F Acad. des Infer. Paris, by Ant Verard, without date, three volumes; Paris, by
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