Pilgrimages to the Holy Land (Vol. v., p. 289.).—I beg to inform W. M. R. E. (Vol. vii., p. 341.) that, though I have never met with a printed copy of the "Itinerary to the Holy Land" of Gabriele Capodilista (the Perugia edition of 1472, mentioned by Brunet, being undoubtedly a book of very great rarity, and perhaps the only one ever printed), I have in my possession a very beautiful manuscript of the work on vellum, which appears to have been presented by the author to the nuns of St. Bernardino of Padua. It is a small folio; and the first page is illuminated in a good Italian style of the fifteenth century. It is very well written in the Venetian dialect, and commences thus:
"Venerabilibus ac Devotissimis Dne Abbatissæ et Monialibus Ecclesiæ Sancti Bernardini de Padua salute in Dno].—Ritrovandomi ne li tempi in questa mia opereta descripti, Io Gabriel Capodelista Cavalier Padoano dal sumo Idio inspirato et dentro al mio cor concesso fermo proposito di vistare personalmente el Sanctissimo loco di Jerusalem," &c.
This MS., which was formerly in the library of the Abbati Canonici, I purchased, with others, at Venice in 1835.
If W. M. R. E. has any wish to see it, and will communicate such wish to me through the medium of the publisher of "N. & Q.," I shall be happy to gratify his curiosity. I do not know whether there is any MS. of Capodilista's Itinerary in the British Museum.
W. Sneyd.
"A Letter to a Convocation Man" (Vol vii., p. 358.).—The authorship of the tract concerning which Mr. Fraser inquires, is assigned to Sir Bartholomew Shower, not by the Bodleian Catalogue only, but also by Sir Walter Scott, in his edition of the Somers' Tracts (vol. ix. p. 411.), as well as by Dr. Watt, in his Bibliotheca Britannica. The only authorities for ascribing it to Dr. Binckes which I have been able to discover, are Dr. Edmund Calamy, in his Life and Times (vol. i. p. 397.), and the Rev. Thomas Lathbury, in his History of the Convocation of the Church of England (p. 283.); but neither of those authors gives the source from which his information is derived: and Mr. Lathbury, who appears perfectly unaware that the tract had ever been ascribed to Sir Bartholomew Shower, a lawyer, remarks: "It is worthy of observation that the author of the letter professes to be a lawyer, though such was not the case, Dr. Binckes being a clergyman." Dr. Kennett also, in his Ecclesiastical Synods, p. 19., referred to by Mr. Lathbury, speaking of Archbishop Wake's reply, says: "I remember one little prejudice to it, that it was wrote by a divine, whereas the argument required an able lawyer; and the very writer of the Letter to a Convocation Man suggesting himself to be of that profession, there was the greater equity, there should be the like council of one side as there had been of the other."—It has occurred to me that the mistake of assigning the tract to Dr. Binckes may possibly have been occasioned by the circumstance that another tract, with the following title, published in 1701, has the initials W. B. at the end of it,—A Letter to a Convocation Man, by a Clergyman in the Country. I have examined both tracts, and they are quite different, and leave no appearance of having proceeded from the same hand.
Tyro.
Dublin.
King Robert Bruce's Coffin-plate (Vol vii., p. 356.) was a modern forgery, but not discovered to be so, of course, until after publication of the beautiful engraving of it in the Transactions of the Scottish Society of Antiquaries, which was made at the expense of, and presented to the Society by, the barons of the Exchequer.
I believe that a notice of the forgery was published in a subsequent volume.